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

[mr big]

Some problem here... with BF + LC interior renders take long times... and not always I'm able to get clean GI... it's a little bit frustrating... sometimes even decreasing noise treshold to ridicolous values doesn't help to clean renders... light scenario is very simple in my last project: VraySky + portals + disk lights... but renders come very noisy...

[Vizioen]

Some problem here... with BF + LC interior renders take long times... and not always I'm able to get clean GI... it's a little bit frustrating... sometimes even decreasing noise treshold to ridicolous values doesn't help to clean renders... light scenario is very simple in my last project: VraySky + portals + disk lights... but renders come very noisy...

When I'm using GGX vs Blinn I notice that GGX produces a hell of a lot more noise. So for big surfaces I tend to avoid GGX.

[vlado]

Some problem here... with BF + LC interior renders take long times... and not always I'm able to get clean GI... it's a little bit frustrating... sometimes even decreasing noise treshold to ridicolous values doesn't help to clean renders... light scenario is very simple in my last project: VraySky + portals + disk lights... but renders come very noisy...

There is a bug with light portals - they render a lot noisier than they should. This is fixed for the next SP.

Best regards,
Vlado

[mr big]

Really? Portals decrease noise and rendertime for me... they very useful... I did a comparison today...

[vlado]

Yes, but they can be better...

Best regards,
Vlado

[mr big]

Are you talking of 3.40.02 or 3.40.03?

[Vizioen]

There is a bug with light portals - they render a lot noisier than they should. This is fixed for the next SP.

Best regards,
Vlado

Any tiny ETA on the SP?

[Morne]

Any tiny ETA on the SP?

50 bucks on "soon"

[vlado]

The current plan is to have a beta at the end of October, but we'll see how it goes.

Best regards,
Vlado

[crazy homeless guy]

BBB3,

I am curious what your final resoltuion / render times tend to be, and what is exceptable for your scenes? These vary quite a bit from user to user, and how much machine power you have.

[BBB3]

The point I was making wasn't so much about rendering being short or long per se but more about the fact that I had the feeling I had once be able to render similar scenes noise-free in older V-Ray versions using the approach of the time (lengthy setting optimizations by hand) than I was now with more recent versions using the recommended default settings. I also felt that some scenes today were not able to resolve noise-free in what I would call an acceptable time. This is all very subjective, of course, but in the old days, when we were all still using bucket rendering, you could roughly gauge how fast or slowly a hi-res still would render by watching the first buckets resolve. If the first buckets got stuck doing nothing for 20 minutes, you knew there was a problem with your settings. In the latest version of V-Ray, I felt (again, subjectively) that I was getting too many of these scenes where, when switching to bucket mode, the buckets stayed stuck, suggesting a very long render time for the full image.
Like I said, this is nothing scientific and it may be that I'm comparing apples and oranges since my scenes today are obviously more demanding than what I was doing on a smaller system with V-Ray 1.5.
That said, I would expect an interior still at 3K to resolve fully in something between 2 and 5 hours on a twin Xeon (32 cores).

[vlado]

Well, like we discussed, I dug up the V-Ray 1.5 code and recompiled it so the truth shall be revealed soon

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

Well, like we discussed, I dug up the V-Ray 1.5 code and recompiled it so the truth shall be revealed soon

Best regards,
Vlado

wow...can't wait to see the results

[Vizioen]

The point I was making wasn't so much about rendering being short or long per se but more about the fact that I had the feeling I had once be able to render similar scenes noise-free in older V-Ray versions using the approach of the time (lengthy setting optimizations by hand) than I was now with more recent versions using the recommended default settings. I also felt that some scenes today were not able to resolve noise-free in what I would call an acceptable time. This is all very subjective, of course, but in the old days, when we were all still using bucket rendering, you could roughly gauge how fast or slowly a hi-res still would render by watching the first buckets resolve. If the first buckets got stuck doing nothing for 20 minutes, you knew there was a problem with your settings. In the latest version of V-Ray, I felt (again, subjectively) that I was getting too many of these scenes where, when switching to bucket mode, the buckets stayed stuck, suggesting a very long render time for the full image.
Like I said, this is nothing scientific and it may be that I'm comparing apples and oranges since my scenes today are obviously more demanding than what I was doing on a smaller system with V-Ray 1.5.
That said, I would expect an interior still at 3K to resolve fully in something between 2 and 5 hours on a twin Xeon (32 cores).

Well I'm not quite sure but could this also be related to the BRDF you might be using? I tend to use GTR for everything nowadays but I experience A LOT more noise with this than with a blinn or ward.

[short cirkuit]

I did make a post on here recently regarding scene optimisation and light noise and I just read from Vlado that the portals are causing a lot of noise - looking forward to the next release as the light render passes are almost unusable for me without heavy post work masking out the noise.