what would you think, if an render engine would allow to use all render tricks to get fast clean renderings with less options only? What, if this render engine could be started and the whole image would refined step by step and could stoped, if the neseccary quality level is reached?
The last days I tryed to get Vray to work like this, and it seems to be possible. But the responce to my posts is not like expected. What is wrong? Is nobody interested?
I thought it could be a little revolution, to get nearly all advantages of Vray together. Please let me know, what you think.
-Micha
EDIT: Here universal setting dosn’t mean slower than manual setting.
Edit II: If somebody like to test it, here the VisOpt file that can be loaded to the VfR options.
The settings can be done maual too, the important settings are:
* Image sampler: Adaptive QMC 1-99
* QMC sampler: adaptive amount 0.95 + noisethreshold 0.005
* Indirect Illumination - primary IM + secondary LC (multiplier 0.8 )
* Irradiance Map: min/max -3/0 + subdivs 99 + samples 20 + clr 0.3 + 0.1 + 0.1 + multipass enable
* Light cache: subdivs 1000 + screen + sample size 0.01 + adaptive disabled + store direct light enable + show calc enable + enable prefilter 10 + nearest + interpolation samles 5 + (use for glossy ray can be used)
Important: if arealight are used, than “store with irradiance map” should be enabled. The usage of area lights in portal mode in windows is not recommended.
From personal experience I find that people are adapted to render engines that have setting levels such as Fast - Lo Quality | Medium - Better Quality | Slow - Best Quality
I am not sure about that.When I started with VRAY,I did use the universal settings,it did helped me to understand.But now I much prefer using my settings which differs,depending what I am rendering.Micha’s idea would be good for me to preview.But I much prefer tweak it the way I want,to get what I want,even if it means let the rendering complete over night.
Or may be I don’t understand very well where he is going,could be the case. :?
Travis, this is right. My idea are following settings:
- exterior vs. interior (change the LC subdiv count)
- low/medium/high quality GI (blotchieness, affect IM sample count: 50 or 100 or 150)
- low/high detailed geometry (shadow quality at small gaps, affect IM -/+ and LC subdivs)
So, we could speed up the rendering, but my Adaptive IM settings are quite fast now. It must be tested.
If Vlado could make the progressiv QMC available, than we would not need to touch any subdiv value.
If Valdo could make, that the adaptive IM is independent from the adaptive QMC, than we could set the bluryness quality of DOF, reflection and refraction. Now, the blur quality is a quite high allways.
One problem is, that the LC sample size and subdiv count are independent from the image size. Or can we use the “world” scale? It would be nice, if the UI could calculate the right size/subdiv count from a good standard value like 1000 subdivs/size 0.01 for 800x600 pixel images.
If anything would work like I expect, than we could setup Vray in two user interface modi - advanced and standard. The standard would show a few low/medium/high settings only and materials with greyed out subdiv values.
You must test my settings on your scenes, please, please. I have tesed it at my last projects and wonder me how good it work. Render with my settings and than try to get the same quality with manual settings. Exterior can be a very little faster in manual mode, but it dosn’t matter, because exteriors are fast allways. So my experience.
My experience: my new universal settings are good like manual settings or better. This is my unbeliveable test result. I would recommend to shift this settings for one reason at the moment - I have a small problem with light blotches at large plane surface like walls and ceilings (increase IM samples at 150 helps, but it increase the render time). If Vlado could fine tune the IM process a little, we could render very high quality with my current settings without to increase the render time to much. At the moment the quality is high only. Sampling of large plane surfaces - sounds not difficult and should not increase the rendertime or?
Obviously I must do something wrong with Micha’s settings.
The first image is my original image.The second one is the same image but with a 400x400 rendering
The last image is with Micha’s settings
The rendering did not even start yet,it was at prepass 4
@RVallieres: Does it work now? If not, please send me the option export file at e-post a simulacrum de .
@ALTO: Caustic will be the next interesting experiment, but it could work like befor independent from the new workflow. But befor start with Caustics, I wait for response from Vlado.
I have emailed you the settings I found on chaos ng.
I redid the rendering with the file you linked on your first post(there is small differences between the file and the settings you wrote under)So I choose the one you wrote.For the same rendering my time is 4 minutes slower than what I get with my settings,with no amelioration,and it is not a progressive rendering as you wrote in fact I can’t see any differences in the process,from what i get earlier.
