Preview Renders

[arcgraphics]

Hello everyone, Im wondering if anyone can give me some advice regarding preview rendering, I tend to do a lot of renders to preview materials for reflections, lighting and all the usual stuff. As my models become more complex I find this is becoming extremely time consuming.

Has anyone any trick to speed up the process of doing preview renders? any advice would be most welcome.

Kind regards

[nomeradona_cg]

I preview my materials using the material editor. As for lighting study, I normally do override materials. As for other stuff, I normally save the Ir and LC passes and load them again. I used render region, in rendering a desired area. Then once satisfied, I render with low setting image sampler and high noise.. once satisfied I use higher quality..

[fpedrogo]

What Nomer said is a good workflow, the idea of the new material preview is to give you a good approximation of the final material, so you can save time making material. Beside that you can override all the material in the scene to have just one color in the render, this is going to reduce the render time because you are not going to deal with glossy reflection or refraction, multiples material layer, etc. Then if you want to work with one specific material, you can go to the material editor and disable the option "Can be overridden" for that particular material. This option allows you to see the real properties of the material no matter that you have the "Override material" option enable in the "Global Switches". So you will override all the other material except the one that you want to test.

This approach is very useful when you are testing glass material for the windows or even when you want to test interior illumination with override material enable, but you have glass on the windows that are blocking the environment light. You could select the glass material and disable the "can be overridden" option. The glass material will be glass allowing the light come into the interior, but the other material will be override.

I hope this can help

Best

[arcgraphics]

Thanks guys, I usually follow the steps above but I like to preview the overall scene to see how different materials reflect off each other. The Override material disable option in material editor was new to me and should come in handy.

[nomeradona_cg]

Notice in this tutorial "how to create pool water" http://www.nomeradona.blogspot.com/2...-water-in.html i have overriden all the materials except the water and pebbles materials which is not effected by the override option. I used it to kind of see the effect of the water together with the pebbles, but at the same time not spending too much time calculating the other materials for reflection, bump etc.

I have also use effect as rendering style.

[arcgraphics]

Thanks nomeradona, I love the above render and had been wondering how you managed to achieve the water reflections while overriding the materials. I will read your tutorial as this affect will be very useful on a project I am currently working on. Thanks again.

[nomeradona_cg]

its very easy actually just like what fernando explained. all you need to do is to render using override material. as for the materials you dont want to be affected by the override material, all you have to do is to open the material editor and access the option of the materials. UNTICK the option effected by override material to those materials you dont want to be affected by the override material.