Settings Overkill???

[heni30]

I was playing around with the Aleso3D dining room tutorial and it is very slow to render.

 

Can some of these settings be lowered to get the same result?

 

 

 

Here is the link to his video: http://www.aleso3d.com/blog/3ds-max-v-ray-making-of-black-white-dinning-room/

Edited April 21, 2014 by heni30

[Francisco Penaloza]

Sure they can be optimized,

But Mr Aleso did explain why is he using those setting? maybe in his machine this render fine or his production time is more relaxed than yours, I know some people that can live with a 48 hours render, for me that's just unimaginable.

From my workflow I would be using DMC in the sampler/Aitialising, no fixed, why? well VRay help can give you lost of answers but basically, Adaptive DMC as it name says it is adaptive so it won't use all the time the maximum values, it will sample and see what to use, trying always to optimist for speed.

Second if I am rendering the image at my standard size( 3000 pix or 4000 or even 5000) I don't need Antialising filter, if sharpening is need it I can do that in post but of course YMWV

Detail enhancement slow downs things quite bit, even more if you combine it with Fixed sampler. Now if you really want those small details your better using Brute force as first bounce, if you know your craft you can even make it render faster than Irradiance a high values.

 

DMC sampler with minimum to 30 and global set to 2 for some people may seems to much, for other to little, for me is a "lazy" way to be sure you won't have sploches in your GI. If you have time to render, it does not matter, if you are in a rush this is not recommended.

 

Other than that, you can optimize per materials and lights too but it seems like the original owner of this leave everything at default and trust the samples to the DMC sampler, this is ok, unless he already used a materials with 128 sample and then mutiply that times 2 with the DMC sampler, then you are exaggerating your setting for sure. Hard to tell without reviewing the whole thing.

[RyderSK]

It's extremely odd setup, but I don't think he used such in later scenes...I only skimmed through on his website, I never had any myself.

 

By the way, I do agree with what Francisco above said.

 

I will continue some exaplanation of multiple oddities:

 

Fixed: It's rare that it would come ever handy nowadays, and if so, it would be in situations outside of Archviz's scope. It's sure way to get guaranteed result, and also long render time. Adaptive DMC is the way to go.

 

It's ok to use high HSPH subdivds for IR in case of complicated interiors, IR is shitty algorithm to deal with complicated GI by itself, but high interpolation samples will blur anything to such degree that nothing will be there. I see this is later adjusted by DetailEnhancement (local first bounce brute force), but by doing so, it's not necessary to keep HSPH so high.

 

It's never good idea to use Ambient Occlusion directly in Archviz since 2005+, (only as mask for advanced features, as dirt, reflection occlusion, etc...) but doing the combination of AO + DE is arbitrary, since DE will give the proper detail in tiny crevices and features ommited by interpolated IR mess, so AO will only overlap it, and provide ugly visual bonus.

 

DetailEnhancement radius 60 is on the higher side, it means quite much of your scene is computed by it, not only tiny details.

 

LightCache you circled quite few things. The number of passes doesn't matter, it should correspond to the number of logical cores of your computer (in his case, i7e, i.e 3930k for example, with 12 threads). Outside of it, it doesn't affect performance.

 

Pre-filter doesn't do much for visual result usually, but it doesn't affect performance much either, this process takes seconds, might as well keep the subdivs to 99 or whatever if you decide to use it. It will just blur the LC. 2000 at 0.01 is quite few samples, so it might not be noticeable at all.

Adaptive Tracing and subsequent option "Use paths only" is NEVER good idea to check. It does not provide visually better result, albeit slightly physically more correct, but at scale that's not noticeable at all, not in this case. It might be worth to experiment with it if you decide to go with LC+LC set in "path-tracing mode", but that's just another useless feature in Vray for most part.

 

Min. samples just force the DMC simpler to use that amount no matter what for any glossy effect, its threshold it won't go bellow. The number depend on strategy you rely to render your scene, it can stay at 8 if you prefer more "universal" approach or it can go as high as 256, it doesn't matter.

 

Global subdivs doesn't mean much without seeing how his material and light are setup (they could be at default 8, or as high as 32-64 each depending on approach chosen). So it could be little or unnecessary higher than 1. Really depends on strategy, there are quite few. Setting it to 0 would disregard all subdivs in "universal" approach.

 

 

So all in, all out, yes, it can be optimized quite much. And maybe completely different, more regular strategy should be used. For starter, even simple Universal should work well.

[heni30]

Thanks for the detailed explanations! In your bedroom scene (with the world's most advanced 3d comforter blanket) you said your render time was 9 hours for a 3000px still.

