tips for curved glass?

I am *trying* to get reasonable render times for an atrium that is made up in the most part of curved glass. Render times go through the roof and somewhere into outer space.

The geometry is imported from AutoCAD, and the glass itself is 10mm thick.

Does anyone have any good tips/settings for getting good looking renders out in a reasonable time? Its for an animation (720x404) and I really don’t want the times to be above 15-20min per frame.

i never use imported geometry from autocad. my clients who are the architects usually make some of the most messy drawing ive ever seen in autocad or whatever other program they use
usually one of the things i find with thin glass when its bent like for car windows is the ior really gets messed up i like to use 1.001 for ior of glass refraction and keep the usual 1.54 for the reflection ior

I’ll have a look at that. We very (very) rarely use the geometry straight from architects as we have found the same problems - poor naming, poor geometry, inaccuracies etc.

This is stuff we have modelled, so we know it is geometrically correct.

Hange on a sec…how do you have a different IOR for reflection? In my version, IOR is for refraction only.

nope…thats why where is a IOR spinner for reflection in the vray material rollout.

well. it depends on what version your using

Wat is taking long, the IR map calculation or the actual rendering of the image?

The actual rendering is taking the time - calculation is pretty nippy.

BTW, I am using the old-faithful version 1.09.03r, so that may explain some ‘missing features’

any tips at all, or is it just a slow thing fullstop.

What’s your reflection depth setting. By default it’s probably 5 but you might be able to pull off a setting of 3. Same goes for your refraction. This could save a lot of time. For stills it might not work because you will miss out some reflection in reflection, but maybe you won’t notice these things in an animation.

Marc

Tricky, put a falloff in your reflection slot…use the fresnel IOR

Tricky, put a falloff in your reflection slot…use the fresnel IOR

Hi Tricky,

Can you show the glass material settings you are using.

Make sure you use pure black diffuse and pure white refraction color. If you change the refraction to for example very light grey (245) and the diffuse to some color for example, rendertimes will increase dramatically, especially if you have lots of reflection/refration bounces.