what settings to change for production rendering?

[Guest]

Are there any settings I need to change to render better/faster? Or do I just leave all the settings and leave it for a length of time or amount of samples? Is it as simple as leaving it render until the noise is reduced? I tried a scene with the default settings and let it render for 2 minutes, I then changed the settings to be:

Trace depth:20
GI depth:20
Ray bundle size: 256
Rays per pixel: 16

I grabbed these settings from the benchmark test scene for GPU. The results after 2 minutes was exactly the same, the same level of noise remained. Are the settings I changed only effective for real-time interaction?

[Alan Iglesias]

Trace Depth and GI Depth, in a general sense, control how much "bouncing" around the renderer will do with light, reflections, etc, while computing your rendering. The more you have, the longer the rendering may take, and the more detail there may be. Notice I say may because it all depends on the scene. You should adjust for the amount of accuracy/depth you need for your particular rendering, and you can do that through experimentation. After a while you will get a feel for what you need for your final render that will be as fast as possible, but with the image quality you are looking for.

Ray Bundle Size and Rays Per Pixel control how much scene information is being sent to the GPU at any given time. If you are using the same GPU card for rendering as you are for the UI display, reducing these helps with UI interactivity. I have found that I can reduce them by half, gain a considerable amount of UI intereactivity, and not really reduce the rendering time hardly at all. This is of course with all the GPUs on the same machine. If you are using Distributed Rendering using GPUs across a network, reducing these will affect your rendering time considerably.

Again, in a general sense, adjusting these attributes and then rendering until your noise is at an acceptable level is pretty much what we're doing currently when trying to come up with final images in RT/GPU.

-Alan

[Guest]

Ray Bundle Size and Rays Per Pixel control how much scene information is being sent to the GPU at any given time. If you are using the same GPU card for rendering as you are for the UI display, reducing these helps with UI interactivity.

What about for production rendering? like CPU rendering I wouldn't want to interact at all. Just want it rendered in x amount for time with minimal noise.

[Alan Iglesias]

For same-machine rendering it may not make much difference. Do some experimental rendering to see if there is anything to be gained by increasing the values. For DR'ed GPU rendering I guess I'd start cranking it up until it starts to slow it down...

-Alan

[vlado]

Are there any settings I need to change to render better/faster?

That's the cool thing - you don't get many settings You may need to adjust them for DR or if you have many GPUs, but otherwise the defaults usually work ok. You only need to set the render time or the desired number of samples per pixel.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Guest]

Just out of interest how do the settings affect DR?

[vlado]

Smaller values for ray bundle size and samples per pixel cause more network traffic but may be able to give you an initial image faster. Higher values for both parameters cause each machine to do a bit more work before sending the results back, which means less network traffic and more efficient rendering but somewhat slower feedback.

We are working on automatically adjusting these settings for fast feedback in the beginning and changing them for more efficient rendering if you leave it running for a while.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Alan Iglesias]

We are working on automatically adjusting these settings for fast feedback in the beginning and changing them for more efficient rendering if you leave it running for a while.

Sweet!

-Alan

[simmsimaging]

Smaller values for ray bundle size and samples per pixel cause more network traffic but may be able to give you an initial image faster. Higher values for both parameters cause each machine to do a bit more work before sending the results back, which means less network traffic and more efficient rendering but somewhat slower feedback.

We are working on automatically adjusting these settings for fast feedback in the beginning and changing them for more efficient rendering if you leave it running for a while.

Best regards,
Vlado

That sounds like a great idea.