Thoughts on these render presets?

[JScullin]

After reading a ton of threads on render settings and still unsure of when/why you use defaults I've come to the settings below based on the typical scenes we get and the turnaround time deemed efficient.

Some background:

Our scenes are typically interiors that are well propped with lots of objects that vary in geometry density and materials rendered at 2000 to 3870px wide. Some have heavy soft surface use and others can have lots of foliage or glass/metals. We also want to limit the amount of post work to contrast/color balance settings so some scenes have many lights and planes for blocking/bouncing light where we want it. It's treated very similarly to a photo studio or on-location photo shoot. Turn around time is quick in that we'd prefer an artist get a render back from the farm in 2-4hrs with some of the complex scenes taking no more than 10. In a nutshell they vary wildly and we don't want the artists fiddling with settings.

We split up the presets into two categories. A bucket render for production renders and a progressive for scenes that bucket is hanging up on (usually complex glossy/refractive scenes) and the artist sets the time. So far these have worked great in the scenes we've used them in with the only problem being the progressive render always has noisy highlights in shallow DOF scenes.

Settings:

Bucket:

• Output – 2000x2000
• MSR – 6
• Image Filter – VrayLanczosFilter @ 1.5
• MinSubDiv – 4
• MaxSubDiv – 50
• Noise Threshold - .01
• Bucket – 16
• Burn - .4
• GI – BF/LC
• GI Saturation - .9
• GI Contrast - .75
• Ambient Occlusion – ON/.25/.25/8
• Light Cache – 1000

Progressive

• Output – 2000x2000
• MSR – 4
• Image Filter – VrayLanczosFilter @ 1.5
• MinSubDiv – 4
• MaxSubDiv – 80
• Render Time – 300
• Noise Threshold - .006
• Burn - .4
• GI – BF/LC
• GI Saturation - .9
• GI Contrast - .75
• Ambient Occlusion – ON/.25/.25/8
• Light Cache - 1000

We're also using some lensfx settings and from what I read having the burn be at 1 will produce better results. We're at .4 because we had an older workflow that relied on it and I'm keen to just bring it to 1 when we switch to Next. Looking to the group to see if anything there doesn't make sense or seems redundant.

[Neilg]

you can leave the burn at .4 but change the color mapping to 'none' - this way you can do the burn in post. either in fusion, arion or something else you'll be able to match a .4 burn - but doing it after the glow gives a more correct result.
unless youre mid animation there's no reason to wait to change that.

[glorybound]

Your settings are very close to default and several setting tweaks would probably best be done in post-production. What are you benefiting from straying from the default?

[joconnell]

I'd drop your min aa unless you're doing really heavy dof / motion blur and are getting holes in your objects?

[JScullin]

Your settings are very close to default and several setting tweaks would probably best be done in post-production. What are you benefiting from straying from the default?

Speed for one. Output is high volume and fast. I found that leaving the default settings will get a good image, but it takes a while to get there depending on the scene (in our instances). Which I think is was the intent--easily approachable and yielding the best result. But when the scenes get more complex we needed "good enough" and found these tweaks shaved off some time.

Which settings would you suggest be done in post? The AO being baked in is giving us a bit more of a contact shadow that was missing in shots and the GI saturation/contrast is just tweaking it enough to minimize occasional color cast from some of the brighter colors we use.

you can leave the burn at .4 but change the color mapping to 'none' - this way you can do the burn in post. either in fusion, arion or something else you'll be able to match a .4 burn - but doing it after the glow gives a more correct result.
unless youre mid animation there's no reason to wait to change that.

We do our post in Photoshop and are just starting to explore animation which will require a different workflow.

[JScullin]

I'd drop your min aa unless you're doing really heavy dof / motion blur and are getting holes in your objects?

That was one of my questions. We do use heavy DOF in some scenes and have gotten fireflies in the highlights while using progressive, but not bucket. Not sure what I'm missing to get that cleaned up.

[joconnell]

Min 4 is a bit of a waste on the flat boring areas you're likely to have, I normally only raise above 1 when there's heavy motion blur as if you only shoot one ray into a pixel, there's a chance that vray misses an object entirely and thinks there's nothing more to do - you'll often see this as a normal motion blur streak but at one of the soft edges, there'll be a box cut out of it. Then you've gotta go more than 1 to give vray more chances of hitting the object. This goes especially for motion cameras or objects with small fine detail too, sometimes a raytracer (not vray specifically, any of them) will just miss an object on it's first shot so you get some flickering. If you're only doing stills though, I'd be inclined to just fix this in paint rather than take a speed hit across the entire image!

[^Lele^]

Speed for one. Output is high volume and fast. I found that leaving the default settings will get a good image, but it takes a while to get there depending on the scene (in our instances). Which I think is was the intent--easily approachable and yielding the best result. But when the scenes get more complex we needed "good enough" and found these tweaks shaved off some time.
Which settings would you suggest be done in post? The AO being baked in is giving us a bit more of a contact shadow that was missing in shots and the GI saturation/contrast is just tweaking it enough to minimize occasional color cast from some of the brighter colors we use.
We do our post in Photoshop and are just starting to explore animation which will require a different workflow.

Without getting into the nit-picking stage (anything off defaults is considered sub-optimal, in general.), it looks to me as if you're trying to correct within the light-transport stage issues which belong elsewhere.
Chiefly, i'd wager the shaders and lights are off (read: too "bright", either in intensity or Albedo) compared to the ideal, and as such generate a cascade of issues which then need adjustment.
The thing is, then the lighting looks flat, like in the above sample, where the color of the stuff is bright and full, but the lighting has hardly any contrast (it's an outdoor shot in direct lighting with white walls. try taking a picture of it, and you'll know what i mean.).
There are fewer and fewer cases (albeit sure, there still are a few. stress on few.) where a proper setup generates fireflies, or unwanted GI cast, or a lack of contact shadows (defaults with LC/BF will give you all the contact shadows you'll want, or there's an issue somewhere else.).
Try darkening your shaders substantially, and add IES, or very close to measured, lighting fixtures, and if those scenes turn out to be problematic, send them over to us for study and profiling.
You'll always find "performance" lowering the calculated dynamic range in a render (any engine, really. it's a well used trick.), but the extreme point of reasoning for it is that you'll end up rendering a murky gray, the definition of uninteresting.

TL;DR:From the defaults, if things are set up right, there's hardly any need to change around stuff. The issues are very likely elsewhere.

Edit: DoF and higher Min samples is good. Try also raising the LC subdivs to 3k or so, see if that helps with artefacts.