Grand Lobby

[MoonDoggie]

Taking a look. What's it doing Bobby?

[glorybound]

I have been tweaking settings for 2 days. Low settings are awful and high settings will take days. The settings now are pretty low, which is what I posted. I did crank up the exterior lights, and I use a 100 watt template for the interior lights. The materials are all pretty basic.

[glorybound]

I can come back in an hour, and it'll be sitting right here.



All the cores are engaging, but nothing moves. The pre-passes and lightcache went pretty fast, but the render stalls.

[MoonDoggie]

Please note for anyone downloading: This is a max 2013 file.

[joconnell]

So back to Irmap for the primary for one thing. On your materials, your high anti aliasing is going to undermine any material sampling, but your material sampling is so low that you're going to end up going through every level of the 1 to 24 anti aliasing steps. I'd up your dmc sampler threshold to 0.01, set the adaptive amount to 0.9 to let it work adaptively, likely lower your max aa and start upping your material and light samples.

[glorybound]

max aa.

What's that? What's a good material and light subdiv to start with. I know it now low, but I had them pretty high, without success.

[glorybound]

Irmap for the primary
dmc sampler threshold to 0.01
adaptive amount to 0.9
upping material and light samples to 24 subdivs

[glorybound]

yes. thanks, Colin.

Please note for anyone downloading: This is a max 2013 file.

[adamf13]

I also noticed you raised your global subdivs multiplier to 1.5. Don't forget that you changed that, I've lost track of it before and it took me a while to figure out why everything seemed to be going slower than I expected.

[glorybound]

I also noticed you raised your global subdivs multiplier to 1.5. Don't forget that you changed that, I've lost track of it before and it took me a while to figure out why everything seemed to be going slower than I expected.

Yes! I dropped it back down to 1, thanks. I think what happened is, the first renders were nice, but I wanted more so, I started tinkering. You get one of these buggers off, and all hell breaks loose. I literally use my iPad, logged in remotely, and tweak, start, and stop all night long.

[joconnell]

Righty - It's your adaptive DMC anti aliasing settings. At the minute you've got 1 minimum, 24 maximum. In theory the anti aliasing can be used to clean up any aspect of your scene but I don't think it's efficient. What I'd do is start using your sample rate render element as a bit of a guide for your AA amount - you really want that to be mainly blue, and getting up towards red in areas of geometry and texture detail. This is like a heat map of your anti aliasing. Get this sorted first. Then you can start looking at your lights and materials and to do this take a look in your raw lighting element (only the direct light coming out of your lights - this pass will be grainy) to get this clean. Raise your light subdivs by a factor of 2 each time until you start getting this clean. Your raw global illumination channel will show you what your global illumination without any diffuse textures applied looks like so you can see if there's flaws or sampling issues. I'd definitely ditch brute force for an interior for first bounce - it'll be a killer, especially on a still.

For your materials have a look at your reflection and raw reflection channels. Noise in these can be caused by two things - either the material itself not having enough subdivs, or alternatively the materials reflecting a light source that's noisey. If your Raw lighting and raw GI passes look nice and clean, this points to your materials.

After you've done all this, you can take one last look at your anti aliasing again. Cleaning up all of the various light and material related noise takes a lot of stress off your anti aliasing so you can have another look at your sample rate to see has it gotten less red. If there's no red left at all, it likely means that the anti aliasing was trying to clean up noise from all of the above, and you've now resolved those problems, and can afford to take your maximum aa setting down a wee bit.

That should be you done!

[glorybound]

sample rate render element

that's a new one for me. You went way over my head on this one.

[joconnell]

Stick it in and have a look at it. What it does is show you how your anti aliasing sampling is being applied to your image. It uses colour as a way of displaying which pixels in your image are getting low sampling and which are getting high sampling from your anti aliasing settings. In your previous settings you were using 1 min and 24 max for your anti aliasing. If you do a render, the sample rate render element should show you red for pixels that are receiving the highest sampling (in your case 24) and blue for all those getting the minimum amount (1). The idea with anti aliasing is that it's there to smooth out texture detail and geometry detail. On flat areas like blank walls you'll likely get nearly flat blue in the sample rate as there's no edges for the anti aliasing to look at, but in your light fittings where there's lots of complex geometry it should be going up higher. Ideally you want to be using just enough anti aliasing in your scenes to keep them clean, but no more.

[glorybound]

Stick it in and have a look at it. What it does is show you how your anti aliasing sampling is being applied to your image. It uses colour as a way of displaying which pixels in your image are getting low sampling and which are getting high sampling from your anti aliasing settings. In your previous settings you were using 1 min and 24 max for your anti aliasing. If you do a render, the sample rate render element should show you red for pixels that are receiving the highest sampling (in your case 24) and blue for all those getting the minimum amount (1). The idea with anti aliasing is that it's there to smooth out texture detail and geometry detail. On flat areas like blank walls you'll likely get nearly flat blue in the sample rate as there's no edges for the anti aliasing to look at, but in your light fittings where there's lots of complex geometry it should be going up higher. Ideally you want to be using just enough anti aliasing in your scenes to keep them clean, but no more.

I will, thanks. probably not on this one, because of time, but i will play with it on the next one.

[adamf13]

joconnell, that was a great explanation. I've used the elements before to look for noise and splotches, but never thought to use them in a system of checks for all the sampling rates. I'm glad I logged in this afternoon and decided to poke around!