Just taking a look now Stan, some initial observations:
Are you going to do a lot of work in post? If not, why not just bake the gamma in to the image (uncheck don’t affect colors in color mapping, and untick sRGB in the VFB) that usually renders quite a bit quicker in my experience. [EDIT: ignore that statement about it rendering quicker, the thing that makes the difference is the bit below]
Also, even if you do keep ‘don’t affect colors’ ticked, I don’t see any reason for not using reinhard color mapping and lowering the burn value to something like 0.25. On a (not very) quick test that alone took the render time down from 23mins to 14 mins.
Humm, thanks for that feedback Peter,
Well, we are used to go out with linear at work, and so it’s more a theoretical limitation.
But yeah, I’m not against going to reinhard if it’s the only way to get it out.
But, isn’t it the same to go to reinhard and tick the “don’t affect color”?
That tells Vray to save as linear but to sample as Reinhard. That means it should render the same speed as the normal Reinhard, but you can still add and substract and having the power of linear in comp. The highlight will be not really well aliased, but who cares, specially if we do the Reinhard curve in comp, then we end up with the same output and same rendertime but with the LWF power, isn’t it?
I will have a look to Vlado’s post when I have time, really interesting, I’m in a middle of a rush now (why am I on the forum anyway then?)
I did two renders, both had “don’t affect colors” ticked, but one used reinhard burn 0.25 and the other didnt. The reinhard one was 14 mins and the other was 23mins, so definitely not the same speed.
Now that is very interesting… I always thought that the reinahard/linear/expo etc etc were only post process effects and did not affect render times too much. I gotta revise my knowledge now.
Yeah sure,
Sorry if I wan’t clear, I meant that if you rendering “don’t affect color” ticked and reinhard, it would be the same speed as reinhard straight away.
Sorry we are on the same lenght here
These are all still using universal settings with a high noise threshold because I don’t have time to do longer render.
This one more or less without any changes to your settings: (there are chairs missing because of a missing plugin, and I havent turned on the interior lights yet)
23:36
And this one with reinhard mapping and burn at 0.25:
14:27
I noticed your light cache settings were a bit odd, so I put things back to default but also ticked use LC for glossy rays:
3:59
So that is all before even messing around with DMC settings and subdivs etc. which I will try next.
On the interior lighting, if you can at all bear it, excluding the lamp itself from shadow casting makes a big difference. I usually do this in my scenes as everything just goes way too slow otherwise. It means the light distribution isn’t correct, but given it renders 2x as fast I would personally live with it. (I lowered the multiplier as well as it didnt need to be so bright when not being obstructed by the shade)
lights turned on:
17:05
lights set to exclude lamp object (cast shadows only):
That’s strange. I just applied your (new) settings to a test scene of mine. But in my case the increase of dof subdivs made the render faster and the samplerate channel darker. Even went till 100subdivs
Oh by the way. These are killer settings, rock on!
Primary bounces - Brute force 512 Subdivs
Secondary bounces - Light cache with Vray defaults and Use light cache for glossy rays and Retrace threshold 1,0 ticked
Among some small details, The Light balls glass refraction seams to be the main killer here and for glossiness got the help of interpolations and no affect shadows option
Thanks to 3LP that sent me this scene!
I will send you the scene back later tonight and try write some more deep explanation as well.
I don’t have much experience with HRDI maps and I would like to have your help to understand the values you use in your scene.
Overall mult: 0,025 and Render mult: 1000 of the Peter’s HRDI map, are those recomended settings? What should they produce? Can you explain me why you use those instead of default 1,0 for both?
Because I would like to actually see the HDRI in the material editor, I need for most of the HDRI to change the overall mult.
Once you have a decent image which is not completely white, you can actually use that to place you HDRI like you want in the viewport through the environment slot.
If it’s all white, you can’t visually use it and you need to guess and place through rendering 300 times.
Now because the VrayCam got some exposure, and bark everything down, I need to counter balance the low value of the overall mult with the render mult.
I hope this make sense
I haven’t had a chance to look at your scene yet, but I will as soon as I got time. Thanks in advance
In general it was a bit of a happy accident with my skies that leaving the intensity at 1 meant that when you use a vrayphysicalcamera you can more or less use ‘real world’ values like f8, 1/200th ISO 100 and the exposure won’t be too far off. So when I start a scene I usually set the multiplier of the vrayHDRi to 1 and set the multiplier of the vraydomelight to 1 as well.
Also on all of my skies I decided to centre the sun (or brightest part of the sky) to take the guesswork out of rotating the sky. When you use the vrayHDRi map you can use the attached diagram that a friend of mine made as a guide.
(why am I on the forum anyway then?) 
