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View Full Version : Mental Ray Soft Shadows But Insane Render Times. Any Help?

drewantarctic
09-18-2006, 10:39 PM
So I am trying to do this render with mental ray and it seems when i soften my shadows it takes more than twice the amount of the original time it took than with hard shadows. I am using a point light and sub surface scattering. I upped the light radius and shadow rays to get that nice soft shadow but the render times are incresed from 2.5 minutes to about 7 minutes. I'm not really certain if there is a fix or a cheat to get around this, but if there were, I would appreciate hearing about it. In fact it could save my life. hehe. So let me know all of you experts out there!
endorph1n
09-18-2006, 11:08 PM
Soft shadows will make ur rendertimes spike... unfortuneley, if its possible using a spotlight instead of a pointlight could help you out.. but ofcourse theres situation where you need a point light
ftaswin
09-19-2006, 12:23 AM
Do not crank up samples as high as you want to achieve soft shadow. I usually up it from 3 3 to 6 6 and 9 9 see which one gives decent quality.

Have you tried ctrl_occlusion shader? A lot of people (including me) use it simply to get high quality soft shadow in fast render time.

Ft
Chadrik
09-25-2006, 10:48 PM
tweaking your bsp can often bring those times way down.
CaptainObvious
09-26-2006, 11:15 AM
An area light is in a sense a whole lot of point lights, so it will always take longer to render. There is no way around this, unfortunately. As ftaswin says: turn down the number of samples to reduce the render time.
drewantarctic
09-27-2006, 11:14 PM
i was working in maya 7.0 with a past version of mental ray. i upgraded to 8.0 and my render times went from 20 minutes to 2...WTF! I am a lot better off now...
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