very slow animation and render problem...

i have a problem and i don’t know how to fix it.
when i try to do a animation its so slow that it barely does frame by frame.
cant even see the animation.rendering is slow too,but when its finished u can see it.
i was trying to see the fairy animation but its impossible.
don’t know if the blender settings are not correctly setup for my setup or what.

if u need to know the OS and some of the hardware here it is:
Windows XP, pentium4 3ghz ,1gb of ram, and nvidia 8600GT 256mb.

any help would much be appreciated:)
i didn’t mess with any settings so dont know whats wrong

thats just the regular process of rendering I think…

it so fun answering noob questions!!!

Well… it’s impossible to get realtime response from your viewport for anything worth having animated. That’s why people do “playblasts” to test their timing etc… Basically you are rendering the viewport out as animation, very quick.

  • put the viewport on the camera so that you see what you would if you hit render
  • find the “render this window” button in the viewport header, hold ctrl and click it
  • wait for it to finish
  • hold ctrl and press F11, to play it

( this will use the same settings as your render output for location, filename(s) and format )

But to increase responsiveness anyway, since it’s so nice to have, turn off the interactive display for modifiers. Lower the resolutions on curves and the likes. Turn off layers with stuff you don’t need to see while animating something else. If it’s still way too slow you might want to consider using super low proxy meshes on another layer to stand in for your actual stuff. Approximating only the general size and form of things.

If you press 0 on the numpad it will show you the view from the camera. Zoom into the box inside the first one. Then play the animation. Won’t give you render quality, but good enough for a quick preview.

And just to agree with the other two posts, it is normal for rendering to go this slow. Pixar’s supercomputers take 17 hours just to render one frame from the movie Cars.

thanks for the replies,i’ll try these things out