Moho Forum

Why the particle layers are so slow?
I try to export a scene with 160 frames , with 2 characters and 1 particle layer (smoke). Without particle , it renderize in a minute or so.with the smoke after 15 minute it is at 15% or less.
Particle are nice to watch but is not useble because the awful rendering time!
I had a pv 2800 with 1024 of ram.

Use the trick suggested in the manual for particle animations. Get your particles the way you like them, then render them out to a quicktime movie with alpha channel. Then import the quicktime movie so your particles are pre-rendered and won't take up any more time in subsequent renders.

Alternately, uncheck particles in your rendering settings after you're satisfied with the particle animation and after that only render them once when doing your final render. However, I've found that the "final" render is hardly ever final as I keep finding mistakes that need to be corrected and re-rendered, so probably the first technique is better.

Are you using the smoke generation script? The script makes alot of particles and layers to make it realistic so it is inherently slow. Try to modify it by reducing the particles, reducing the number of layers in the particle group.

btw 15 minutes per scene is excellent by 3D standards. A simple antialiased raytraced frame in 3D can take 20 minutes. One single frame! Not even talking about effects yet. Be patient. Heh heh!

Damn, the whole sequence (default smoke,72 frames,1 particle layer) take me ONE f** hour!.

red hamster wrote:Damn, the whole sequence (default smoke,72 frames,1 particle layer) take me ONE f** hour!.

I've had a single frame w/ particles take an hour in a 3D program. Particles are just a processor intensive element to render, espcially nice looking particles. There is a program called Particle Illusion 3 that does realtime particle effects...its pretty awesome, but its also $300 for the full retail version.

red hamster wrote:Damn, the whole sequence (default smoke,72 frames,1 particle layer) take me ONE f** hour!.

Well how long your CPU and RAM needs to render particles is systemspecific.
Can you post some details on your system, pls? I'd be interested

Cheers