Accurate image render time estimate

[tricky]

Would be great if there was an optional feature that does a very small render of your image, say 25x25 pixels or so, to establish a more accurate total render time for the full res image. At the moment, the real-time estimate is easily fooled by large areas of sky etc.

[glorybound]

+1 for me. Usually, my current time equals my estimated time, throughout the entire process.

[Morne]

Would be great if there was an optional feature that does a very small render of your image, say 25x25 pixels or so, to establish a more accurate total render time for the full res image. At the moment, the real-time estimate is easily fooled by large areas of sky etc.

I could probably build something like that into my script. But it would be nice if it was a standard future of V-Ray and you can just tick it on or off.

Something like preview size = 170 x 96
Target resolution = 4000 x 2250

Then it does a "preview render" and afterwards it gives you an estimate based on your target resolution.

May become a bit tricky because a render so small could finish on your workstation before the slaves kick in, in which case the estimates for the final res will be too high

[instinct]

I would imagine this to work more along the lines of doing a small preview render and using the relative differences in pixels (say you rendered a pixel per bucket for example) as bucket estimation multipliers during rendering.

Cheers,
Thorsten

[Vizioen]

That might work for simple scenes but scenes with lots of proxies and displacement with static geometry ticked and stuff take a long time to start rendering sometimes. "COMPILING GEOMETRY" takes 10 minutes sometimes.