I read almost everything posted, and I try almost everything suggested. I have a pretty good handle on Vray, but sometimes I just don’t get it! I can have everything correct, but I get absurd render times for no apparent reason. All day yesterday I was fighting render times, tried some other people workflows and my times just went up, so I reset my scene and started again. After starting over, my render times went down drastically and I was able to render my scene quickly. Now, I started with these render settings and I kept going back to them when nothing else worked, but only when I reset my scene did it seem to work again.
Something gets gummed up and only a reset seems to clear things out. Has anybody else experience this?
With a lot of scenes it’s kind of hard to keep track of everything in there so you’re right - you can really trip yourself up quite often, especially in scenes like yours where you’ve more different lights and materials than you can scan over manually. There’s a lot of different combinations of numbers / settings that people use so you could easily forget to reset one and have yourself in a world of hurt. Might be good to search out some kind of spreadsheet type of view so you can see at a glance every subdiv in a scene - it’s one thing I liked about maya. Either that or have a look at maxscript to make yourself some set / get / reset functions for anything to do with vray.
As a slightly different example, I worked on a tonne of film shots last year and I wanted them to come out consistently in terms of filenames, locations, passes and quality. Each time I did something dumb like not turning off the VFB, I’d see how the on / off button worked for it in maxscript and then write in a little check. I’d a script that set up my output file names based on my max file name and as that was being run, it’d go through my list of dumb mistakes that I’d previously made and either warned me or corrected them for me. Some method of scanning your scene could be handy for you in this case?
More and more, I am trying to standardise scene setup. I know a lot of people say that each scene is different and what works for one will not work for another, but I think 90% of situations can be handled the same way, and then just focus on the few ‘problem’ items (like a particularly blurry marble floor, or a particularly tricky strip light) and up the subdivs on those.
At the moment, I am actually trying the universal setup and getting small renders looking acceptable in house, then farming out the full res versions to a render farm service knowing that the quality will be good.
Maybe I am forgetting something, or changing some obscure setting, but it seems that even if everything is the same the scene gets gummed up. It is almost like settings under the hood are not consistent with the settings being applied; some kind of cache issue going on.
there is a saying: sometimes you can do everything right and still lose
I often feel I go crazy with things spiraling out of control. I learned that throwing things out and starting from scratch sometimes is faster/better then trying to salvage lost work.
I notice this quite a lot with scenes that people send to me. Often, just resetting the settings to the default vray ones and then starting again seems to fix things, but yes it does seem to me that sometimes even though all the settings LOOK correct, there is something weird going on.
max leaking may happen, but in my experience that NEVER resulted in slower rendertimes, but rather sluggish interaction with themax ui.
on the other hand, i made a career out of always getting the expected rendertimes after USER fiddling.
Yes, Dmitry’s too, and i am sure he recalls a few episodes as well.
I am NOT superhuman, i use scripted routines and sanity checks: human creativity will never cease to find new ways to get things wrong, especially when under duresse, while a script will invariably perform the exact same way (right, or wrong, at that), regardless of the time of day (or night), the pressure on the artist, or a bad day at home with the wife. or kid.
much as John pointed out.
I’ve seen all sorts happen that are fixed by a merge. objects randomly flickering in and out, render times going up by 20x, things looking wrong.
Mostly used to happen when we were using max 9 and around there - i’ve not really seen it for a few years. Making much cleaner scenes has to help too.
a merge WILL reset the render settings to their defaults.
Which could be achieved simply by turning to scanline, and back to Vray.
Max file corruption -fixable with a merge-, i’ve had aplenty in the times past, but Vray had nothing to do with it, rather it was a guiltless victim, at most.
And yet, i have never experienced slowdowns on the render side due to the aforementioned scene corruption once the data was in VRay’s hands (sure, "transforming vertices| might have taken ages in case of corruption, but that’s not quite vray itself, and definitely not the screen rendering phase.).
Then again, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt in my philosophy.
Good to know. This is a Revit model, but there is probably drafting lines.[quote=“Dariusz Makowski (Dadal), post:5, topic:38893, username:Dariusz_Makowski_Dadal”]
one of the items I’ve found that gums things are cad lines that get imported. For some reason they sometimes wreak havoc with max.
mh
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I use the same stup for 99% of my scenes (be it indoors or outdoors). Sometimes I have to change the noise thresholds, material samples or irrmap resolution - but generally I find a scene with balanced settings I am familiar with will save me a lot of trouble. I can take an hour of extra render time instead of spending 4 of those precious hours trying to optimize the scene.
That is one great thing about the “Universal Method” methodology; it’s easy to understand and serves my scenes well most of the time (so far). [quote=“voltron7, post:24, topic:45383, username:voltron7”]
Revit models are horribly unreliable.
I use the same stup for 99% of my scenes (be it indoors or outdoors). Sometimes I have to change the noise thresholds, material samples or irrmap resolution - but generally I find a scene with balanced settings I am familiar with will save me a lot of trouble. I can take an hour of extra render time instead of spending 4 of those precious hours trying to optimize the scene.
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For me, it has always been overnight renders, so 12+ render times were okay. But, now it has become a game to render as clean and fast as I can. Also, when you dump a lot of downloaded models into your scene and hit render, it’s a nightmare; that’s what most people do. You have to get intimately familiar with your entire scene and know the settings for everything. Once you get your mind around that, VRay will not be an obstacle.
