15+ Hour Renders (Max + Vray Renderer 1.5)

[noouch]

The poly count seems to be still within acceptable limits... I don't have time to play around with the scene right now, but looking at the settings, I noticed:

Your QMC image sampler is set to 4 subdivs max. Now it won't have a positive impact on your render times, but it will definitely give you more control if you set them to something improbably high like 100, and just control the antialiasing via the noise threshold. This doesn't always work to your advantage, but normally produces pretty good results. On the other hand, in the QMC sampler section, the noise threshold seems awfully low. Start with the default 0.01 and work your way down, I've hardly ever needed to go below 0.005, and 0.1 should be enough for decent-looking preview renders. Then set the adaptive amount to 1.0, and the minimum samples to 2 or something low like that.

Also check out the help pages here:
http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150SP1/
They have helped me understand the renderer far better than any tutorial has.

[Seraph135]

I took a look at your file and found several speed killers in there. First off, if your going to use the DMC anti aliasing then leave all your subdivs in your lights and textures at the default values of 8. The biggest speed killer in your scene is the global subdivs multiplier. You have it set to 16 which means ever single glossy reflection value was being mutiplied 16 times. So those few materials that had their subdivs at 50 were actually set to 800. Set the global subdivs back to 1. I turned off all the glossy interpolation. Just cause I don't like using it. I raised your noise threshold to .005. I raised your max AA samples to 16 (100 is overkill I think). Finally I changed the max reflection depth to 4 and max transparent levels to 4. At 640x480 I was getting almost perfectly clean renders at around 5min.

Tim J

[jlpeacock]

I took a look at your file and found several speed killers in there. First off, if your going to use the DMC anti aliasing then leave all your subdivs in your lights and textures at the default values of 8. The biggest speed killer in your scene is the global subdivs multiplier. You have it set to 16 which means ever single glossy reflection value was being mutiplied 16 times. So those few materials that had their subdivs at 50 were actually set to 800. Set the global subdivs back to 1. I turned off all the glossy interpolation. Just cause I don't like using it. I raised your noise threshold to .005. I raised your max AA samples to 16 (100 is overkill I think). Finally I changed the max reflection depth to 4 and max transparent levels to 4. At 640x480 I was getting almost perfectly clean renders at around 5min.

Tim J
Your a saint. Can't thank you enough!

Thanks for the replies guys. Really appreciate it.
Sorry it's taken so long to get back to you. I've had busy few days..

Cheers
Jason

[jlpeacock]

Well I played around with the settings for quite sometime now and managed to get everything but the glass to look how I wanted within a reasonable render time.

http://img73.imageshack.us/img73/3950/76tn7.th.jpg (http://img73.imageshack.us/my.php?image=76tn7.jpg)

I'm currently rendering out my image with the global multiplier set to 8 as I've found its the only thing that works, but unfortunately throws my render times up somewhat.

How can I improve the quality of the glass without effecting the other elements?

Ive tried:
1.setting the glass refract/reflect subdiv to a value of 300 going on the principle that the global sub div would have multiplied this value
2.enabling interpolation and playing around with those settings.
3.increasing the number of shadow subdiv the light has
4.increasing light cache to a value of say 2500
5.changing the glass so that it is simply plain and not frosted etched glass
6.setting the sampler noise threshold down to 0.001
7.switching the filter modes mitchell.. area.. etc
8.setting the adapive subdiv min 8 max 8
9.setting the samber min samples to 16.. 32

giving me a headache!

I'm using low irradi preset as I've notice no boost in quality/realism using the med/high..

[edit]
1024x576 final render
Having found that higher settings seem to be eating up my memory I've given up and think I'll have to settle with this:

Image Sampler: Adaptive Sub, Area Filter, Size 1.5
Irradiance Map: Low, HSph Sub 50, Interp 35
Light Cache Sub div 1000, Sample Size 0.02
rQMC Sample: Adaptive 0.85, Noise threshold 0.002, Min Samples 8, Global 1.
Adaptive Sub Div Min 4 / Max 4

http://img227.imageshack.us/img227/9012/50000if9.th.jpg (http://img227.imageshack.us/my.php?image=50000if9.jpg)

May try reverting back to Mental Ray to see what kind of quality I get, but don't think I can face going through and setting all the materials up.

