All bounced light

[YoyoBoy]

I have a scene in a large room that is lit completely by sunlight splashing onto the floor through a large doorway. The camera comes through one door, inspects details of the walls, and leaves through the sunny doorway. My render times, especially with brute force (which I will probably have to use), aren't acceptable. What sorts of tweaks could speed something like this up? I'm using SolidRocks for it at the moment, and even the Low quality setting is super slow.

Thanks.

[Deflaminis]

There's no bonus points for doing everything with 1 light. Photographers use all kinds of bounce cards and lights to fill a room just right for archi photography, so why not you?

A single light or two with intensity even as low as 1 can really help the sampling in your scene, especially if you want to brute force a scene with mostly 2ndary bounces. If your render times are too slow, either your antialiasing sampler or your subdivision sampler are working too hard. Add a VraySampleRate to your render and look at it... is it red? Then your antialiasing sampler is doing all the work...

It might sound nuts but increasing your subdivs for lights and materials can actually speed up the render if your antialiasing sampler is doing all the lifting here.

Really hard to help without a reference image.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Architectural Visualizations are usually very well handled with Irradiance Map and Light Cache GI and the render times are significantly faster - what's the reason to avoid using them?

[YoyoBoy]

It's archaeology. Archaeologists prefer facts to flash. And the reason for going BF is that there will be people walking around, all wearing long skirts and robes with cloth dynamics.

[tashko.zashev]

There are few Irradiance map animation approaches, which will allows you to get flicker free render results even with moving objects. Especially when you need optimization for the GI part of the render calculations.
If you send us your scene, we can inspect your V-Ray settings and advice about appropriate GI method.