Hi all. Not exactly new to Carrara, but haven't used it for over a year so a bit rusty. Just got 8.5 and am refamiliarising myself with it. A few questions...

Can you adjust the bucket size when rendering?

Can you set the number of threads?

Problem is, my GPU drivers are a bit... enthusiastic. Carrara autodetected the available threads for my CPU (12) but then proceeeds to use all available capacity for the render. That means if I do what I'm doing now (playing on the net) it will start to shut down other operations and the mouse gets laggy. I had to set the max threads to 10 for Poser renders to avoid this, but can't see how to do it on Carrara (if it can be done at all).

Cheers

In the Render room, Rendering tab, at the bottome you have the Miscellaneous option where you can Reduce the tile size.

You can reduce the tile size as Spaceland notes (I ususally use 42 on my multi core rigs) but you cannot control processor usage. In my experience, most 3D apps grab everything that they can at render time an Carrara is no exception. Making a render take longer is usually not on most peoples minds. ;)

If you have more than one computer, you can set up the second (and/or third) as part of a network render to offload some processing but the main machine still needs to be part fo the render and re-assembly of the image or animation. 

Well, Poser allows you to reduce the number of threads used, so it grabs all I allow it to.

It turned out that the latest drivers are just too aggressive, with some renders actually tripping the GPU itself and turning the screen black for a second. I just rolled back the drivers to the previous ones and it is all stable again. I'll be able to put Poser back on 12 threads without worrying about the rest of the system being unstable.

I do have a laptop, but the capacity difference between the desktop (i7 hex core, 64Gb RAM, 9 Tb disk space) and laptop (i5, 4Gb RAM, 500Gb disk) makes network render more trouble than it's worth.

Thanks for pointing out where the tile size is!

You can open Windows Task Manager, go to processes, right click on the Carrara.exe process. go to "Set Priority" and select "Below Normal". This should bring the performance of other applications back to normal while rendering.