One of you V-Ray brainiacs should start a V-Ray scene optimizing business. We send you our bloated scene, you optimize it, and the world is a better place for it. I would pay someone to tweak my scene for optimal performance. Since I have my own small render farm, and I usually only have one job on the board, I just crank thing up high, and render overnight. But, having this workflow made me lazy with scene optimization, so when I am super busy, I fail when it comes to optimizing my scene for fast render times.
With a couple script and SolidRocks, I get close, but I can spend more time optimizing a scene, than it took me to build the scene.
I am interested in that heat map looking thing some of you guys do, but I haven’t had the time. My understanding is some colors indicate materials that need more sampling. So, let’s say, the whole screen should be red. If you have anything blue, let’s say the floor, the floor material’s subdiv should be increased. My workflow is more like this. I set all the materials to subdiv to 8, and I control things globally, which is easy, but not optimal. What would be neat, is if the software handles this. ideally, the further from the camera, the less sampling. And, on an object to object basis.
Bobby, I may be wrong, but I believe the element is the vraysamplerate and you want little bits of red, and more blues/greens. Someone please correct me if I am writing BS
Optimising scenes after they’ve been done is a massive pain. I’d do it for an absurdly large amount of money, but nothing reasonable.
The biggest things are simplest and should happen while making the scene - reflection depth on materials. very soft materials need 1, metals 3, glass 5. Instancing maps properly so they don’t take up more memory than they need helps too, as does nesting materials in an override with no reflection for the GI.
Switching off all glass for the base render and doing it separately makes a massive difference too.
Those things alone cut most scenes render times down by half.
Keep all the glass on a different layer - switch it off when you render, render it as a separate pass with no refraction, put it back on in photoshop afterwards.
here is my sample rate. I am seeing a lot of red on the floor, and computer stuff. Does this imply that I need to increase subdivision on those materials?
Basically, it was material settings. I had a dirt map on my blinds, bump on my floor (which wan’t doing anything), my glass had an IOR of 1 (so he set it to 1.01), and other small tweaks. So, a combination of a lot of small things equated to high render times. From now on I’ll set up my materials like I set up by v-ray settings. Start simple, and only increase if you have to.
There are few interesting things with materials… for example if you have not enough samples on matte materials then AA will try to clean up the noise which will take longer to render so once you hit 0.7 gloss of materials consider upping subdivision to 32+ or so…
Yes it is! I know I need to read back through those threads mentioned above. I had really good workflows with pre VRay 2.0, but some of that changed with the newer versions. Just need to find the sweet spots again.
Having a decent sized render farm is a complete lifesaver. Many times I know I don’t have the time to optimize and just get it close and let the farm hammer through it. But since we do a lot of the same type of thing, I could start putting together a base set a materials and settings that will get us close and then optimize from there.
stock libraries and material downloads are my biggest issue. It takes time, but building your own materials saves time in the end. Or, at least, check all the materials. So, from now on, I am going to open the model in its own MAX session, optimize, and then import. The scene checker, I found in the forum, is great. It’ll scan the scene for outrageous material subdivs.
