Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

[BillyRaygun]

In my industry, I tend to have to render multiple views of a scene. For example, right now, I'll need to have 10 views of my project. All at 1500x1000.

The project started last Friday (6/13). It's due Wednesday. With the project still needing to be designed, modeled and then rendered. My first render at the above resolution took 47 minutes. Round that to one hour, and I'm looking at 10 hours of rendering time.

Vray is very nice rendering program, but in a deadline oriented, rush business like mine, the slow render times are almost not feasible. No fault to Vray.

Ideally, it would be perfect to achieve a 10 minute render at that size. Without going back to the ray trace/scan line render, am I even being realistic. Meaning, is long render times just the result of high-quality?

Do I need to give up quality in order to satisfy the rush demands of the business?

Long story short, I would very much like to bounce ideas off people.

[Micha_cg]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

Hi Billy,

from my experience, if you need speed&quality, than Vray is a great solution, but it's some experience needed to get the max speed. For product design it should be possible to render images within 10 min at this resolution, but it depends on the materials too. I use 4 overclocked QuadCores and render times are 1..10 min most.

Best you invest in some days of experimenting and reading the forum. A good start could be to use the starterkits - best stick at light cache and irradiance map.

An other way to get a solution now could be to hire a freelancer to give you a direct support of your projects. Typical my design clients send me a first raw model. I create a setup and later, when the model is ready, I produce the images within a short time frame. If you are interested my offer is: render consulting / creation of setups /creation of images, QTVR (scene/object) and animations. (I hope it's ok to place a little advertisment here.)

[Hoop]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

Hi BillyRayGun,

Are you by any chance in the Exhibit Industry? It kind of sounds like it. I am, and deadlines are always insane. I typically am achieving renders from 5-20 minutes depending on the complexity of the scene. The only renders that approach 45-1hr are interiors we do. Our typical resolution is 1862 x 919. In my experience, interiors have always taken quite a bit longer than exterior renders. Don't know what your hardware is, but I'm on a quad-core xeon 2.6 ghz. Anyway, here are a couple of renders . . . the TVlogic one took 2 minutes 45 seconds and the Reed one took 17 minutes 5 seconds. TVlogic was simple materials, simple light setup, optimized polygon count, etc. and Reed was more complex materials and lighting, and a not so optimized poly count.

These are both extremes (fast and slowest), I'm usually somewhere in the middle of these times, around 8-12 mintues. In any case, if you want to compare notes on setups, etc, let me know and I'll be happy to share. I'd often like to spend more time on renders, getting everything perfect, but in the exhibit industry, there just isn't time. If you are in this indsutry, you know what I'm talking about. Both of these images are straight out of Vray btw, no photoshop. Both of these projects were done in less than a week, from project brief to final design presentation. Arrrgh. Hope this helps,

Hoop

[BillyRaygun]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

@Micha - Nice Advertisement ;D

I think I do need to have a look at the stater kits. I also agree with you on IM and LC. They seem to be the easiest for me to work with under extremely short deadlines.

@Hoop - only another exhibit designer would understand my issues. I'm in the business!

Nice renderings BTW - no artifacts. I've played with Maxwell, Vray, Air, 3DS Max(Crash Happy), Cinema4D and many other modeling and rendering programs. Nothing seems to allow for any real quality when it comes to such insanely short deadlines.

I would be happy to kick around settings. Unfortunately, my trial is about to end and I'm not sure if I can purchase the program at this time considering my other software investments.

[Hoop]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

Hi BillyRayGun,

I understand the budget constraints totally, the company I now work for is very small and growing and has very tight budgets. The firm I worked for beforehand was totally opposite, a giant with huge resources, our design department could buy a seat of pretty much whatever we wanted to play with. There I did exactly what you seem to have been doing, I played with 3D Max, Cinema 4d, Modo, Catia, Maxwell, Flamingo, FormZ, etc. and none fit the bill becuase of the time vs. quality issues. When I found Vray I was a little overwhelmed at first but the idea of fast, quality renderings kept me giong. To be honest, there are a lot of settings that I don't even touch and have been fine. I've learned what makes a difference and what is just "extra" fine tuning type of stuff and have been fine. I'm still learning but have come a looooooooong way since I first started.

