photoworks rendering is tooooooooooooooooo slow!!!

Help - this is an appeal to all photoworks gurus !!

I have an assembly of a jewellery which is made of 76 parts and from 3
materials. this includes 72 diamonds, which are specified by photoworks as
having a glass type material with few adjustments, each one of them is made
of a part with 28 flat facets. the other 4 parts are made of brass and gold.

I rendered this scene in PhotoWorks 2006 sp5 using the following options:

1. indirect illumination on with default settings.
2. anti-aliasing set to very high.
3. Ray tracing set to "reflections = 6" "refractions = 4"
2. Environment is set to "Enable spherical environment" using background
image.
3. Background set to Plain white.

IT TOOK ABOUT 30 MINUTES!!

And the real problem is still to come: I need to make an 25 seconds
animation using the PhotoWorks Buffer in SW animator with 15 fps = 375
frames*30 minutes= 187.5 hours of rendering - WTF!!!

My system specifications are:

Pentium IV 2.6 GHz with HyperThreading
RAM 1 GB of DDR 400MHz CL3
Windows XP SP2 with all recent updates.

The task manager shows that the solidworks process while rendering is taking
about 300 MB of RAM and is taking about 97% of CPU power. apparently swap
memory on the HD is inactive (so shows also the HD led which is off most of
the render time), so what is there really going on here??

Any enlightment from you guys is highly appreciated,

Thanks,
Gil

 

Hi
I think you should disabled the hyperthreading of your pentium (do it
in the bios).
I don' t know if it would help you, but SW don't like this technology.
Hope this help.

Stef

 

PhotoWorks will use hyperthreading, but best to turn it off so that SW
can use all your CPU as well. If you do this all the time it may be
worth investing in a dual processor machine.

Anyway, you don't need 6 reflections, 2 will probably suffice, though
you may need to up the refractions depending on the view angle of the
diamonds - you have to make sure that this equals the maximum number of
diamond facets you will look through at any one time during your
animation. Both these settings as well as shadow quality take a long
time to calculate. You should also consider using caustics if you're
rendering diamonds but this will up the render time too.

For an animation, setting anti-aliasing to high will be good enough
because your video codec will lose the quality anyway (use techsmith
codec if possible).

Hope this helps.

 

Also what is the material of the metals. Satin metals take up a long
time. Also make sure that you are rendering at optimal resolution. A TV
resolution animation could possibly be sufficient for your needs rather
than a print resolution. Laike asow34 said you really should reduce the
antialiasing and reduce the number of refractions and reflections. Make
sure that you are using surface planes set to constant illumination and
eliminate some of your lights or set them to non shadow casting. Shadow
calculation takes up a lot of processor power too.

 

Hi Parel,

Your system is a little old (about 3 years now) - a new conroe system
can be had for around $1000 and would as a rough estimate render about
4.5 times faster.

Other than that, just reduce your settings (especially aa and shadow
quality).

Also, it's only 187 hours - that's less than 8 days - maybe that's not
to long to wait, or render half on your machine and half on a
co-workers?

Zander

 

Hi Stef,
Thanks for the advice! although I have to ask:

Does it matter if I change the number of threads in the affinity of the
SolidWorks process, or do I have to restart my system and change it from the
bios?

thanks,
Gil

 

Can i set the affinity of the solidworks process in the task manager, or do
i have to do this via the BIOS?

o.k., I will try that and will return with the results!

Thanks for the detailed answer - this really helps!

Cheers,
Gil

 

No, you need to turn it off in the bios because solidworks
predominantly is single-threaded and won't be able to make use of
processor affinity.

 

Parel,
Thanks for your advice. the metals in my rendering are set to burnished. I'm
rendering at 740*480 resolution, which should be enough low for rendering
time but enough high for the client to be able to see the details of the
jewellery.

Is constant illumination an appropriate property for an object like a
diamond, which is partly reflective and partly refractive like glass? In
the rendering I use metals which have a degree of reflection because they
are not polished completely. I also use ambient light, and one spot light
(In which, I have to admit that I can't figure out what are the "Attenuation
A,B,C" and "Exponent" settings are for. the documentation of photoworks
doesn't explain this at all!)

I will try to play with the shadows as you suggested, and see what will
happen.

Thanks,
Gil

 

Hi guys,
Thanks to your help, I achieved pretty good results while cutting the
rendering time to about 3 minutes, which is still too long to my taste, but
at least manageable with animation - Thanks!

Now I have a further question: I've noticed there are "Memory management"
options in the PhotoWorks options under "Document Properties". can they help
me achieve faster rendering? I've tried to play with them a little but with
no success :-( - render time remained the same.

thanks,
Gil

 

Attenuation is a setting that controls the decreasing intensity of
light as it gets further away from the source. Kind of like the Depth
of Field setting for a Camera. The A, B, C & D are values used in an
equation for this setting.

Note that Attenuation and Exponent are settings that only affect
SolidWorks lights and not PhotoWorks, so this shouldn't matter for your
rendering.

Steve O

 

Thanks Steve,
this is good to know - if it doesn't affects PhotoWorks then I can leave it
aside.
I guess there are renderers where this setting exists and affects the
rendering outcome.

Cheers,
Gil