Speeding up interior

[YoyoBoy]

I'm wondering if there's anything I can do to speed up the render of a detailed, slightly dim interior. The attached raw render (at this tiny testing size) took over 11 minutes. The sunlit exterior of this scene takes about one minute.


I've sped things up as much as I can by putting a (not simple) skylight in the doorway, and putting area lights around for the ambiance. I'm stumped.

Thanks.

[Macker]

Does a brighter exposure of the same scene render quicker? There's no need to render things really dark - this should be done in post.

[Vizioen]

Lower burn value in reinhard colormapping, also reduces rendertimes.

[Morne]

Lower burn value in reinhard colormapping, also reduces rendertimes.

Yes but only in bright renders or renders with very bright areas. The example posted here wont benifit from it as even the lights at the entrance doesnt burn out anyways

[super gnu]

i think the only way to speed that up is to get more direct lighting in there. try turning off gi and getting some fill lights in there. go old-school!!

omnis with attenuation.. shadow maps or small area shadows. you can even use them out of shot and only using attenuation, no shadows at all.. they just help to give the gi engine more to work with.

you could also try vrayambientlight with a large dirtmap keeping it limited to the open areas. on a very low level this might provide a speed boost without ruining the image.

area lights take almost as long to render as a bf gi-only solution, which is why your area fill lights might not be helping as much as youd like.


of course there is also the irradiance map option and comp any moving elements in.

[super gnu]

just to clarify: i meant turn the gi engine off while setting up some fill lights.. turn it back on again after.. i dont mean -that- old school.

[glorybound]

You can turn reflection/refraction off globally, which will speed things up. You can turn GI off.

[Vizioen]

You can turn reflection/refraction off globally, which will speed things up.

I think the point is to more or less maintain the same quality/detail

[YoyoBoy]

Thanks for the suggestions, guys.

It's likely that the actual space did have some skylights, but archaeologists (at least the ones I work with) don't like it when you get creative and start putting in details they don't want to speculate on. It's also known that pretty much everything in these Assyrian palaces was very brightly painted, but the evidence for most of those colors no longer exists, so I'm forced to keep everything boring and stone and plaster colored.

In reality the rooms have torches spaced every few meters along the walls, but I found that it renders quicker if I just put area lights in each room, since the camera doesn't see what's going on.

I have the problem that the camera flies in from the bright outside, and so the EV animates down to 8 from 14 after it enters (the bright spot you see on the bottom right is sunlight coming through the doorway arch).

Turning off the reflections didn't really do anything, since nothing in the scene is all that reflective to begin with. I also experimented briefly with faking the GI, but I think it'll be cheaper for the boss to just pay for the rendering time than to pay me to take the time to get that looking right.

Thanks again.

[glorybound]

Sounds like a fun project.

[Morbid Angel]

Sorry I don't understand, 11 minutes per frame isn't that long...?

[glorybound]

Sorry I don't understand, 11 minutes per frame isn't that long...?

11 minutes for a thumbnail. I'm assuming his deliverable is going to be a lot larger.

[YoyoBoy]

11 minutes is for that little test size. At full HD it's over an hour and a half per frame

[snivlem]

Something doesn't sound right there. None of those surfaces look particularly reflective - is all refelection turned off from materials?

[YoyoBoy]

Correction: It's over 2 and a half hours per frame. And if I render with a global material override with a plain gray VRay material, it's not that much better. 2 hours or so.

My CPU is a little out of date, but not horrible: i7-4900MQ 2.8Ghz

In the morning I'll see if my Multiscatter tiles have anything to do with it.