run through of my working method for vray 2.4 sampling in arch vis scenes.

[mcnamex]

Massive thank you to you Jon as well to Toni and Akin for all of the contribution to the 3d industry. Vlado can we have this as sticky or even documented into the manual sometime.

[alexyork]

Thank you Jon! Great tutorial. Wish I'd seen this a bit earlier. Some eye-opening tricks and findings, there.

[joconnell]

More to come Alex, I've gotten some good feedback from viewers so I'll make some adjustments. There's all the major improvements in vray 3 to come in and other artists are constantly testing and finding new ways to speed things up - exciting times!

[alexyork]

More to come Alex, I've gotten some good feedback from viewers so I'll make some adjustments. There's all the major improvements in vray 3 to come in and other artists are constantly testing and finding new ways to speed things up - exciting times!

Sounds good. I actually tried your method(s) out on a scene yesterday and managed to bring my rendertime down for a complex interior from around 5hrs to just over 3 and it looked perfectly fine. I need to look more into this balance between high light and material samples and lower AA. This is a very tricky and complicated balance it seems.

[joconnell]

Sure. My method isn't necessarily the only one either, a very smart user called Emanuelle Lecchi is constantly looking at various other methods to simplify this, hopefully he'll publish something very soon!

[Bathyscaph]

Watched this today. Great stuff. Thanks for taking the time to do such a thorough tutorial.

[joconnell]

Cheers Steve! The general feedback is that it's not quite as accessible as Akin's or Grant's very bloody good tutorials which is totally fair, it's not designed to be that. What would you like to see if I was to expand on it though?

[AlexP]

Cheers Steve! The general feedback is that it's not quite as accessible as Akin's or Grant's very bloody good tutorials which is totally fair, it's not designed to be that. What would you like to see if I was to expand on it though?

Stuff like this is amazingly useful, but would like to see something that uses heavy geometery, a much larger scene, foliage, trees etc. DOF.
This along with grants etc. are amazing for general technical approach, but once i start trying to apply it to the more mental scenes its starts to fall apart a little because Its not clear how to adapt the approach based on larger scenes & animations. For me the interior stuff never covers 'real world' situations. How does one tackle a shedload of plants, lots of glossy surfaces, DOF while still needing to render an animation in a reasonable time. (the current hell Im in)

[pg1]

Hey John,
Thanks for this great tutorial video. Been trying to break down a scene using the same technique for a fairly regular arch viz exterior scene that I lit with BF and light cache.

The scene is lit with a sun and vray dome light with a hdr in the dome.

I cleaned up the scene considerably by cleaning up the dome light select element increasing the subdivs to 128.

The only pass I had left to clean up was some noise in the Global illumination cause from the BF.
I increased the subdivs on the BF to 128 and it cleaned up the noise in the GI element but it made the Dome light select element noisier which has confused me all over again.

[joconnell]

Ah okay! did you have the dome light clean with GI first turned off, then turn on GI, clean that up and find that the light pass was now noisy?

Could you pop up some of your passes and we can have a look? One thing that Vlado mentioned is when you have a dome light with GI turned off, all of the light contribution is direct light. As soon as you turn on indirect illumination though, half of the light comes from GI, half from direct. It's the same amount of light shining on your object so the brightness won't change at all, it's just the way that it's calculated will change a tiny bit.

[pg1]

The only difference between the noisy part at the top of the image and the cleaner bottom half of the image is that I changed the BF Gi subdivs from 32 to 128.
This of course will clean up the GI pass but it made my vray lighting pass noisier which really surprised me

[joconnell]

That is a little odd alright, I can't think of any good explanation for it without seeing the scene though!

[pg1]

Finished up on that contract so cant get access to the scene files.
There really wasnt that much going on in the scene. Building with exterior light i.e. a vray sun and a dome light with a hdri, brute force and light cache, the area we are looking at in the render is a vray mat with white in the colour swatch and nothing else.

Will try and recreate it in a simple scene later today.

[pg1]

The issue was rendered on vray 3 and the place Im working at right now uses vray 2. They are upgrading this weekend and will try and reproduce it next week.

[snivlem]

I don't know where else to ask this - but should we be putting in Portal lights if we illuminate an interior via a dome light?