too slow or crashing, hardware upgrade?

[carpalmer]

Getting VERY slow rendering times, or never ending renderings... working on a building and using the storefront/window-wall tool.

Running 11.5.1 on a 3 year old Dell with lots of RAM (can't remember how much right now...)

Is slowness specific to window wall element, or 11.5.1, or VP's?

I have done fairly complex renderings before the upgrade, without window wall tool, and without VP's (but with transparency a equal amounts of compexity) and was always able to go to Final Quality within a reasonable rendering time (less than 5 minutes).

Now I can't even get there in half an hour!

Anyone experiencing this?

Any reasonable hardware upgrades to consider? Video Card, etc...

[Dave Donley]

Hello carpalmer:

Does this wall use a glass shader? The calculations to bounce rays off of and into the facets of the glass block could be the reason for the speed difference.

You can try Custom RW with the raytracing recursion set smaller (Final Quality uses 5), or try using a texture that has a mirror and plain transparency shader in it instead of the glass.

[islandmon]

To avoid the Glass issues you can use 'semi transparent opposite facing image props'. This works very well in tight views and provides a high level of control over the depth of the reflections.