Foilage - EXTREME Render times on i7 2600K

[Morne]

Hi

I'm having some serious issues with a night scene. Originally I thought it was a displacement problem, but turns out it seems to be my foilage. There are about 4 or 5 different types of plants only, some is instanced proxies and others are just instanced meshes. Mostly they are from the HQ Plants catalogue.

I've already switched OFF motion blur in my VRayCam settings, lowered the IRMap preset to "Very Low" preset. My dynamic ram limit is set to 3500 (since my slaves only have 6GB each). The slaves don't even render and times out, and my i7 2600K with 16GB ram takes 3 hours per frame! I'm using this as my basis for my settings: http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/200R...ials_anim2.htm
With the plants hidden, I get about 50 minutes per frame

It hasnt done enough frames yet to judge if it is free from GI flicker, but on a "very low" IRmap preset I'm geussing it's going to look not too good. I've now cancelled the render and also switched off "detail enhancement" and also switched off "check sample visibility" in an attempt to get lower render times just for a test.

I've also tried the VRayAmbientLight route as some has suggested, but this only brings down the render times from 3 hours to about 2 hours 50 minutes so not much help with render times.

I've gone blank and not sure what it can be. I've rendered much larger scenes than this one with millions more plants in 30 minutes per frame on a pc quarter the speed of this one. Although that was a day time forest/mountain thing. The one I'm busy with is a night shot exterior archviz. Any suggestions would be HIGHLY appreciated.

Unfortunately I cannot post any scene screenshots or part thereoff, all I can post is render settings. Please any suggestions?

[samuel_bubat]

Before you get a "wall of text" from me about a similar problem we ran into, yesterday... do you have the latest Vray Version installed ?

edit: just looked into the realease notes of Vray sp1.

(*) Slow rendering with many overlapping VRayProxy primitives;

That was our problem. After updating to sp1 it rendered like a charm

[Morne]

yes they are overlapping heavily, however I am already on vray 2 sp1. Or wait, what the **** In my "about page" it says vray 2.10.01, however when I start to render, the little vray messages window says "VRay DLL version 2.00.01"
Anobody?

[Neilg]

Have you checked that filtering is turned off in your opacity maps?
Change all 2 sided materials to single mats.
Turn the reflection/refraction depth down to 1 (in the materials)
check the subd's on the materials.

edit: is there any reason you cant render your moving objects separately, either via vray sphere fade, region or a matte pass setup?
Are the trees animated?
If so, is each frame of the animation a seperate proxy file? because if it isnt you've probably got proxy files of a couple of gig each.

[samuel_bubat]

Same here, in the message windows I have 2.00.01. So this shouldn´t be your problem.
Another problem we had, wich caused huge rendertimes was Multiscatter. I don´t know if use it.
But Multiscatter makes copies, not instances resulting in huge rendertimes. With Multiscatter
there should be Vrayscatter installed as well wich makes instances and renderes fine.

[Morne]

all planst are still (no movement) and I think they're just geometry leaves, not opacity mapped but I'll have to checkto make sure.
I'm going nuts here

Some feedback, switching off "detail enhancement" and also "check sample visibility", cut the render time in half. I'm down to 1 hour 20 minutes, but that still leaves me with low quality GI due to "very low" ir mpa preset
Material subdivs are deafult of 8