So I redid with the settings found on chaos,I stopped it after 32 minutes the rendering was fine,but I hat to guess what it would be because I can’t see any refinement step by step as you mentioned.
To make it short,I am not yet convinced,I really don’t see any advantages for this for me at least :? may be on an interior scene?
The basic idea is, that first raw full lighting is calculated by LC and than the QMC process start. If you use a single core engine, set bucket size same or bigger as image size. At dual core engines you must set the bucket size at half image size. The strong noisethreshold makes, that the QMC process render very long, but if you cancel the rendering, than you can see the current sampled image. This method is useful for test only, because the progressiv preview is not working (Vlado must make, that the buckets are updated every minute or so). I want to show with this experiment, that it is possible to render progessiv with QMC and faster as PPT.
(b) Adaptive IM - use the settings of my first post (Edit II). This method is not progressiv, but show, that one setup is useable for many situations and fast too. Let bucket size default or something small.
If both experiments are working fine, you can start to combine both. You use the setup of (b), but set the bucket size like at (a). Now, first LC is calculated, than IM and the final pass start. Progressiv rendering dosn’t show a progressiv preview now.
Your visopt looks ok. I’m not sure you need the default lights for your scene. I recommend to play with experiment (b) first, so set bucket size at 40x40 or something small. But general your setup should work. Cancel the render after the final calcualtion was working a while. If you stop during the IM pass, than you get the IM only. The method is not 100% progressiv, first the prepasses must be calculated and only the final pass is growing progressiv.
Being a newcomer to V-ray, I greatly appreciate to use predefined settings like these.
Compared to some other settings I found on this newsgroup, Micha’s are incredibly fast : 10 minutes compared to 7 hours, for comparable results.
Moreover, I definitely think there should be an option to switch the interface to a “Beginners mode”, where the user would choose only between a small set of pre-defined render profiles such as :
-Interior / Caustics (slow)
-Interior / No Caustics (fast)
-Exterior / Caustics (slow)
-Exterior / No Caustics (fast)
A simple slider called “Quality” LOWER<-- // -->HIGHER would allow the user to control the quality of the output very simply.
Now this may seem ridiculous to die-hard users, but I’m pretty sure this would please those of us who don’t give a damn about the “normal threshold of the irradiance map”, whatever that means…
:?
Personally, I would much more fancy a physical sky and a proper “sun” with geographic settings and all that.
So, I’ve been keeping an eye on this for a few days now and its a very intersting concept. At least my understanding of what your going for is some sort of ppt kind of thing but using LC, IM, or QMC. Maybe if you use qmc for both primary and secondary bounces you don’t have to worry about waiting for any precalculations, and you could literally kill the image whenever you want.
So here’s my suggested options settings
Both bounces= QMC
Adaptive amount=1
Noise threshold=0
Adaptive QMC min/max=1/50 or 1/100 whichever you prefer
Set buckets to fit resolution depending on # of processors
In the few quick tests I’ve done this works well with both caustics and dof. At this point I think you may have to set higher subdiv on dof as there is a bit of noise in the blurry parts of the image.
There are two main disadvantages to this method right now. First of all is the high memory usage. I’m not sure if there’s really a way around it right now, but maybe somebody (Vlado ) has some ideas. The other disadvantage is that the viewport doesn’t refresh, which makes it hard to determine whether the quality is sufficient at any given point. This could probably be resolved by retrieving the sample information from the buckets at a given time interval that could be set by the user (you can do it Vlado )
I think this is definitely a very interesting concept to make vray work in this way. I’m not sure exactly how useful this will be, but I definitely think that somebody will find the “set it and forget it” approach useful. I will post some images and visopts settings tommorrow.
Edit:
So here is the first image, which is all default settings with IR/qmc for bounces. The caustics are precalculated so they don’t play into the final render time.
This image is done with the progressive qmc settings above and also with the same precalculated caustics. I specifically stopped the image at almost the same time so that the quality of the images could be compared for the same amount of render time.
Just for comparison here is a PPT version. The qmc sampler settings are back to the default values. Again the caustics are precalculated and I stopped it at about the same time as the others
Very useful comparison.Seeing this,it reinforces my opinion,the first one is the best,and for me there is no real advantages in using the other method.As you mention I don’t know how useful it could be,but we never know.For now I will stick with my settings,this is what work best for me.
