Scene Optimization

[glorybound]

I have one of those scenes that are taking way to long to render. I am using "Universal Settings", but I have tried almost everything. Last night, I got the render times down to about an hour, but for some reason the render time has gone up, exponentially. Here is the file, if anyone is interested in helping out. I have included everything, including materials.

123 N. State (662MB)

[glorybound]

I have to crack this nut so I can move onto some fun stuff. I want to do some close-ups with shallow DOF, and other stuff, but I can't with these high render times. I read a "how to" last night from a scene that was beautiful. The artist does what I do, which is hit render, go to bed and hope things work in for the morning reveal.

[Neilg]

I was going to have a look at this but I cant open it - could you save just the max file as 2012? no need to repackage everything, should be about 70mb compressed

[glorybound]

Here you go! Much appreciated.

https://www.sendspace.com/pro/dl/nidhmc

[Neilg]

you said it was slow, but wow... I reduced to size to 600px wide and after 15 minutes it had done 3 buckets.
I think there's something a bit broken here. I stripped it right down to a grey scene, turned off all your lights and put a huge bright vray plane in and the IRmap will not clear up. no matter how high the settings, it's got blotches that almost cover the full range of black to white on every surface. there's no combination of settings that reduce these, higher settings make it worse and more contrasted.

I'll keep digging, but i'm pretty sure that brute forcing your way through this issue is the cause of the render times.

e: merged it into a new file and the problem is instantly gone.

[Neilg]

merging it all into a new file should help, but I switched it over to IR/LC with the AA at 2/8 and got it rendering in 4 minutes at 600px wide. The original took 15 to do 3 very noisy buckets over the white cabinets. maybe if BF is still slow after merging it into a new file try moving away from the universal settings... i'm really not a fan.

I got rid of your background image and the glass objects, and reduced the resolution of your hdri to 1500. The hdri is still introducing some super weird spots and i'm pretty sure you don't need it at all, it's barely contributing except making it more difficult to render... that's the reason for the blotches in the lower right.
I didn't even bother going into the materials to up the subdivisions and remove noise at this point, cleaning up the floor, ceiling, metals & the lower right would maybe only add 30 seconds to a minute on the render time.

[Mokiki]

I have only access to Vray 3 right now so I won't get the exact same results you get bobby but this is what I ran into.

When playing around with the render settings I couldn't really provoke a change in render time. So I did what Neilg did and merged the scene into a fresh file and used the same render settings which resulted in a faster render for some odd reasons. What I tried then was saving those render settings as a preset and loaded that preset in your original file. That got me same rendertime I had when I merged the scene into a fresh file.

[glorybound]

I am not married to the "universal settings", but I tried other workflows too. I tried with HDRi and without, so the scene as uploaded was how I left it. It seems merging is the key, which is what I was doing, but why? Last night, with universal settings, I was around an hour. I have been using Oily's script; could this cause issues with the file? Really, I only change the material subdivs with it, so I am not sure what damage it could cause. I'll merge and use the same universal settings and see if it is the settings or the file.

[glorybound]

Yep! Merged and at 1920 X 1080, nice and clean, in 20 minutes. I did remove the HDRI from the dome light, but that wasn't the issue. Also, I am using IM+LC but again, I tried that before. Something is happening to my file, which takes a merge to fix. I only use a few scripts:

Relink
FilePathFinder Pro
Oily's VMC

[Morne]

Isn't something switching on Bitmap proxies by any chance? (Just a geuss, I havent looked at your file yet)

If it slows down again, check if this magicaly came on by itself

[glorybound]

where is it in 2014?

Isn't something switching on Bitmap proxies by any chance? (Just a geuss, I havent looked at your file yet)

If it slows down again, check if this magicaly came on by itself

[Mokiki]

Its in the common tab above the "Render Output" Section called "Bitmap Performance and Memory Options"

[Morne]

You can also see Bitmap Paging in Asset Tracker in the menu

[glorybound]

Found it and it is off.

[Neilg]

Sometimes max files just break like that. Doesnt happen as much as it used to (back in version 9 i'd be merging files on a daily basis to fix these kids of issues) but still crops up now and then.
When something strange starts happening the first thing to do is start a new scene and merge everything in. if you're using dome lights instead of the environment tab then you barely have to adjust the settings.