[noouch]

Try setting the minimum value of the Adaptive Subdivision lower, 1 or 0 for example. By setting both values to 4, you're effectively doing the equivalent of what the Fixed sampler does: sampling the same number of times for every pixel regardless of difference to the neighboring samples. And with 4 subdivs, your render will be slow no matter what you do.

Your GI settings look like they're fine, or at least not performing as a bottleneck.

Once you've lowered the antialiasing subdivs, try cutting the Clr Thresh value in half, there should be a noticeable improvement.

No matter what you do though, the glossy refractions are probably going to be slow. You can make it a little bit faster by cranking down the max. refraction depth, but I'm not sure how much good that will do your scene. Could you show the glass material as it is now?

[jlpeacock]

It would appear that following my decision to reset all render settings I had forgotten to uncheck the default lights in the global settings, which seemed to be at the route of a number of quality issues.

Glass material remains as it was in my initial post, which is part of a vRayBlend material to create a tinted/etched signature on the glass surface. The second glass material used to create the etched material is the same glass material with a grey fog colour and a 0.9 gloss applied.

http://forums.3dtotal.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=113020&stc=1&d=1207239182

[jlpeacock]

Thank you for your help guys. Think I managed to crack the issues I was having, which were a combination of the "reflect on back side" within the glass material. I'm not too sure about the render settings as I just reverted back to the originally uploaded scene, which I luckily still had access to.

I've a few things to tweak, but these are how the final renders are going to be looking like. I decided to render without the etched glass material for these renders, but I'm currently in the process of rendering the etched version as we speak.

http://img501.imageshack.us/img501/4236/camera10000zy6.th.jpg (http://img501.imageshack.us/my.php?image=camera10000zy6.jpg)

http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/396/camera30000sp7.th.jpg (http://img225.imageshack.us/my.php?image=camera30000sp7.jpg)

http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/145/camera40000jf3.th.jpg (http://img225.imageshack.us/my.php?image=camera40000jf3.jpg)

http://img227.imageshack.us/img227/5479/camera60000cu4.th.jpg (http://img227.imageshack.us/my.php?image=camera60000cu4.jpg)

I don't know if I'd mentioned before, but these were for a uni project. This is my first interior scene.. Well first big MAX project come to think of it.

[Ransom]

I am really impressed. What uni? And is every one that good at rendering, my experience has been focused on modeling rather than textures/ lighting.

congrats on the 'A'

[jlpeacock]

I am really impressed. What uni? And is every one that good at rendering, my experience has been focused on modeling rather than textures/ lighting.

congrats on the 'A'

I'm glad you liked it. Still lots to change..

Brunel University in West London http://www.brunel.ac.uk/
My degree is in Multimedia Technology and Design (I'm due to graduate this year.. final exam next week!)

Level Three Modules
- Multimedia Production Management

- 3D Graphics, Virtual Reality and Animation

- Emergent Multimedia Technologies

- Multimedia Broadcasting



Level Two Modules
- Design Practice

- Web Application

- Communication

- Imaging

- Video & Sound

- Interaction



Level One Modules
- Internet Technologies and Website Design

- Systems Thinking and Computing

- Multimedia Studio

- Multimedia Design


So as you can see, we don't really focus on 3D, its covers a bit of everything.

Some other people's attempts are :
(we had the choice of an animation or a photo realistic scene)

Rob
http://rob-mcc.com/renders/1.png
http://rob-mcc.com/renders/3.png
http://rob-mcc.com/render.png
http://rob-mcc.com/renders/4.png

Jorge
http://www.cubed3.com/media/2008/April/jb/artifact_1024x768.jpg

Liz
http://www.lizsandon.com/3d-wip/mib-1.jpg
http://www.lizsandon.com/3d-wip/mib-2.jpg
http://www.lizsandon.com/3d-wip/mib-3.jpg

Ajay
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=QrW_-Zu4FBA

Rob S
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=siXANsaSTVU

[Ransom]

hmm seems really similar to my program. Although, your program seems to be a little more comercail based rather than contemporary art. Really good work in general though.

[jlpeacock]

I did something entirely different for my final year project:
http://jlponline.wordpress.com/2008/03/12/music-video-showcase/

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