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As I'm sure you've already discovered, Truespace can be more than a little resource hungry when it comes to working with complex geometry and rendering at high resolutions. The following tips will help you design your scenes in a more 'resource friendly' manner:
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Be careful when using raytraced light sources. Unless
your using a dual-processor setup, raytraced lights with falloff can take forever
to render - especially when you assign raytraced shadows to more than one light
source. Usually for most scenes one raytraced light will be enough, with perhaps
a couple of other non shadow casting (or shadowmap enabled) lights providing 'fill'
in dark areas. As a compromise for users with slow CPU's, try the image dependent
shadow mapping option - your rendering times will be significantly less, and the
results can often be visually acceptable in many circumstances |
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For users with less than stellar machines working
with materials, here are some useful tips: Three things things that you should
avoid using except when absolutely necessary are very large image maps (especially
when rendering in high resolutions with raytraced shadows), transparency, and
excessive shininess values which will induce raytraced reflections. To give your
models greater realism while conserving system resources, try to use small texture
maps AND bumps, and try creating a few environment maps to simulate reflections.
Procedural textures are also slow to render due to the algorithms which are required to generate them, so you may want to use them sparingly. A quick path to realism is to use a 50-150 width pixel texture map on your model, and then use this same image as a bump map, with the amplitude set to around 0.3-1. Use phong shading, set ambience to 0.3, shiness and roughness to 3.0 each, and use a small environment map for extra 'believability'. |