Church: Rows of Chairs slowing down render!

#1

Hey there!

I’m wondering if anyone has a tip on how to speed up a render like this:

Larger View

All those rows of chairs adds an extra 3 minutes of rendering time (without them it takes 1 minute). Other than hiding the chairs, because I need them in there, is there some settings I can reduce the amount of indirect illumination calculations going on?

Here are my settings:

Larger View

Cheers!
Wesley

#2

I have yet to mess with VRay…

Have you tried using Maya Instances and Mental Ray Approximation? I’m sure something as badass as VRAY should have something just as powerful.

Possibly rendering in layers and comping in the interior?

#3

Hey Reed5point0,

Thanks for the reply! I haven’t tried Maya instances with the chairs. Is that duplicating the chairs as ‘instances’?

I haven’t heard of mental ray approximation… I’ll take a look into that!

I was thinking of doing layers, but I’m not too sure how well that would work with vray sun/sky and indirect lighting.

I was initially lighting this with mental ray, then I switched to vray and found it much more intuitive to set up a simple realistic render.

#4

Check out this link as well for a more in depth talk, it might be right up your alley.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=804892&highlight=tree

#5

Hey cool,

Thanks for the link! I’ll see if I can find a parallel to Vray on Maya.

Cheers!
Wesley

#6

Have you considered baking it to lightmaps?

Considering the distance/low detail, you could use small maps and then your render time would only be seconds per frame for the camera move.

#7

Hi LowJack,

Thanks for the reply! I thought about that, but wasn’t too sure if Vray had the capabilities. I remember when I was doing some mentalRay rendering there was a way to bake out lightmaps for GI. But I couldn’t find out the settings in Vray. Need to take a second look!

Cheers!
Wesley

#8

When duplicating objects be sure to use Duplicate Special and select “instances”

Or use Vray proxies. But this is mainly a memory optimization unless your memory is chugging along.

#9

Thanks Bitter, thats good to know! I think my memory usage is fine, Maya only uses 4gb out of my 16gb anyways. Only issue is that its very CPU heavy.

 If you're curious how it turned out, check out the raw cut of the shots:

http://vimeo.com/30121211

 Thanks for the help everyone!
#10

If you have small sections with high detail it is often good to lower the “render region devision” from 64 to 32.
Them more cores can calculate that region at the same time.

#11

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