need help from vray for sketchup users on how to render faster

[kathleenfinley]

Hey guys

 

I know this is not the best place to post questions for vray but its the only place i dont need an account and is easy because its through my gmail.

 

I use sketchup pro 8 at my school where they also have a full version vray license.

 

sketchup has always been slow for me as i started to add 3 or more components from 3d warehouse. so for my current restaurant i was told to download it into a new sketchup file and then copy and paste it over to my project. This actually helped drastically increase the speed of working within the project and made it way more responsive.

 

My problem now is that vray is running insanely slow. I tryed rendering yesterday and left it up for 8 hours, didn't even get half way and it froze up.

 

There are only about 10 components in my model after checking because i guess copying and pasting them from a different filed saved a lot rather than downloading directly to my project. however there are about 25-30 different furniture and other elements downloaded from 3d warehouse used in my project, but again, not directly interted into my project.I have purged all unused materials.

 

I have added a material from a jpeg image for about 5 different things. when researching my problem i read that vray really doesnt respond well to jpeg images, and to change them to png's or tiffs and it runs a lot faster. Does anyone know anything about this? i changed 1 of my larger materials and no help,, but then realized there were 3 other materials i didnt change to tiffs and re apply material.

 

I kept all the default settings after a while of trying to get it to work but this doesn't help much at all either. with the default settings it still took over 8 hours and still ended up freezing.

 

i have about 10 omni lights but i have large wide span of windows and they arent rendering well anyway so i think i will just get rid of them if this will help increase the speed? because i already have good light...

 

i hid basically all groups/furniture not in my seen my view to try to speed up render time but no help.

 

Does anyone know if there are some settings on default that can be changed to make my render faster? Or any other ways i can speed up the time and keep it from freezing?

 

my computers at school arent very fast, they are very average pc processors, running windows 8 i believe. i just remembered we have one computer lap on the top floor that has newer mac computers running windows. i am going to try those computers this weekend and hopefully they are faster but i still feel like there is something im not doing right, maybe i have just copied and pasted too many warehouse downloads from unknown sources and maybe one of them had a bug or virus in them. But i mean the program runs ok just the vray that keeps crashing.

 

Please help with any ideas you can think of as to how to make this faster and not crash! I am not even worried about the quality at this point, just to create a decent finished render...thanks!

[anejo]

Could you post your vray settings. Can't really help unless we know this.

 

You could also go to youtube, Chaosgroup

[Dimitris Tolios]

It is hard to understand what "slow" is unless we know how complex the model is, how complex the materials are and how big the resolution you are trying to render to is.

 

I never had issues with JPEG textures...converting them to PNG or whatnot is a waste of time imho.

 

 

A prime concern with VRay for Sketchup is that it is a 32bit app - just like Sketchup.

Than means that with the WinOS it cannot address more than 3-3.5GB of Ram. If you try to render a high resolution image, you blow up the size of information needed to be temporarily stored, forcing VRay to approach its 3.5GB limit. Once this is surpassed, the process tree will crash. Period.

A big portion of the memory used, is not about the rendering process per se, but displaying the rendering process - that is the Frame Buffer.

If you are after a large scale rendering, consider outputting your render to V-Ray Raw image.

Vray Options > Output> check Vray Raw Image file under the settingsoutput. Leave Vray Frame buffer - VFB mode to Preview - for you to see a little thumbnail of the process.

Export the image as .exr, which can be directly opened with Photoshop afterwards for post processing.

In this fashion you can export large images without Vray crashing by running out of memory.

[Scott Schroeder]

Yeah, the whole jpeg conversion isn't something that our industry is concerned about. That's more for the real time game engine side. If you do see a time savings, it is measure in the blink of a eye. It's best to try to stay away from them if at all possible due to their lossy compression, but it won't cause your render times to spike.

 

It sounds like you have a whole lot of "other" models that more than likely have really high material settings. As a general rule, you shouldn't overly trust models you download to always have the best material settings. All too often someone cranks up a setting that will just kill your render time, like your glossy subdivs. The SketchUp Warehouse is pretty much a free for all, so I'd be willing to bet you either got a model that is overly complicated or has insane material settings (or both).

[Dimitris Tolios]

One thing that you have to know is that Sketchup (SU) does not purge the components and groups that have been created or imported to it after you delete the last instance of each. Your model is burdened by all the components you've test-downloaded from 3D Warehouse or those that you've edited down - say you've downloaded a whole kitchen scene and you've deleted all of those dozens of geometry groups keeping only an appliance or a glass out of them...well, the kitchen is still "inside" your model.

 

Make sure to download and install a "Purge All" ruby script. Either the "purgeall.rb" all the Cleanup3 - both of them easy to find in Sketchucation forums. Those can help you purge all the unused materials, layers, component definitions etc.