Scene optimization

[pailhead]

I'm rendeirng a scene with a bunch of ies lights. I wouldn't say that there is a hell of a lot of them, but there are a few. As an experiment i tried setting up a high res, universal settings rendering over the weekend. After 60 hours, more than half of the image was done, but i was surprised to see splotches. I did these off the top of my head, and i've experimented with lightcache a bit before i let this render. I guess i took lightcache for granted as most of the times i wouldn't notice any artifacts or anything that could be caused by it. Here it has to be the culprit, since brute force can't cause splotches like these. There is some funky stuff going on the model, i tihnk it was imported from rhino.

[flino2004]

why the dynamic memory is that low? and 6000 for LC seems very high

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

In my opinion the render is terrible set up and/or scene is badly lit... try using 0 in dynamic limit - this is mainly the reason why it renders so slow... Other than that theres bunch of settings that go above what u need for it...

[samuel_bubat]

Well, it depends. If you get "Unloading geometry" during rendering process than do what DADAL said regarding the dynamic Limit.
But 400mb is probabely to Low especially with 6k LC samples.
Also on a first look I would say your Lightcache sample size is way to low. Try it with 0,01 and decrease you LC subdivs.
6k sample will take a huge chunk of your Memory.
Anyway if you have very fine structures like Gaps for example it will be pretty hard to get it absolute clean with a LC as secondary.
One trick wich sometimes does work, (but also sometimes doesn´t work) is to make the LC very Low. Like a sample size of 0,1 with 500
or 1k sample and increased Interp. Samples.
So the LC will still have blotches, but they are so large and so blurred out that you don´t really recognize them as such anymore.
The details are added by the Primary anyway.

I usually try to avoid modelling very fine gaps and fake them with just a texture or take them out of the GI calculation completely and Lit
them seperat.

[pailhead]

400mb is the default value for some reason. It's been like that ever since i first noticed that parameter. I was under the impression that it affects absolutely nothing unless a lot of geometry such as proxies are used. Proxies, displacement and such. Usually i notice that the rendering is going super slow, even though there isn't much going on in the scene. Also, the green warning really flags this and i usually increase.

I've been using vray for a while, i managed to pull a lot of stuff without banging my head on the wall, even since single core cpus. But, i've never worked so much with ies lights. And i hardly ever work on someone elses models.

Rendering at 5000 pixels with 0.003 and 1-100 sampler is supposed to be so much faster than what i had going here? The half of the image features a thin plane with an opacity map (unfiltered though).

I was trying to get rid of the blotches caused by LC by making the sampler smaller, i obviously don't understand how LC works.

The scene is lit per specification, made by lighting designers. Every light is specified, except the cove since vrayies is utterly useless, and normal ies takes forever to render. So the way the scene is lit is pretty much absolute, this is what they want to see.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

With jobs like this its time to fake few things here and there... If u are using 1 type of IES then make urserf a texture from that IES and use as projection map. Fake the IES everywhere where u need them and use vray lights / other lights to lit the viz...

[glorybound]

SolidRocks, baby!

[pailhead]

It's an environment where everybody is particular about the IES lights. i even use calculation software

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

solidrocks will only confuse you setup wise.
a lot of its setting are way too overkill. and whats more, i tends to proguce blotches in complicated interiors.

id start with LC at 2000 with sample of 0.02
prefilter 100 retrace thresh 1
+ give an irradiance map a go....80/40 (0.3,0.1,0.1)
if you want more detail, use check sample visibility instead of using DE
DMC sampler start at 1/8 with noise at 0.005
if you still get noise, just bump up indivual material subdivs.

Hope this works for you....and dont forget to set dymamic mem limit 1GIG below your actual physical ram