Anyway, in short, Vray fits the bill here. Once you invest the time in learning it, you can get really fast, high quality renders with no problems. And photorealistic animations becomes possible as well! And the setup time ends up not taking very long the more you get used to it. At first you'll spend a lot of time tweaking settings, but the more you use Vray the faster you'll go throught the pre-rendering setup's. I can pump out images in no time now, that look much better than most of our competitors images, who are using less photorealistic programs.

If you decide to purchase and stick with Vray, I have no doupt that you'll be happy. It's the only program that I've found besides Modo, that can give me super high quality in just a few minutes. And in our industry, that's priceless, especially when your presentations end up looking more polished than the competition becuase of better imagery.

If you want my settings for the above renders let me know, and I'll post them. Hope you decide to give Vray a try.

Hoop

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

Billy,

You'd really be hard pressed to find anything thats consistently faster than V-Ray. Getting images very fast just requires becoming familiar with settings/options and how V-Ray works. A little reading and some experimentation, and your render times will begin to get quicker. As Hoop said, there are a lot of settings that you won't even have to touch, so just make sure you keep to the big ones and you'll be fine.

[BillyRaygun]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

Thanks everyone for the feedback on this subject. I think I just need to keep playing with Vray to learn how to optimize my settings to perfection.

Hoop probably understands best that in the business that I'm in, nothing is fast enough. :P

Thanks again everyone!

[Micha_cg]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

... and don't forget, the DR of VfR is extrem easy to use, not to compare with Maxwell. You enable it at the VfR options and the additional machines will be direct used at every rendering. Textures and scene will be send to each node per automatic process.
Best you buy some cheap Q6600, overclock it at 3.4GHz and you will be happy, render time dosn't matter.

[BillyRaygun]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

I would like very much to try DR. I haven't looked yet but is there any information on how to set it up and connect another computer?

[Micha_cg]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

You install VfR at all machines and than you start the drspawner.exe at the slave engines. At the master you start Rhino and set at the DR option the names of the slave machines. If your network was working befor, than DR should work now. Best you use a network without firewall first. If it work, you can setup the firewall later again.

[diegojimenez90]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

Hoop, I would really like to know those settings. Mine tend to work fine sometimes, but there are those special scenes, no matter if I preload the materials I've used a dozen times.... They still freeze and take longer.

[BillyRaygun]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

You install VfR at all machines and than you start the drspawner.exe at the slave engines. At the master you start Rhino and set at the DR option the names of the slave machines. If your network was working befor, than DR should work now. Best you use a network without firewall first. If it work, you can setup the firewall later again.

Thanks Mica. Will this work on a wireless network? Or can I connect with a Cat5 cable directly to each computer?

[Hoop]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

Hoop, I would really like to know those settings. Mine tend to work fine sometimes, but there are those special scenes, no matter if I preload the materials I've used a dozen times.... They still freeze and take longer.

No problem . . . here are the settings for both of the renders I posted. I generally start out with these settings and tweak from there. Two notes: I can sometimes get away with a value of 8 instead of 16 for the Minimum Samples under DMC sampler. Also, one of the settings that I end up tweaking the most is the IR map samples, and the LC subdivisions. Most the time tweaking these two seetings up a little tend to fix the majority of issues that I have. Hope this helps!

Hoop

[Micha_cg]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

... the DMC sampler adaptive amount 1 is a pitfall, because it can cause strong IM splotches, better stick at 0.85 allways.

[Gijs]

Re: Ideal Rendering Program Thoughts

Indeed. I've always wondered how that came into the default. Also, a maximum of 16 subdivisions for you aa samples is mostly an overkill. 4 should be enough in most cases. If you have not so many materials that have blurry reflections (in terms of covered area in the rendering), you could probably render faster with adaptive subdivision. Switching off the AA filter saves some time too (and hardly makes difference in image quality) Switching on clamp colors and subpixel mapping will improve aa quality. If you don't adjust the exposure after rendering, I'd recommend to turn those on.