Ambient Occlusion

[nihilist]

I use ambient occlusion for lighting scenes - I like the effect it produces. But my rendering times are pretty long on a PowerBook. What sort of hardware set up would help? RAM, CPU, Video card, OS?

Thank you

[spleblem]

having a good graphics card and over 2.2ghz cpu would help

[spleblem]

and if you turn the size of your renders down it would go faster

[BeBraw]

Don't stare at the GHz. A 1.6 GHz CPU can beat 2.8 GHz CPU. Example Pentium M versus Pentium4.

[MassTA]

having a good graphics card
Graphic card has NOTHING to do with rendering times.

[nihilist]

i hope to print images i render, so i sort of need them to be a reasonable size to represent a level of detail. what cpu performs best, regardless of ghz rating? if a graphics card doesn't matter, is it then just the cpu and the amount of ram that make the difference? is there a reason to run linux, windows, or os x?

[BeBraw]

Invest to a good CPU and RAM rather than to graphics card. Dual core cpus such as Intel Core Duo and AMD Athlon 64 X2 are good options imo. 1 GB or more of RAM should be adequate.

Also fyi nvidia cards tend to work better than ati ones on blender.

You can find Blender render benchmark at http://www.eofw.org/eofw/ . That may be helpful.

[Timothy]

And indeed, linux also performs a bit bitter than windows during rendering.

[osxrules]

If you altivec optimize the AO code then it should go much faster. You could also experiment with a programmable renderer and use shadow-map based AO, which is said to perform up to 10 times faster. The truth is, this stuff is just slow because AO uses raytracing. Even if you got a faster machine, even a high end machine will only really be 2-3 times faster. With optimized programmable rendering, you could in theory get up to 20 times faster. Of course everything looks nicer in theory.

[nihilist]

osxrules,

do you know if there're instructions on doing altivec optimization? do you mean i'd need to compile blender myself? what do you mean "programmable renderer and shadow-map based ao?

thanks for you reply.

[BeBraw]

One interesting option would be to render AO pass in different, faster renderer such as Sunflow. This should be possible in version 2.42 of Blender.