Ok, I created a animation using blender physics, which is basically some wind blowing on a cloth. I added some compositing nodes to defocus items in the back ground. I’m using blender 2.56 on OS X using the blender render engine.
My questions is whether your using a Mac, Linux, or PC does rendering seem really slow with composite nodes? And has anybody seen the compositing nodes reapply itself multiple times before going to the next frame. I now 2.56 is still in beta, but rendering 1440 frames with the wind and compositing took THREE days using a Xserve intel with 8 cores. I’m just trying to figure out if it’s the compositing or rendering in general that is problem. When I was watching it I could see the rendering it was taking 6-8 cores at a time, but when compositing it was using only one and then rerunning the defocus about four times.
A lot of “what if” questions, but I’m just wanting to see if someone has the same or different experience with 2.56.
You wouldn’t happen to have Full Sample enabled in the Render Properties? This would be one reason it would go through the composite nodes multiple times.
DOF can take a long time if your f-stop is too low. Turn it up a bit, or add a max blur amount (I often use a value around 5 or 6).
And +1 on the Full-Sample insight from Sago. That said, however, Depth of Field looks a LOT better with Full Sample enabled. I’ve found that 5 full samples looks much better than standard 16 samples.
@Sago: Your spot on. I have full sampling enabled. I tested a render without it and the frames rendered about 3 seconds apiece, instead of 20 seconds.
@benu: Thanks for the tip! I just started doing more with the composting and any information helps.
I was trying to make a volume light look more soft and turned on a whole crap load of things. Looks like I want FSA on, but didn’t know it would add so much to the render time!