Interior lighting setup

[Vizioen]

I'm not using next yet, but I've seen you use auto exposure. Might be worth trying to setting the camera up yourself, with realistic values for an interior with this kind of lighting and checking what the output is with the intensity of your lights untouched.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Auto exposure doesn't affect render time in Vray next. It is actually really fast
12 minutes render time for this one on my Core i9 7900X
Using portals with Vray sun and sky

[pietervanstee]

Hi Ashley and Muhammed, thanks for your replies.
I think I'm making progress here (at least I'm back where I was a few months ago when I was still using 3.6)
Looks like the interiors are still in desperate need of portals... now I'm getting the results (speeds) of before.
I even think I can lower my render settings, cause I've got no noise at all in my renders, so they could speed up, certainly for these testrenders.

Also now I get a more realistic samplerate
Haven't tested rendering on my nodes yet, I'm transfering my scene assets, once that's done I'll let you know how long it takes...
I've got my workstation, with an extra 9 nodes each with each 12 cores and 2.93Ghz so that would be 316.44Ghz (WS not included)
Think I'll order 4 more nodes as I have still 3 render node licenses left... so I can submit my renders to my nodes, and don't include my ws as rendernode.

Are you rendering on render nodes? I'm using the default vray DR mode, but I'm looking for a better way to submit my renders so I can continue working on my projects.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Really nice progress!
Sample rate looks more natural and like you said the render is way to clean now. Personally I use noise threshold of .01 with my renders and it is way more than enough to clean all noise without using denoiser.
Thing is using min shading rate of 16 helps give you cleaner result and allows you to use higher noise threshold. Also credit to Bucket sampler for this clean result too(Vray is smart enough to determine the right amount of samples for each bucket which is not possible with progressive mode)
And like mentioned above, the only slider you should play with to control how clean your render is, is noise threshold.
Don't change max subdivs, min shading rate or light cache subdivs.. That is the beauty of Vray's sampling system since it was introduced in Vray 3.3
Only one slider I use for almost all of my scenes. that is how easy sampling in Vray works
Trying to do the same in Arnold or Redshift, you will waste a lot of time on a hundred sliders, optimizing the scene to get the best render time possible.
Also I do think that you need portals because you are using Vray sun and sky.. Maybe you are using the sky as fill light or mixing this with a dome light somehow, but if you are using purely an HDRI for lighting, the adaptive dome light can do the job without portals and it will be as fast.
One thing I would like to point out is how nice your shadows and areas of contrast are. That is why I never use IR for my interior renders, it really affects the quality and detail of these areas. BF is way better and it is actually not slow with my settings at all.
If you want to see the difference yourself, do a test with IR as primary GI engine. Use Medium preset and change max rate to 0 and color threshold to 0.3 and use the same LC and sampling settings I pointed above.
One last thing, Vray Next is faster than 3.6 even if you use portals. If you feel something is slow, it would be worth it to investigate
Few years back I never thought I will be able to render this kind of scenes in 12 to 28 minutes without DR