Rendering times

[JuhaHo]

I just got finished rendering a scene that had very basic lightning and material setup. Rendering time with my Dual processor workstation was 23 hours, 17 minutes and 14 second. When I started at beginning of 90´s the rendering times with my 286i were about one minute. Does this mean that 2050's we can expect rendering times around 3.7 years per frame?

[Vizioen]

Are you rendering the same scene you rendered at the beginning of the 90s? I don't think so...

Anyway without more info on hardware and scene, this post is just a useless rant, for which this could be very well a pebcak problem.

Which dual processor? Do you mean dual core or dual xeons for instance, which type, amount of ram. How does your scene look like? Etc...

[JuhaHo]

Thanks Vizioen,

This was not meant to be rant. It was just an observation on how things are developing and prediction where it will lead to. I'm looking this at productivity point of view. I'm comparing typical early 90's scene with typical 2020's scene in typical rendering ecosystem of the era. Beginning of 90's I had 286i processor and 1 MB of RAM. I think my rendering software was Autodesk AutoShade the predecessor of Autodesk 3D-Studio. Now I have 2 x XEON 8 core and 96 GB RAM. The rendering software being 3DS Max/V-Ray.

Don't You think it's worth discussing?

[sirio76]

Render time is meaningless, unless you disclose what you are working on
I’ve worked in 3d for over 20 years and my experience between software and hardware upgrades render time have been reduced drastically (I mean drastically, like several order of magnitude).
Comparing software from decades ago is not that useful since technologies were vastly different, but probably a scene from late 90” that took hours or days back then now would render in real time and with better quality.
Take Toy Story for example, it was considered the state of the art in 1995 and a single frame may take easily 24h, now you can get basically the same quality inside your viewport without even using a render engine.
Maybe you are asking from your software/hardware to perform very different tasks compared to the past.

[JuhaHo]

Thanks sirio76,

I got your point. However, I'm comparing a typical project, I did thirty years ago with typical project today. Problems were different back ten. I remember, sending files with modem over phone lines to client was overnight project back then - no internet available. Simple boolean operation took sometimes hours.

[Vizioen]

You can't compare these two at all. That's the point.

Because the opposite is true for me. I render scenes with 100s of cars, ten thousands of trees, millions of grass patches, flowers, bushes, hedges and displacement and 100s of light sources, complex railclones, fences etc with ease in 4K in 40 minutes on a threadripper 3990x. While on a pentium 3 only 1 little fence would render 6 hours on 720p to be somewhat clean. Besides the hardware, the algorithms have gotten a lot smarter, easier for the user to use and more realistic too.

If your frame needs 24 hours, I'm very curious what it exactly is you're working on and at what resolution we're talking here.

[JuhaHo]

As I said, I'm comparing my productivity now and back them. What was mainstream back then vs. now. Every time, when rendering results got more and more realistic, the rendering times are increasing faster than than hardware processing speed.

The resolution in this case was standard 300 dpi A4 (3508 x 2480). Single HDR dome light with few rectangular spot lights for reflection. Materials are based on built in V-Ray materials.

E: at the moment I'm struggling with this issue. Luckily I forgot to save. What does this even mean "Can't begin chunk inside Data chunk". Yet another weeks work flushed straight to drain.

[sirio76]

Maybe there is something wrong in the scene or in your workflow, I’m able to render this scene in 4K in a few hours on an old 8core system: https://forums.chaos.com/forum/chaos...-dining-vray-6

[JuhaHo]

I just got the craziest rendering results for a long time. Can't share them, but things are getting hilarious. I don't know if there's a way to fix, probably not. It has to be bug in Max or V-ray or both at the same time.

[Vizioen]

You claim there's no fix and it's probably a bug yet you fail to share any details about the scene not even in words. Number of objects/polys/lights/.., size/type of textures,type of visual interior/exterior/object/character, animations, forest packs, railclones, proxies, tyflows, particles whatever,... What's the point of this thread if after 10 posts we are none the wiser, besides the fact that you think that it's a bug.

[JuhaHo]

Thanks,

That was totally different case and has nothing to do with the productivity thing. Just noticed a crazy material related thing in one of my renderings. The odd thing is that it does occur with full scene and doesn't in isolated mode. UVW Maps are messed up with whole scene.

Here's third one. I don't know what the attached error message is, but I had to force max down. I had totally forgotten to save the scene.

[fixeighted]

If you type the error into a search then that would be a good starting point and may help to solve the issue, as it is a known error message.

The other stuff...literally impossible to imagine solutions to an unknown issue.

[JuhaHo]

If you type the error into a search then that would be a good starting point and may help to solve the issue, as it is a known error message.

The other stuff...literally impossible to imagine solutions to an unknown issue.

Yes, but isn't that a productivity issue too.

[fixeighted]

I'm sorry but I don't think I understand.

What I meant, if there was confusion, is that most error messages have been seen before (in Max and all other software) and so there are usually explanations of them when, as in this case, the wording is far from clear.
I did search this one and there are a number of possible reasons/solutions which I thought you may benefit from knowing

[Vizioen]

Lol I give up, I have more meaningful conversations with ChatGPT.