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Hello. Thank you for creating this amazing piece of software. I am in the middle of rendering a short animated film with Mandelbulb 3D. I have encountered a performance bottleneck with reflections. I was wondering if there was anything I can do to speed the calculations of reflections.

Currently I am rendering frames at 2K resolution. Certain shots have dramatically different reflection calculation times than others, even though the formulas and lighting are the same. I understand that the complexity of the shot will increase rendering time, but I am not seeing a correlation between subjective visual complexity and reflection render times.

Example:

Shot A calculates diffuse pass in one minute, reflection pass in two minutes.

Shot B calculates diffuse pass in one minute, reflection pass in one hour.

The two shots are different framings of the same formula, parameters, and lighting. Raytrace reflection Depth is set to a value of one.

It should be noted that I have analytical distance estimation disabled for aesthetic reasons-- I need the fractal shapes to remain consistent when changing camera zoom and transforms.

So, if there's any chance I can speed up these reflection calculations, I'd love to hear suggestions.

Best wishes, and many thanks.

Aaron

Thank you for your reply. I just upgraded from 1.76 to 1.78 and that seems to have fixed the problem. I can still send you the parameters if you want to try to debug. Let me know if you want that.

By the way, while I have your attention, it would be great if there was a way to separately save out the various passes: alpha, diffuse, specular, ambient, ambient occlusion, and reflections. There's so much magic that can be done in post-production if the various elements can be saved to separate image sequences. Currently the z-buffer is all we have, although I haven't tried it.

Thanks once again,

Aaron