I came back to Vray after having some down time with my native rendering program. Over the last week, I took a crash course on getting back up to speed from where I left. I started with some white models and went into some color renderings.
The white was use to set the lights, quality settings etc. Once those were knocked out, I went to color. Below are three color renderings of a few different stands. Each rendering uses the lighting setup as the white model.
Each one took about 6min, 30sec to render at 1500x1000 dpi. No post processing other than the sharpen filter in Photoshop and scaling down to 750x500 dpi.
Did you use secondary GI engine multiplier 0.8? If not, try it. So, you get less indirect bounced light. 0.8 is a general limit, so you never get unreal 100% diffuse GI reflection, 80% percent is a good max value.
Also, so you get more contrast, but your white could get a greyish look, if you use a to low value (lower than 0.5).
The LC works with infinite light bounces (like Maxwell - it use an internal physical correct limit), so the 0.8 limit helps to avoid to much bounced energy, most important for interiors with white walls.
The QMC support a bounce control, default 3 bounces. Here the limit is not so important.
I will have to try IC with LC and compare. What I like about these is the render times, very fast and good quality. LC might be better, but I see the trade off being time and quality. I can sell off these renderings, and for render times under 10 minutes, no complaints. It’s a fine balance to manage.
LC is typically faster than QMC, not to mention there are other speed enhancements that can be gained by using LC like Use For Glossy Rays and Store Direct Light. It also produces a smoother result (no film grain noise, even at low quality levels), and provided a good sample size is used (I use .01 or lower rather than the default .02) the quality is very good. Plus you can use for storing light information to reuse making it significantly quicker.
If you don’t use “clamp output” (so you limit the output to 8bit), than you could use the framebuffer exposure correction and move the exposure slider. So, you could test, is your scene to bright or not. If it is to bright, than you could look why? If you don’t use a physical camera, than you can use low HDRI environment intensities around 1…10. I suppose so your current problem is an intensity/physCam problem.
