To vray or not to vray animation

[conceptdesign]

I am starting a new project - and was wondering if I should use vray on it or not - It is an exterior flyby of a 100,000 sq ft hospital - with lots of site details - Poly count is rising by the minute - I will be rendering on a PIII dual 800 with a gig of ram - I would love to use Vray on this but I am afraid of the render times to calc the GI, etc.... Here are some screen shots if you want to look at the start of the model and see where it is going and give me your thoughts - Thanks guys!

www.cdi3d.com/images/lv.htm

These images are done using vray - no materials - each one takes about 1 min for 640x480

[FutureMan]

How long is the animation going to be? When is your deadline? How complex are the materials going to need to be? What format is the animation going to be in, how many frames per second? What size resolution?

If you can render a frame a minute then you just need to multiply the number of frames you need by one minute. Then compare that number to how long you have till the deadline, if the deadline is far enough away then use vray if not then don't or try lower settings for vray to get a faster render time. Also you'll have to consider quality, if scanline is faster but gives unacceptable results it won't do you any good. You will have to try to balance quality with speed either way.

Also are you going to be doing any post work on the animation? Don't forget to factor that into your timetable.

[nildoe]

Ok...not an expert but here goes..

I would try to use Vray...but i would also use compositing..in combustion...i would render for instance only the building and depending on how will the camera flyby, maybe render the building and some details that for example would reflect on the buildings windows...

one thing i did once, in my final project at university...was to do just that...my scene (it weighted about 110MB) involved a marina and Dreamscape sea...the reflections on the water were very important to me but it was takin like 7 to 10 minutes to render a frame and i needed like 400 frames or so...so i rendered the scene in "layers"...i hid some details and kept only the most obvious ones to render with sea..i was able to cut down rendertimes by half sometimes more than half...and them composited it in combustion...it worked great!

If your animation going follow the renders u showed here than i think u should render for example the cars separete from the building then paste them together in compositing..for example...

quite a large building u have here...its nice i like it.

Nil