My V-Ray concerns -- please tell me I'm wrong.

[Alex_M]

Render times will never be faster, renders will always take approximately the same amount of time. Once faster CPUs/GPUs come out, we throw even more geo/textures/shaders/FX/larger resolutions at them. If you want to see your scenes taking faster to render, create them in the same way as you did 5-6 years back, with less detail, old shaders, faking, and smaller and fewer textures. If you actually experience slower render times with scenes you made 5-6 years back, then yes, there's definitely something wrong.

Anyways, I'm curious to see too what exactly are the problems with the interior scenes and if there's something that can be done about the slowdowns. Exteriors are almost always faster to render since there is much less light bouncing going on than interiors where things can get really complex for renderers.

[BBB3]

are you sacrificing some settings / quality that you were using in vray before?

No, that's the thing. I could sacrifice quality in V-Ray and render a bad IM/LC in a fraction of the time. But I've pretty much always used BF/LC in the past and I wouldn't want to go back now that it's becoming the standard.

@Alex_M that's my point, I feel the renders are taking longer. In your theory, render times should be staying the same. But they're not for me.

Anyway, Vlado has the scene now so let's see what his verdict is.

[vlado]

From an initial profile, about 30% of the render time is spent inside the environment fog, 20% specifically go into the code for gizmos. For the moment I've disabled it to see what happens without it - there is a lot of noise coming from someplace and I'm trying to figure out what it is.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Vizioen]

20% specifically go into the code for gizmos.

What do you mean by this exactly? (just trying to understand how things work)

[vlado]

What do you mean by this exactly? (just trying to understand how things work)

There is a mesh gizmo attached to the environment fog; for some reason, the work related to rendering that amounts to 20% of the render time. That's definitely something that we should look into, since the gizmo is just a few planes, nothing really complicated.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Vizioen]

There is a mesh gizmo attached to the environment fog; for some reason, the work related to rendering that amounts to 20% of the render time. That's definitely something that we should look into, since the gizmo is just a few planes, nothing really complicated.

Best regards,
Vlado

If that would be the culprit in this scene and it would be a bug of some sorts, I wonder if that would be the same problem with the other scenes Bernard mentioned. That would mean scenes with environment fog + gizmo's + interior should render faster or I'm missing something else?

[vlado]

It could be... once I disabled the environment fog and compared the results to that other renderer, there really wasn't a big difference. There's some stuff related to the max. ray intensity that I want to check too - I think it might be leaving some of the fireflies even though it's supposed to clean them up, but I'm not really sure and I will need to debug it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[M.Max]

I am thinking about the same thing too. Recently we have jumped from 3.2 to 3.4 and even though I have read every single thread / post about the new optimization (I had alot of free time =D) I couldn't get -especially for interiors -a reasonable rendertime as what we have before when we used to optimize our scene manually.. The problem also as if vray now look at the final result only (beauty pass)?! and it is somehow clean enough but the render elements is way noiser than the old way before converting to VBAS.. I was planning to post a comparison the next week before reading this thread and I will see if I can send one of the problematic scened we had recently.
And I 'm really interested in hearing more about Bretnard scene.
Best regards,

[M.Max]

I would like to add that I am not saying this new update is bad. for some cases like exteriors and studio product scenes the render time is great (1-3 min per frame for full HD studio lighting animation with complex materials /fur/ motion blur and dof on my 32 threads machin which is crazy good !!

[vlado]

There is nothing terribly wrong with Bertrand's scene, apart from the slow environment fog. V-Ray does leave a bit more fireflies than I would like for the given max. ray intensity, and they require somewhat longer to clean up, but other than that, result is comparable to other renderers (although things can always be improved, certainly).

If you feel like you have issues, letting me know (preferably with specific examples) is the best way to go

Best regards,
Vlado

[BBB3]

I agree that removing the fog evens the score quite a bit on the speed side. Still, the issue with fireflies means there is some hard-to-resolve noise in the scene for a long time. Leaving aside the issue of comparing V-Ray to other renderers, it feels to me as though V-Ray is super-optimized right now for exteriors or product shots--anything where direct lighting dominates over GI. Scenes where 90% of the light comes from the GI have, I believe, become harder to render as we've moved towards making BF/LC the standards and transitioned towards a renderer that doesn't require users to spend hours tweaking a million settings (which I think is a good thing).

I know these scenes will always be harder to render. But if we want to keep the focus towards more simplicity, which I love, should we perhaps have a preset or setting that expedites rendering in these circumstances?

[vlado]

I know these scenes will always be harder to render. But if we want to keep the focus towards more simplicity, which I love, should we perhaps have a preset or setting that expedites rendering in these circumstances?

I would just rather work on making the renderer better in these cases without adding presets As I said, we still have a few tricks that we can implement, and things are not that bad even now.

Best regards,
Vlado

[LudvikKoutny]

Could it, by any chance, be that reflective caustics is now enabled by default while it was not previously? That would explain excessive noise in indirectly lit areas, especially if many of the interior materials are reflective surfaces, and it would also explain excessive render times in trivial, but shiny scenes, like bathrooms and toilets. Maybe something like adaptive sampler just crunching on noise caused by reflective caustics, even though they are reduced by MRI.

[vlado]

Could it, by any chance, be that reflective caustics is now enabled by default while it was not previously?

No, those were off in Bertrand's scene when I got it, though I enabled them for my own tests. Indeed they might cause some slowdowns compared to previous versions, but on the whole other speed-ups in V-Ray usually compensate for that.

Best regards,
Vlado

[rikou]

Very interesting thread !

are there ways to solve these problems? what's up ?