 

Is that typical for your renders? (like the Paris apartment) What part of the settings consumed the most time?

 

Do you think your bedroom settings could have been optimized for a shorter render time?

Edited April 21, 2014 by heni30

[RyderSK]

I have to say I didn't know much about Vray settings at that time at all, and just went by SolidRocks preset :- ) Zero shame. Worked completely fine for me.

Yes I do use quite high render times, doesn't mean they are necessity :- ) After all, that is time for the stills, the animation rendered on average only 20-30 minutes for 1920x1080px frame on either single i7 2600k or 3930k ! With some noise, which had to be hidden by post DoF effect, but, otherwise, completely usable quality. Stills just rendered over-night, so 9 hours is about fine then.

 

Rendering is about compromise (unless you use the strictest path-tracer possible, like iRay or Maxwell), you swap technical quality (noise and antialiasing) for render time. After certain threshold, the quality improvements are very small, and you hit diminishing returns, where you start to multiply your time with only slight improvement. Up to everyone to decide where to place that threshold :- )

 

I do use humungous levels of optimization only for animations now, where every shaved second means a lot of time and money. But for stills, I simply compensated with sheer power. It's not worth fiddling with settings and test renders forever.

[Zdravko Barisic]

^

What did I find, when I got some scene where SolidRock was used, is that SolidRock use some really weird settings, especially for Iradiance Map, which works incredible awesome.

 

@George

The main wrong stuff is FIXED IMAGE SAMPLER set to SEVEN, thats insane, put it to 1/100, and you'll get it nice and more more faster.

[benjaminbogaert]

I really don't understand Solidrocks render settings, I use it mostly for test renders, because I can set it at draft and preview, etc it saves time. But I recently started looking at those optimize vray render settings using sample rate. When I look at the sample rate of Solid rocks its all red, from my understanding, it shows that it's actually oversampling my image which in turn would INCREASE render times, yet it doesn't; strange strange stranger.

 

It's funny how everyone follows the same path in terms of learning the art of archviz. I used to wonder the internet looking for the best AA filter for that particular scene, that's the time I used Alleso's tutorial's, then I went to Viscobel ( still do ) and now I remove AA because you really don't need it.

[RyderSK]

Grant's approach is not the end of all, approaches taken to sample Archviz, I would even argue, it's not ideal for Archviz ;- ). Regular scene with lot of hi-res noisy textures, just should be red in that sampler.

 

Filter =/= AA, it's only image filter. It's optional, and advisable to even keep off for further post-production. But it doesn't do any impact people used to think it does.

 

Now, there is lot of interesting stuff shown by Grant, I am btw subscribber as well, but....it seems it spawned lot of absolutely confused people who can't think for themselves. Just look at ChaosForum....every single thread is Vlado being sent scenes "with horrible render times" by users who simply blindly followed the "Sampler rate pass strategy". Vlado sets it to default Universal (which isn't fast at all) and....voala...like 10times faster times than the users get.

 

Imho, if someone already doesn't understand the Vray's complicated methology deeply, they shouldn't even bother incorporating these tweaking strategies, which are valid...but it's not universal answer to everything.

 

People don't follow the same paths. Some(most) people only "follow", and that's the problem with everything and everywhere in this world.

[Francisco Penaloza]

The deal with SolidRock it is a software that the developer wants to sells, so his only way to protect himself is find the crazy setup to make VRay render the way he want without being copied for some one else, so he hide his technique with those crazy values, that at first view, they just look confusing, but all together they work.

That's the Magic of V Ray, it is so flexible that you can approach different task in many ways.

Now the main issue that I see is, since VRay became popular, and since the software is good, by default you can get good images, so most of the people think that with one magic number you can solve all your scenes. Comets like, "You should always use lanczos" or just set the DMC to 1/100 or always use Irradiance-Light cache. or Rehinard is God.

If you are rendering always the same scene, with not tight dead line, all these setting will be fine, that's why you see always nice render in Evermotion website, for instance, always the same "loft" always the same "simple interior' "modern House" House in the forest" and so on.

 

When you need to do some special setup or you are in time crunch and your client want more and more changes or the architect believe that even a building underwater should reflect only the sky, then is when a real understanding of the software and many other techniques are need it, all those "magic numbers" or Universal settings fail.

 

Those tutorial like the one posted here, are a good for what they are, learn someone else approach, but they should be taken with a pint of salt, because it is not the only way, questions like the one George is doing are great, can this be done quicker? can this looks better?