"Kenneth" <kdw### [at] earthlinknet> wrote:
> "Bill Pragnell" <bil### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:

> > Just out of interest, what sort of parse time vs render time are you looking
> > at?
>
> I should have made a note of that, but didn't. Total render time (using
> cylinders for vines) was between 3 and 4 hours on my 400MHZ  Pentium II,
> using AA 0.2.  Parse time was a small fraction of that--perhaps 5-to-10
> minutes at most.

I have more accurate results now: Parse time is only about 2 minutes, using
(sixty) vines of either type. But the scene with sphere_sweeps for vines
takes an astoundingly long time to render--after 19 hours of a *partial*
render, I did a quick calculation, and realized it would consume about 148
hours total!!  But I also discovered that the reason wasn't just the
sphere_sweeps...it was due to two "area" spotlights in the scene. Changing
those to regular spotlights reduced the sphere_sweep render time
drastically, to a mere five hours. Area lights of any kind do slow down a
render, of course, but I don't really understand this area
light/sphere_sweep interaction, why it's so MUCH slower. (Thinking it might
be a bounding-box problem, I tried manually bounding each vine; but that
didn't improve the render time at all.)

Ken

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