Anything in your scene will add to the render time, but the amount of unused shaders in your scene should be really intense before it can be felt in rendertime. However, it can be seen in your file...

Hi Monkey,

For me that is a very fun thread to see, since I just did an image with the very same figure at work. I am not allowed to show due to copyrights atm tho..

But great to see that you...

The settings for the shader for the water/transparant surface is much more interesting .. this is where stuff can go wrong..

Hi,

There is no final answer for your questions. However I can give you a few inputs on how to attack the problems.

Note, I am by no means an expert on nCloth, but I have used a few times to...

I usually start in zbrush, then retopo it in silo and ends up in Maya.

My immidiate idea to create this, would be:

half a sphere with thickness
add the small spheres as objects around the edges ehere the big sphere has been cut in half.
add all the small spheres...

One thing I have learned after switching to Mac, is that the money you spend extra on a mac is well worth in time you use to reinstall windows XP. Also the resell value of a PC is equal to zero while...

do you have more than one version of Maya installed ?

i.e. maya 2008 & 8.5, because then it might be trying to render a 2008 scene with the 8.5 batch renderer

Excellent stuff :)

its very hard to tell what is happening. Try to post your mb file .. maybe that can help us help you..