High Render Times - Vray Exterior

[gputhige]

Hi Guys

need some urgent help on this. I have this exterior scene with lots of trees and bushes and also forest pack pro presets (like garden area etc). All the trees are proxies and I have an animation of about 1500 frames to be completed urgently.

 

I have taken out the maps for IR and LC and have used these maps to render the animation. However each frame is taking about 1 hr and 10 mins (appx) at a 960x540 resolution. This is despite having rendered the IR and LC maps.

 

Any suggestions to reduce the time drastically? I have a i7 4 core system with 8gb ram. Even if I use all my 4 systems, I will not be able to complete this in a month. My customer needs this pronto.

 

A test render is enclosed. However, there are lots more trees in the background not visible to camera (in this frame)

 

Will be posting the render settings separately.

 

Any suggestions welcome.

 

3DS Max 2010/vray 2.0/plugins

 

Gputhige

[Francisco Penaloza]

if your GI is already saved, it should not take this long, maybe your antialising is to high?

are you using Adamptive DMC? also you don't need a too sharp filter for animation a simple area 1.5 will do fine for animations.

Also your dynamic memory may need to be adjusted depending of how much RAM you have in your workstations and render node, I'll recommend to about 3/4 of your total memory other than that.

[Tommy L]

I think your scene maxing out the ram then it has to work out of your HD which is very slow. When it renders, check the RAM usage, if its over your 8G then this is the case for sure. 8G is not really enough for this kind of scene. Buy more ram may be the simple answer.

[Scott Schroeder]

Some solutions have already been mentioned; http://forums.cgarchitect.com/74223-exterior-animation-render-hi-render-times-need-help.html

 

Still waiting on them settings.....

[Corey Beaulieu]

I think that Forest Pack and a bunch of trees along with any decent render settings is going to equal an hour a fram under you machine's conditions. Nothing seems out of whack to me.

 

I will say, in your render, it looks like you have some sort of camera effect like motion blur or DOF or both going. That is definitely going to add time to the render. Do that stuff in post with a Velocity pass and a Zdepth.

[sergiocaparelli]

looking at the sample image, it definitely shoudn´t be taking that long for a single frame. Reflections and refractions are slow, but the scene doesn´t seem heavy on that field.

Like they said above, maybe its the dinamic memory limit, you can change it on the render setup. (or in the worst scenario you are running out of physical RAM).

[peterletten]

I've rendered a LOT of scenes with similar levels of landscaping:

http://vimeo.com/peterletten/showreel2

password cgarch

 

I'd be happy with around 30 mins for a shot with that amount of planting and resolution.

 

Try isolate whats taking so long. If you do a grey override does it render pretty quickly? Then its your materials... you can get away with turning off reflection/refraction on non-hero plants and trees. The other key setting will be your noise DMC noise, before rendering a scene like this I'll render 5 frames of the noisiest region - from your image attached possible the high detail grass in the shade of the tree - and then tweak the settings until you get a decent compromise between lack of noise and render times.

 

As a start for this scene I would say min subdivs 1, max subdivs 16. DMC Sampler .009..... and the drop it if you're still getting noise, may need to go down to 0.006.

Reflection and refraction of trees and plants will be massive, as will bitmaps in the opacity slots of leaves. Geomoetry will render faster in these cases.

 

Like I said, I doubt you'd be able to get it much below 30 mins and still have decent quality - which sounds like still is too long for your client. You can always try an online render solution like Rebus or Foxx? I recently used Rebus and it worked great.

[gputhige]

Hi All

thanks for the very helpful inputs provided above. Will be trying these and revert back if any improvement. I have now checked the displacement off (tested a few screens if its making a diff - no its not) and the render time dropped to about 40-45mins. Below is the render setup I have used

 

[gputhige]

Hi Guys

 

Thanks for all the tips provided and I am glad that I have now been able to isolate the issue. Its the Forest Pack Pro trees in the background which was the issue. I have now changed these from 3D Trees to 2D Trees and and am rendering as a seperate pass. With this one change, the render time dropped to 15 mins (8 mins for the render pass without the BG trees and 7 mins for the BG trees).

 

These render times are something I can defenitely live with and am now processing these on all the systems and should have the animation ready by end of this week.

 

Phew!! Major relief...

 

 

Regards,

 

GP