Joseph Petrino

I just stumbled across this post so sorry if I'm coming in late. I currently use Blender & Cycles for Arch Viz after using Max & Vray for many years. I will retire soon and I just don't want to pay for Autodesk anymore. Change is good. I am convinced that Blender works just as well as Max. The interface is weird, but if you go with it very easy to use with some clever tools. The Blender community is young and energetic just like the Max community used to be. The problem is Cycles not Blender. Cycles is painfully slow even with all the speed-up ideas people have. GPU is much faster but Vray still kicks Cycles butt any day of the week. Cycles is very easy to use and looks wonderful. The good news is that embree is on the way for Cycles. This might change the balance. I made the switch. No going back. Hope this helps.

You have to click "track mouse while rendering" button on the top right of the frame buffer.

There is a lot of varying opinions from knowledgeable people so I'm reluctant to suggest anything.... But, I get that kind of noise when my lightcache settings are too low.

Try Customize / Preferences / General / spinner precision make sure it's a reasonable number.

Happy stories? None. But I'm still alive and I think I hear a heartbeat in the economy.

I'm doing that right now also. I'm not including any images, only brief text and a link. It's to soon to know how effective it is. Last year I sent out postcards and got a few jobs that way. I plan to go back to that eventually.

The renderings are great to be sure, but the lighting is awesome. Can you say a few words about the light setup?

Uncheck "affect background" while you troubleshoot the problem.

That usually comes from Lightcache settings that are too low. Are all materials Vray materials? It doesn't look like it.

2-Sided materials works well enough.

turning up the "secondary rays bias" a little will fix that.

Your irradience map setting is "low". Low means blotchy renders and fast render times. edit: Your lightcache setting is also very low.

Videep The noise threshold comment was regarding long render times. In my experience .001 increases render times a lot and adds very little to the render.

I always check "none" in the bitmap filtering. Diffuse and opacity. Same as blur to 0 (as suggested before) I think.

Your long render times are coming from your "Noise Threshold" setting of .001. Setting it to .01 (the default) works great with a "high" irrandiance map. I agree about light subdivisions set to 16. If they are vray lights try checking "store with irrandiance map" I get much cleaner renders with that. Good work by the way. ps At final render I also change the global subdivs multiplier to 2, for a really clean render.