Render Times too long or just a Patience Problem?

[fooprobe]

Neat to see this side by side!

[mcvltd]

Micha's settings win by a mile!

[Helldoor]

Hi folks!

It was a great decision to register for this forum. The tipps and advices you gave me, really helped a lot!

It was crazy to see, how a rendering, which took me 13 hours, could get ready in a bit more, than an hour, without any major quality withdrawals...
Also, the slowest of your settings, could still beat my render time by whole six hours!!! Damn...

However. Here some further questions, I wanna ask you:

@Micha : One hour? Really?! I really liked the duration of this one... Here my questions: With Your Render settings, the lights in the interior are invisible (compare to the other two pics). Why? And how would you set the AO, so that it gives better shadows? And is AO the only parameter you'd change, in order to become a nicer/smoother image?

@fooprobe / Rob : Respect for the render options. I didn't want to make a contest out of it, but I thought, that a direct comparison would help all of you/us to get better render times.

@Rob : I liked the rendering result. How, do you think, can we lower the times of your settings a bit more?


And finally - I'll be glad if you guys, could give me some further tipps about my scenery/settings/materials and everything else, I could approve. That would be really great.


Once again - thanks for your help.
Much love.
Teo | Helldoor

[mcvltd]

Teo,

I think what you've shown here is great. It shows that by tweaking a few settings you can hit some really tight deadlines albeit at the expense of losing a little detail here and there. The thing you have to weigh-up is detail vs deadline. If your deadline is tight then you probably won't be creating the best image ever but you will be able to complete a render. If your deadline is flexible then crank-up the settings and enjoy the extra detail in the image....but will the client notice?! At the end of the day it's good to be given the choice to tweak the image to what's acceptable to you in a given situation.

The things I usually tweak to adjust render times are-

- Adaptive dmc max subdivs. Low values may give you problems around bright highlights. I never usually go below 8 for this.
- DMC sampler noise threshold. I usually start with 0.005 and get smaller as I want the image to get less noisy. Larger values will be quicker but give you more noise.
- Irradiance map. Reduce max rate to -2 but make sure detail enhancement is on.
- Lightcache. Reduce subdivs for quicker lightcache times but if you have 'use lightcache for glossy rays' active then this will drastically reduce the quality of your reflections.
- The only thing I've found on materials that slows the render down significantly is glossy refraction and also displacement.

One other thing you could try is using Brute Force for your secondary bounces rather than Lightcache. For exterior renders this can sometimes work out faster. You will however have to reduce the DMC sampler noise threshold to eliminate the extra noise that's created (probably to 0.001 or there abouts).

Hopefully the other guys will have some extra tricks to share!

Rob.

[fooprobe]

The missing reflections on Micha's settings are probably because max refl/refr depth is set to 1. Try increasing.


Dont worry about comparing, we all want to know better ways to make the render faster. But I think it's a mistake to think that any of these are fixed settings - this is a place to start, suggestions to try to find what was slowing down the render. You have to be able to then increase or decrease settings to adjust for quality, because these settings won't work on every scene. I'd suggest reading about these settings on spot3D to get a better understanding.

[Helldoor]

I'll play with the options a bit and post the SUMMARY (best of) OPTIONS, once I finish my big current project in the end of the month.

Till then - once again - huge thanks for all your help and tipps, fellas. Have a nice time!