Rendering multiple lights

[northern monkey]

Hi there

 

I have a major headache at the moment. I have a major contract on the go at the moment and have been requested to do a lighting analysis for a supermarket. We modelled and set the scene up, created the lighting rig including ies files and populated the shelves using proxied elements. In total the scene was 3 million polys and 800 lights. Now i have never done a scene like this before and anticipated the scene would take a while to render due to the number of lights but.......... i'm stripping out a 3000x1500 image in 10 300x1500 strips, so far 6 strips have taken 74hrs to drop on an i7 8gig machine. Is this expected?!! Or am I missing something? I've attached screen shots of my render settings (not at all high & fg map pre calculated)... any suggestions would be more than welcome!

 

Thanks in advance

 

Chris

 

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Edited June 13, 2011 by northern monkey

[Justin Hunt]

It is highly recommended to set far attenuation on the lights which will allow you to lower the shadow samples as well.

 

Do you really need all 800 lights?

 

jhv

[northern monkey]

Cheers for that, will have a look at the attenuation, will also see if i can get rid of a few lights, but will only be able to loose 100 at a guess, as they're florescent light strips that span in strings across the store. If I halve the number of lights and double the intensity of the remainder will that create the same effect? Am used external visuals with one big light!!!

 

Thanks for your help

[SgWRX]

i think halving the lights and increasing intensity might work. for me, instead of modeling 1 fixture with 4 light bulbs in it, i'll only put 1 light bulb and increase the intensity for say a 2ftx4ft fixture.

[northern monkey]

Cheers for all your input. I've stripped out half the lights, so I've got 1 light across two fixtures, added far attenuation, and increased the intensity of the remaining lights and......... the render is dropping at a couple of hours per strip! Which is a result, so thanks again and will know for next time!