Irish Render Farm?

There are loads of valid work arounds for rendering out animated scenes with global illumination/radiosity/HDRI/caustics etc., you should really look into the alternatives as, if done correctly, the end results are virtually identical.

A few suggestions:

Coming mainly from working with Brazil RS here, you could try :

*saving out photon maps, disabling your lighting solution and just using the photon maps from the first frame.

*using render to texture on as as many objects in your scene as possible and bake out the lighting/shadows into your world textures then excluding them from the lighting sim.

*render 1 frame of your scene then try to approximate the lighting using standard lights, I’ve ssen some stunning exterior and interior renderings done using this method. if you’re using Max then check out “Lightmesh”,

http://www.maxplugins.de/r7_files/ambles/lightmesh_max7.zip

its not big but it sure is clever and the results are excellent. Good luck with the render!

Max 6 has a network render manager built into it, so if your in an office/I.T./college environment you COULD (if you were sneaky sneaky hail from spain) install the render client, and when everyone goes home, turn off the personal firewalls, and render yourself Toy Story 3 in about 8 hours.

well…not quite toy story 3….and not quite 8 hours…but you get the idea…

but like I said, you’d only do this if you were ‘El Sneaky Majoro’

(the author of this post accepts no responsibility when your employers network crashes and all the financial transactions for that week are lost.) [/i]

Give me a shout. We can offer access to a render farm comprising 20x Dual 3.06GHz CPU Boxx machines (40 CPUs of 3DS or Combustion crunching power).

Peter