faster rendering in Maya

[Maxthrax]

I have a first generation dual core Mac Pro with the standard Radeon 1900XT GPU and renders are excruciatingly slow on Maya 2008. I'm talking 24 hours for 24 seconds of standard video output. Are there any GPUs for this platform that will improve performance significantly?

J

 

[Claytoniss]

How complex are your animations? Lots of lights? Textures? Shapes? i haven't touched maya in years but I used to render at least 5 min per frame. But I rendered different scenes on different computers. Then put it together in the end.

 

[LeviG]

ok working on the assumption of 24fps (this is a rough guess here) for 24 seconds gives 576 frames to be rendered (or to make it simple 24 frames/1 second per hour) meaning each frame is taking roughly 2.5mins to render. Thats nothing I've had renders which take over an hour to do a single frame, admittedly different program and slower cpu but still 2.5mins is not exactly a long time to render a frame. Raytracing, resolution, materials, number of component parts/polygons for the scene all add to the render times.

 

[klymr]

I did a rather simple clip in 3D Studio Max back in high school for a friend that was 450 frames, or 15 seconds long. It took over 100 hours to render, but that was a piece of junk Dell. I haven't delved in to Maya too much.

I do render jewelry at work, and a simple 640x480 rendering takes anywhere between 30-90 minutes using a Dell with a PentiumD. They render at about twice the speed on my MBP under Boot Camp, but because it's Windows XP, it only uses 3GB of RAM. I think you're probably sitting at about a decent speed. Grab a bunch of computers and build a render farm to speed things up.

 

[theyoda3]

The GPU is not used for rendering, it is only used for drawing the viewports. Only the CPU is used to render so to make that go faster you can buy/use a faster CPU with more cores or buy/use more computers by distributing the render(as previously mentioned).

 

[motoxpress]

Your best option is to look at what your doing in the scenes and see if you can optimize them but, the others are right in that if this is a high-rez render then your times are not that unusual.

-mx