nongrato wrote:
How long does it take to render it on your setup?(and what is your setup by the way?)
i didn't remember so i pulled the project from my archive and ran it again. it took 8 1/2 minutes on a dual 1ghz box with mentalray 2.1. i didn't care tho since it's a still so 30min would have been just as fine
the major point why it's rather heavy is the antialiasing which i set to min/max 2/4 which for mentalray standards is quite high and the rgb threshold was at 0.1. however i set it to front faces only and disabled 3d textures and reflections in the render settings. i also had 2 mentalray post-effects and one bionic light shader.
in addition i used quite large textures even for todays standards (hdr not counted). some were 8mb per file so per object with bumps, specular and so on it sums up.
for rendering on 2 cpus mentalray took 86mb for each.
the scene had around 35,000 polys in total. mostly caused by the debris obviously
at first i started the scene with softimage 3.8 on an indigo2 but at some later point i switched to 4.0 on an onyx350. i don't remember why but i reckon it was something that didn't work with 3.8. anyhow i used nothing that wasn't available in earlier softimage versions because i tried to get as close as possible to what capcom used.
since i had mentalray 2 then i did tried a GI render tho but it didn't have the atmosphere i was looking for. the blue was too intense; almost like glowing. so as you can see in the attached pic the lighting is faked
EDIT: since "backporting" scenes with softimage is relatively easy i hammered hrcConvert and loaded the thing into 3.7 on an R4400/250 indigo2 running 5.3. for such cases i also (ab)use my server-octane as a render slave so an R12000/300 was working on the final image, too. also note that with softimage 3.7 we're using mentalray 1.x which is available as mips3 on the octane and mips1 on the indigo. softimage with the scene loaded used only 7.5mb ram in total btw
for the first try i was a bit more careful and kept the antialiasing to 1/3 instead of the 2/4 i had with the onyx. i fired up mentalray standalone on the indigo as master in verbose mode so i got quite some stats.
the octane's run used 64mb while on the indigo the mentalray instance only ate 16. in total it took 6m:46s. 87.03% done by the octane and the rest got filled in by the indigo. however what i noticed later was the missing softshadows despite having that selected. i guess that was the reason why i switched to 4.0 at the time. sure, i could make it an area light but for smooth shadows there you need 6x6 samples at least which takes pretty much forever.
anyway i did a second run, this time with antialiasing set to 2/4. for that the octane needed 74mb and the indigo 18.5. this time the total render time was exactly 14 minutes and i had 78.50% done by the octane and 21.50% done locally. quite interesting to see that upping the antialiasing doubled the indigo's contribution in comparison. the missing softshadows aside the quality of the resulting image was no different from the one made with mentalray 2 on the onyx.
i think that should cover the interesting points. if i missed something just let me know
