I don't know if it will make a difference, but I've got 7 lights, 3 for the character, 3 for the hair (masked off so they only affect the hair) and 1 for the fog, all set to ray trace for shadows. I tried using depth map shadows, but in my tests the time to calc the shadow plus hte render times didn't seem to make any difference at all. The lights are all spots, ray trace shadows except for one. I tried area lights but to get rid of the grain, it started to slow things up quite a bit so I gave up on those.
I'm using the micro poly renderer, 3X3 sampling, with Volume samples turned up to 1 to make the fog render faster for the volumetric light. Other than that, the rest of the mantra settings are pretty standard.
I'm also point instance a bunch of sequins, about 20-30 thousand sequins to decorate the dress, that does seem to make a difference.
All the materials are using .RAT files instead of tif/png to optimize the image loading.
The hair is done using 3 fur assets, one for the scalp, one for the hair bun, and a third for hte ponytail with the dynamic guides. The hair render settings are set to "Ray Trace" otherwise it's *really* slow to render.
All the shaders are Mantra Surface with a couple of customization to drive spec settings via ramps. The only from scratch shader is for the eyes, and hte hair shader which is the Marschner hair shader by ssh on odforum (http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/12323-marschner-hair-model/page__hl__ssh_marschner_hair).
Ouch, and I just saw a frame with the dress and realized that I must have bumped the spec back up ( I actually turned it down like was suggested) on the dress material! Oops
So many things. Now I understand why 8 minutes. But I really like. Nice work with the camera. And thanks for the link to the hair shader, after the competition will have to see.
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I'm using the micro poly renderer, 3X3 sampling, with Volume samples turned up to 1 to make the fog render faster for the volumetric light. Other than that, the rest of the mantra settings are pretty standard.
I'm also point instance a bunch of sequins, about 20-30 thousand sequins to decorate the dress, that does seem to make a difference.
All the materials are using .RAT files instead of tif/png to optimize the image loading.
The hair is done using 3 fur assets, one for the scalp, one for the hair bun, and a third for hte ponytail with the dynamic guides. The hair render settings are set to "Ray Trace" otherwise it's *really* slow to render.
All the shaders are Mantra Surface with a couple of customization to drive spec settings via ramps. The only from scratch shader is for the eyes, and hte hair shader which is the Marschner hair shader by ssh on odforum (http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/12323-marschner-hair-model/page__hl__ssh_marschner_hair).
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I'm not sure how far I'll get, we'll see on Sun.