Grand Lobby

[joconnell]

Sure thing. This is one to have a look at sooner rather than later as when you start getting a grasp of the settings you can start to really get your render times down. It's less important in stills where if you've got gi glitches or grain they can be photoshopped out, but for animation or fx where gi flickers and materials and lights have a tonne of grain in them, you've gotta find a way of solving things without killing your render times. Stick it into the professionalism / science category rather than artistic. Just as important (with business a close third )

[joconnell]

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!

Here's my basics:

Anti aliasing buggers up everything. It totally undermines every other sampler in vray as every time vray goes to render a bucket, it first calculates the material and lighting sampling. This gets passed back to the anti aliasing to decide if it's good enough and if it's not your anti aliasing goes up to the next quality level and so on. It means that you've got two options on how to solve your render issues in vray, one is with really high anti aliasing to solve everything, or make sure your sampling is good before it gets passed back to the anti aliaser so it "approves" it as such.

What I do now with passes is the following:

Sample rate to check AA
Raw lighting to check grain of my area lights
Reflection to check materials
Raw reflection to again check materials (this can be misleading - raw reflections will boost reflection strength to make it almost chrome like which may be stronger than your actual material ref strength)
MTLGlossiness - Handy to see is it an overall noise problem - since this gives you a guide of what glossiness value all your materials are, you can see are ALL of your blurry materials noisy or just some.
Raw global illumination to check GI undersampling errors

Your sample rate will start to evolve and become less red as you start clearing up your material and light sampling issues, so you can gradually bring down your Max aa until you get a nice balance of clean and speed.

[glorybound]

Using the light listener, and a material script, I set all my subdivision to 8. I use the global subdivision override to crank things up by 2x. It usually works, but something is wonky in this scene.

[glorybound]

If some specific needs more samples, I'll tweak it separately.

[joconnell]

Using the light listener, and a material script, I set all my subdivision to 8. I use the global subdivision override to crank things up by 2x. It usually works, but something is wonky in this scene.

Global subdivisions can be a bit of a blunt instrument. For example if you've got quite sharp reflections, they clean up faster than soft reflections so you can often end up in a situation where you don't have enough on the really blurry ones and too many on the sharp ones. Likewise lights can need different sampling based on their size or whether they have a HDRI loaded. The light select element could be a handy one in your case - having one light select for the source outside the windows, another light select for the lights on the walls, and a final one for the ceiling lights.

[glorybound]

It usually gets me pretty close.

This scene, on the other hand, is being a problem. I literally only have a hand full of materials , and 3 kinds of light. The scene should be easy to manage, but something is off. I had an idea and I'm looking into it now. My light bulb has a vraylightmtl, which isn't really contributing to the scene, so I am going to get rid of it.

[glorybound]

Well, I'll be.... That was it! I guess all I had to do is step away and think about what was actually in my scene, and what would cause it to drag. Now, I can spend my timer optimizing my scene. Thanks for all the good advice! Now, who gets the $25.00?

[glorybound]

I also plugged in the sample rate, and my scenes is pretty much red, but is rendering clean. Basically, you are saying, that means my settings might be to high? If am usually fine with 12 hour render times, because I usually render at night, but if in a rush it would be nice to have a nicely optimized scene for quick render times.

If its a clean render, with red, do I lower things until I start to see blue, at which time I slightly raise things to get back into the red.

[joconnell]

Yeah - red is not a target as an allover image - red pixels equal high anti aliasing sampling, and you really only want these in the areas that actually need high aa - texture detail and geometry detail, so you should see red along the corners of walls, edges of objects, areas of compex geometry and so on. Anti aliasing is only meant for these things, everything else should be cleaned up by upping the sampling on whatever is causing the problem.

Vlado's universal settings from a few years back DID use the method of using anti aliasing to clean up everything but for starters that method was designed as a simple method that'd get you good results without too much fiddling, but it wouldn't give you the best render times and we've also found recently that it isn't as effective as it was in current versions of vray.

[Dman3d]

Can you save it down as a 2012 by any chance, unless you have it resolved of course.

[glorybound]

Yes. Tomorrow I'll upload a new one. My issue was the VRAY light material. I tweaked every texture and every light, but nothing worked. When I deleted my light material, everything was fine.

Bobby Parker

[glorybound]

Here.. I saved it back.

[Morbid Angel]

my max 2012 crashes when I try to open your scene. But also without the textures it will be hard to get proper estimate of the time. What is richdirt.dlt plugin for?

[joconnell]

It's an ambient occlusion and noise combination plugin - actually a really handy one for adding in weather effects to a scene - http://www.enrichpro.com/en/richdirt/index.html

[glorybound]

I am not sure why it would crash. Here is Richdirt - http://www.enrichpro.com/en/richdirt/index.html. I'll save it again, without rich dirt.