:shock:
Damn, I have to think again about it… I use a lot of CC
Looks like we need a VrayColourCorrect material 
Indeed! or some viable alternative if a 30% consumption is a possibility. I take it this is some sort of failure in the coding of the ColourCorrect map or is a significant time loss going to be inevitable when performing all of those adjustments on the fly?
I’d imagined that it would perform all of the adjustments at the beginning of the render and hold those in memory but I suppose that negates the memory-saving aspect of having fewer source images.
I thought about the VrayHDRI loader but there is no control over Hue/Saturation. It would be great to have an image adjusment map with more generous controls (a bit like what we now have in the VFB in Vray 3) - as long as there were no big negative impact on render times associated.
4k wide would be ideally 6-8 hours on a single i7, up to 12-15 for some particularly elaborate ones
Similar renders are honestly about 5 times longer than this for me. I must be cursed!
Wowsers! I use quite a few CC maps. I often use them within a BerconTile/Multimap texture too which can have many high resolution textures inside (for timber floors, marble walls, brick walls etc). This could be a big potential slowdown in this case. I have just emailed you and look forward to your findings.
Vlado
I think its great that you can see where render time is going to that level. Any chance of including some kind of diagnostic tool that would allow a render to be broken down in a “percentage of time per process” basis? I would imagine is goes way beyond what is revealed in the vray info window even at its most verbose setting. I’ll try to reduce my dependence on cc textures in the mean time for sure.
V Miller
Second that suggestion
That would be awesome. Or a VrayColorCorrect-map, preferably. CC is a good thing, but I never ever use it due to the slow-down. I edit textures in PS whenever I have to.
As for workflow, I always use a simple IM/LC setup defined in a “template” file. Render settings at medium-ish quality: DMC 1/4, noise thres 0.01, IM -3/-1 50hsp, 1000 LC samples, use glossy rays… Lights and materials with a decent amount of samples according to dispersion/glossiness. It works as a decent base, and it does the job if you’re on a tight deadline.
For high-end jobs, just crank up DMC to 1/8, noise thres ~0.004, IM -3/0 75hsp, 2500 LC - add some detail enhancement with a small radius and multiplyer. This works for most scenes. I usually render at 5000x3000px and on a single i7 it finishes over night. There might be some noise here and there, but the client never ever… ever notices that. So, in the end, working with a setup that minimizes tweaking, and works in 99% of the jobs saves a lot of time, headache and money.
This is the type of thing that I too would have done in the past. However, it has become apparent, through several users explanations, that upping the max DMC sampler from 4 to 8 like this can actually increase the overall noise as all values are divided by 8 (squared) rather than 4 (squared). This is the bit that is always counterintuitive (to me at any rate).
Of course, as I have said many times, it is always a balancing act between render time and render quality and workload largely dictates where the weighting should be placed. I’m on a continual mission to increase quality and am prepared for an increase in render time to a point. The GW approach (sorry for that term Grant - I know its not all you, and it isn’t intended to be derogatory) so far has lead to overly massive hits in rendertime for my type of work (high resolution, high quality archviz interiors) and workload.
I am looking forward to a review of one of my scenes which I have issued to Vlado as he suggested. Could be quite revealing (and hopefully it will reveal some of the stupid errors I have no doubt made!).
Looking forward to feedback on this one. Please keep us updated…
Will do. I am preparing myself for some embarrassment
Totally agreed on this regarding Archviz
Yeah, I’ve read and heard about this stuff too. So far, I haven’t noticed any real difference in actual rendering situations, when it comes to noise.
Anyway, my point is that I find it more useful to develop a personal workflow that eliminates tinkering and doing huge numbers of test renders, just to optimize a scene. We’re ususally working on real short deadlines, and spending even an afternoon optimizing is unthinkable.
Also, there are other things than eliminating noise that produce great architectural renderings. Still never had a single client commenting on noise in an image. Lighting, materials, composition, mood… that and more comes ahead of the noise issues.
Would be nice though having a checkbox that would optimize material subdivs according to noise threshold and DMC max sample settings… just to increase render speed.
An option to disable division of DMC Sampler by Image Sampler has been provided in Vray 3.0, it called Divide shading subdivs: