photoworks rendering is tooooooooooooooooo slow!!!

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.

Gil Alsberg wrote:

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

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

parel wrote:

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

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