Autodesk Maya, rendering deadline...

[Ritsugamesh]

My sister is doing a project for her university course regarding 3d animation aand she's creating one herself. She runs on an iMac because they are of course the 'best' for any sort of creative program. Well now it's come down to my pc rig to actually render the damn thing out!

I was wondering if any Maya experts new of some nice tips to cut down rendering times on batch renders, I'm no expert but any help would be much appreciated, course deadline approaching!

thanks for any replies in advance guys, best regards.

 

[ZXSpectrum]

To be honest i think you may be struggling cutting down render times with a dual core..

 

[Jason_T]

I can think of a couple of things you can do.
Get rid of any motion blur. do any motion-blur/DOF in a 2D compositing program. If you are using Maya 2010, then it will have installed Toxic 2010 at the same time. If you do this, don't forget to render out the Z-buffer. This acts as a mask for any lens blur you plan on doing. This also works in AfterEffects too.
If you are using GI, then I suggest baking the Final Gather map to stop Mental Ray recalculating it on each frame. Also, take a look at the shadow angles on the lights: soft shadows= heavy render times. Reflections will almost certainly push render times through the roof. This can be tweaked in the Render options.

 

[Ritsugamesh]

Thanks for the responses guys, I've tried and yes these have been helping somewhat, the scene isn't overly complex and rendering times have been brought to about 1 minutes 30 seconds per frame.

One thing I have been toying with is Maya's in-built hardware renderer, which if I am not mistaken uses the gpu to render. My rendering times are massively reduced but it doesn't appear to be compatible with all the aspects to the scene.

I'll keep plugging away at it and hopefully this thing will be done by the end of the century.

Thanks guys!

EIDT: Oh if only I had the holy grail that is the i7! *prays* =P