mental ray render times 3ds max 2013 vs 2014

[tomaspayani]

Hi,

 

We have just updated to 2014 in our office and i have been playing around with the new unified/raytraced settings and to be honest i would expect the render times to have dropped in 2014 but instead im seeing quite a substantial increase compared to 2013.

 

I have used exactly the same scene and settings on both 2013 and 2014. In 2013 i used sampling of Min 1/4, Max 4 and in 2014 i used 0.5 quality 0,25 min and 4 max. and on a render that was 100x75 pixels 2013 came out at 8 mins 45s and 2014 at 13 minutes and 50 sec. Even if i dropped the quality to 0.25 which is the default i get times around 11m 10s.

That equates to increase in render times of 58% and 26% respectively compared to 2013, when rendering these small previews it doesnt affect me that much, but when i start doing the final renders which will be around 2000pixels this is going to ammount to several hours extra per frame.

 

Has anyone else experienced this? have i missed to tick a little box somewhere? Cant help but feeling a bit cheated with both the lack of new functions and rendering speeds in 2014, it was quite pricey to update.

[tomaspayani]

tried the "classic" sampling in 2014 with 1/4 min and 4 max, and got a render time of 9mins 30s, better but not good

[depictstudio]

Hi Tomas,

 

Originally I felt the same however after quite a bit of experimenting I found that 2014 is faster as you don't need to up the sampling as high with unified sampling as you would have to with the classic mode in 2013. For example I final render at 4-5k and can get good results with sampling of 0.35 (scene dependent) which ends up working out better and quicker than the classic setting of 1/16 we would have used previously in both quality and speed.

[blank...]

I have used exactly the same scene

 

 

Here's your problem, you can't use the same scene! Well, you can use the same scene, but you have to tweak your materials and lights for them to work properly with unified sampling.

I don't know how many times i posted this quote:

It's a shame there is no "how to unified" with max 2014. If you don't go out and look for yourself, you're probably not using it right. I've been using it for some time now, before it was exposed in max UI (with Thorsten script), and there is enough info on it out there if one wants it.

But, long story short: where ever you see a sample setting, set it's value to one. Glossy samples in materials, shadow samples in ligth, samples in ambient occlusion, etc... All to one. Unified takes care of the rest (lights, i.e. shadows could still need 2 or 4 in some cases).

That's why you can get away with crazy settings like 200 or 300 for max value.

 

http://elementalray.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/unified-sampling-visually-for-the-artist/ (it's got even better since this post, it samples more in light areas, less in dark)

http://www.infinity-vision.de/blog/render_optimizer

[tomaspayani]

ah, thanks for the replies

 

There should be a global setting for all samples.. its going to take a while to change them all, maybe should have waited til this project had finished before updating max then..

[blank...]

There should be a global setting for all samples.. its going to take a while to change them all, maybe should have waited til this project had finished before updating max then..

 

You can still use classic mode for this project. Or grab yourself shader utilities from here http://www.infinity-vision.de/ and change all samples at once (at least in materials).

Also, if you're serious about using mental ray, get yourself Render Optimizer (from the same page).