Beep. Still an awesome idea.
Hmm - I wonder if there would be a way of giving you some kind of diagnostic readout to let you know what the noise threshold of the dmc or aa was? I was going to write a post asking Vlado about the relative expensiveness of each type of sampler - for example I was doing a simple AO element and it gave me quicker results to use less AA and vray dirt samples up around 60. Another car scene I worked on which was lit by lots of very large area lights (sometimes being bounced off cards) and vray blend materials with multiple levels of glossy came out better with a lower dmc and higher AA.
As Vlado mentioned there’s no real rule that works for every scene but it seems aa is the only real way to clean up a scene - I suppose this makes sense since things like ao, glossy and area light subdiv rays could be shooting all over the place (similar to the wasteful nature of photon mapping) and ultimately aa is going to be dealing with a 2d converged grid of pixels. Is there such a thing as a ranking table of which subdivs are going to be the slowest? For example:
1. Glossy
2. Area Light
3. Depth of field
4. Motion blur
Again no doubt this is so scene subjective to the amount you’re using of each and how much of the render frame it takes up. Would it be possible (and I’m not sure it’d even help) to have some kind of diagnostic mode that would give use the current noise threshold that each of the samplers is feeding back to the aa so that we could work out which are giving bad results and causing more aa samples to be used?
For example something like:
Glossy samples threshold - 0.04
Area light samples threshold - 0.01
So if we had our aa clr threshold set to 0.005 the glossies are going to be causing a lot more samples and cause the AA to work harder - some kind of readout might be a way of pointing us towards what’s causing the issue. Again I’m not sure whether this is even the way it works or whether having the unified dmc system is going to make it hard to isolate the noisiness of each component of the render?
yeah this would be cool. Would also like to know what noise level you are actually at - might help with the age old monitor issue as well - i.e. you monitor might be too dark and hidding noise, when you view it on another monitor or another output, it might show some noise you didn’t realise was there - would be good to know you have hit a 0.003 threshold, for example, if this is possible…?
Stumbled upon this thread when I was looking for troubleshooting some slow renders - and I feel I have to ressurect it.
A script like this would just be great. Even for us who are working proffessionally with vray every day, a script like this would be awesome. It’d save a lot of time, which is quite essential when on a tight deadline. So please, vlado, tell me you’re working on this.
I’m all for the script too! It would be really nice to have the suggested settings from the script printed in a separate file or to the listener for comparisons.
Yep, the script sounds like a no brainer to me…I think you have the backing of most vray users 
I gotta second this - I can’t think of a single thing that I would have done to increase my times the way they have, and Vlado, did this ever see the light of day? If so I’ll comb the forums, but if not, my god this would be helpful.
+1 , do it Vlado…
+1 It would be useful for all users IMO.
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+1 Very usefull script, how or where will be posted in case, just to be ready
Any progress on that?
I 50th a script/feature/plugin to help optomize render settings!
Even when you think you don’t have a problem, How many of us are rendering images/animations that are of “acceptable” rendertimes, and yet changing a setting or two might cut the render time by another 25% or more and we don’t even know it?
I think solidrocks is supposed to do that, although having bought it, I really havent had much luck with it. The end results for a particular image I was rendering after using solid rocks looked terrible.
I totally agree though. There is so much to learn with vray and knowing the best/most optimised solution for each scene is hard…I generally apply similar settings to each scene because of my lack of knowledge.