GPU for archviz interior production...

[nlo]

answering a question about gpu in production:
we recently used distributed gpu rendering to render interiors of apartments.
we were quite happy with the possibilities but it is a wise idea to start from scratch, since "normal" vray scenes usually do not render correct.
we distributed over 6 nvidia gtx 580 with 3GB and after about an hour the noise level was acceptable for us.

one thing were we clearly had to sacrifice: the fur of the carpet does not have the right density. proxies (to use smaller patches) still don't work correctly and we ran out of ram with a nicer carpet.

[vlado]

This is actually very nice, thanks for posting

Best regards,
Vlado

[particlerealities]

Those images look great! I assume a scene built for GPU rendering should render perfectly fine with the standard production V-Ray renderer - if so, did you by chance try rendering it the normal way to see how much faster/slower it was compared to the GPU renderer?

[nlo]

the scenes render fine with cpu. i did not compare the scenes to vray rt cpu because i am not really patient to wait. i did render with lc/irmap. it is fast as expected but the light distribution is poor compared to rt.

[vlado]

one thing were we clearly had to sacrifice: the fur of the carpet does not have the right density. proxies (to use smaller patches) still don't work correctly and we ran out of ram with a nicer carpet.

There is some good news on that front; we have already implemented proper instancing for the next update

Best regards,
Vlado

[nikand]

awesome Vlado...is it implemented in the nightlies already?
nice renders guys...the detail in shadows/textures and the filtering from rt gpu is execellent.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Heya

I see some noise, did u try Photoshop denoise tools or the RAW denoiser ? I think it would fully clear it up in post without losing details..

Thanks, bye

[nlo]

yes, there was still quite some noise. the white ceiling lamp in the first image cause white spots on the right side of the image and i would take a lot longer to get rid of those.
we rendered during lunch brake and the noise level was acceptable for us. in post we used a denoiser but when used too strong the images look painted.

[eyepiz]

Very Nice work! I also do architectural interior renderings. I recently bought 2 680 GTX's 4GB versions. The one thing I can't get over is that the vray plane lights do not hide correctly and cast shadows on the ceilings. I hope this is addressed soon. Double sided materials would be nice too, but that I can do with out.

[Alan Iglesias]

+1 on the plane light bug.
+1 on the two sided materials (great fior lampshades!).

-Alan

[jacksc02]

What is the original resolution of the images?

[Alain]

You really use 6x GTX 580 graphiccards ?

This means 6x 512 GPU Cores to render and it still needs 1 hour to render and has this noise-level ?
In my opinion it should render faster if you have so many GPU Cores

What was the renderresolution ?

Kind regards
Alain

[tricky]

This doesn't really seem like a great use of RT to me. Don't get me wrong, the images are very good, but its hardly 'interactive' if you need to leave it for 1 hour without accidentally changing a setting and having the render re-start from scratch. Also, 6 top end graphics cards?!?

It is interesting seeing what can be achieved in the real world of archviz though. The RT demo's that made us drool a couple of years back were pretty unrealistic situations really - they normally involved a nice model of a car spinning around and changing colours of the paint or the position of the sun. I think archviz projects are, in general, far more complex. For us, RT still hasn't really taken off.

[Alan Iglesias]

...I think archviz projects are, in general, far more complex. For us, RT still hasn't really taken off.

Perhaps not a complete take-off yet so-to-speak, but just to let you know, myself and number of my of clients doing ArchVis are saving tons of time with RT/GPU by previewing lighting and materials before final biased rendering. The interactivty is helped greatly by minimizing the scene to essentials while test rendering. Folks are reporting great improvement in all-around project efficiency.

In addition, I recently did an interior job where the lighting had to be just even throughout the room, and a single Vray Domelight worked great in RT/GPU and rendered very fast to a solution with very little if any noise. It won't win any art contests, but it was interior ArchVis and pleased the client to no end. The 2k shot rendered in 14 minutes on the GPU as opposed to their 9+hour CPU render with Mental Ray! Yes, their MR lighting was needlessly complex and added to their rendering time, but it was still a dramatic improvement. I'll upload the shot if I can get permission.

Also, if anyone is doing ArchVis exteriors, GPU rendering speed is much closer to those car demos that Chaos Group has shown, especially with just a Vray sun. I'm including an image here. It won't win any beauty contests either, and I realize that it is not typical of many complex exterior shots, but I threw it together in a few hours as a demo and the rendering time with minimal noise is my point here. It's 2k, over 2 million faces and rendered in 5 minutes on 1024 Fermi cores, as you can see in the specs. Actually it pretty much looked this good at 4 minutes...

Oh, and I wanted to add that it used 1506MB on the GPU. Some folks were asking about GPU memory usage so I wanted to have that spec here...

Just a friendly viewpoint from a RT/GPU user...

-Alan

[vlado]

if you need to leave it for 1 hour without accidentally changing a setting and having the render re-start from scratch.

You do know that you can lock the render to prevent accidental updates, right

Best regards,
Vlado