Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Don't use your boot drive for your projects/renders. Your computer will be
hammering on the boot drive to use it as a temporary memory when it is running
short of physical memory. You don't want your OS and AEX competing for this
resource. For that matter, if possible, keep the AEX temp file directory off the boot
drive! (Set it to Available in the AEX preferences menus.)
Don't use USB drives for your projects/rendering. USB is too slow. eSATA is better
if you need to use an external hard drive, and if you're on a Mac, FW800/thunderbolt
is fine. Just don't ever use USB drives . USB2 is too slow, and USB3 is still unreliable on
most systems (on most systems, the drive will suddenly unplug and then re-plug,
causing a render crash).
Turn off the power saving features. You don't want your drives to go to sleep and
then have to wake back up to write/read a frame of video. Also, on some video
cards (and AEX uses the GPU to help with renders), the GPU will go to sleep when
the monitor turns off. Turn off all your screensavers, and if you want to save your
screens, turn them off physically! (Although, I like to watch things render so I can
see that every frame is good.)
Finally, if you have any stability issues with your system, render to frames not video,
and put the image sequence back together in your editing software. Then, if you
have a crash mid-way through, you don't have to re-render the entire scene!
Polygon counts/points
When a rendering engine renders your object, it has to do a lot of calculations.
Part of these calculations is building the geometry in virtual space. Every frame
that is rendered requires a rebuild of all of the geometry. Say, you have a square
that is 10 units high, 10 units wide, and the bottom-left corner is at (0,0). This is
how it looks to the computer:
 
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