Rendering a very large scene with lots of glass & interior whats the best approach???

[franziska]

Hi everybody,

 

I am currently working on a demo image with a very large building and have trouble with rendering it without spending ages.

It's doing it, but its a big scene and resolution is high with about 5000dpi.

The file is running into the Gigs's by now, as it has an aweful lot of detail in it & I have already cut it down considerably. Here some details.

Maybe someone can shed some light on how they approach this typically. Many thanks for your suggestions!

 

The details:

 

 

• Building is about 20 stories high
  
• Round shape
  
• Lots of glass outside walls therefore the need to show lots of interior stuff as well
  
• Full interior (all Vray proxies) with over hundered desks monitors and the likes visible
  
• Lots of outside frames of old cast Iron lattice structure type struts with lots of details (I built them already as simplified boxes by now with transparency mapped details instead of fully modelled)
  
• 15trees (all Vray proxies)
  
• Surrounding city & terrain (simplified boxes via Openstreetmap model)
  
• Many complex reflections in the glass facade from struts, trees....
  
• Grass surrounding
  
• Carpark with about 30cars visible
  
• I've already hidden (&switched off) all strip desk lights and stopped dreaming of nighttime illumination before post production even though I'd love to do it in arendering
  
• I did hide anything not visible in the model and than even deleted that geometry from the model.
  
• Purged unused materials.
  
• For testing I use the Vray exterior scene medium quality presets, but added a vray sun and GI lighting from an image.
  Normally I'd use ligh cache instead of Brute force, but figuered the presets (which suggestBF) might be more pretuned for performance.
  
• Caustics witched off
  
• Prepass reduced to 1 (low res test image came out fine)
  
• Physical camera
  
• Dynamic memory limit 22000
  

 

 

I'm running on a HP Z800 workstation (Two Xeon X5650 6x2,66GHz) with 24GB Ram & a Quadro5000 graphics card. Software is Vray 2 for Rhino.

I did notice that at first both CPU's run 100% than RAM gets used up fully and CPU performance drops eventually to 10-20%.

Guess its reading from cache than as the SSD is working near 100%.

Maybe its time to get more RAM?

64GB Win with distributed rendering switched on (I can see all my 24sheep (=kernels) on their meadow (=renderscreen) but they graze really slow ;-)

 

So, looking forward to your suggestions.

 

 

Thanks for your thoughts!!

While I appreciate suggestions how to speed up my specific process very much, I am primarely after understanding how anyone doing such scenes regularly would approach this from a workflow perspective.

 

Franziska