Hello,

I have a scene that has a volume with a fractal applied to it to create a cloudscape. I am trying to optimise the frame render time for this scene but am unsure where to start. I know about volume step size and have tried messing with it but still have huge frame times. To be honest I'm unsure what a reasonable frame time for this type of render would be on my machine (i7 950 3.07Ghz).

Any pointers/advice would be greatly appreciated. I'v attached the file too.

EDIT: added the otl also

Your missing an otl either imbed it or provide it please

rob

Your Volume Step Size on the Mantra node is set the default of 0.1, that's very small for a scene of this scale. Try starting at 10 and dropping it down til you start getting acceptable quality. Also you've set your render engine to Raytracing and you're using Deep Shadows on the light, I'd recommend switching back to Micropolygon or using raytraced shadows.

Wow. Micropolygon has made a big difference. I'm not sure why I switched to ray tracing in the first place :?

Are there any other adjustments that can be made other than the volume step size to improve thing even further? Light settings etc?

Yeah, I usually bump my shadow samples to 3x3 and keep my shadow map at 256x256 (128 is usually decent for previewing, since there's no hard edges on volumes you can get away with using small maps). Set Shadow Blur to 0.01, this can smooth out low res shadow maps. Also when you get ready for your final render you can bump your shadow map to 512 and increase Shading Quality on the geo object to 2, this will crisp up your edges and give finer detail.