A few days before the release of the new version of VRay, I had created a scene in SketchUp that’s basically a simplified Chicago skyline in front of the lake and the buildings are made of foliage materials to look like trees.
I had rendered the scene with the old version of VRay and it took about 90 minutes to render on a single computer with 2 cores.
I then updated my VRay to the newest version that just came out and tried to render the very same scene. The only difference is that I used distributed rendering with two other computers for a total of 8 cores (hoping this would speed the process even more.)
While the parsing time was much faster, the light cache calculation took about 90 minutes alone. Right now my computer is still rendering that same scene. I’ve hit the 3hr 45min mark and I’m only 30% into the final IR rendering phase. I was hoping to have this rendering finished by 12pm central time to send out to clients, but it looks like I’m going to thave to send them the rendering I made on the older version.
If I haven’t changed any of the settings from the older version, can anyone explain why it’s so much slower for me on the newer version?
I seem to have bad luck uploading .visopts from an older version onto a newer version, so I played it safe and changed all of the settings manually to match the settings on the older version.
I’ve stopped the current render (it was only at 35%) and have tried rerendering with the Material Override turned on. So far, it looks like the same thing. It’s been about 10 minutes and the frame buffer is still pitch black. I’ll let it keep going, but it doesn’t look like anything’s gonna change.
Do you have any other ideas? I’m open to anything.
Is this something that happens with all of your scenes? or is it just happening with that one scene? If it’s only one scene, then there’s probably an issue with a missing texture/material. If it’s happening with all of your scenes… then I am sad. An example scene that can reproduce this slow render time would be helpful if you can provide us with one. Otherwise we’re just completely shooting in the dark.
Below is a SketchUp screenshot of the scene I tried to render. I scaled down the city so that the tallest building (the Sears Tower) is about 6 feet talll. So the whole model itself is not that big. I just picked one of generic vegetation materials in SketchUp for the buildings, just to test out the look. There’s also a clear surface below the buildings, which will be the lake.
Below is the VRay rendering of it. Ideally, I wanted to create a vegetation layer with an alpha transparency layer on it so that there were open spaces to give the impression that the buildings were made of leaves. In this rendering, I didn’t add any layers to the vegetation, but it still took over 5 hours to render. The lake took a while to render. I took a glass material and applied displacement with noise. Still, it took just as long for the cores to render the buildings as it did to render the lake. I hope this gives you a better idea of what I was trying to render. The buildings that are solid green were groups. I was going to group each and every building, but figured it would be a waste of time.