Huge render times

[joeddy]

Hi I am new to this forum and was hoping someone could help as I have been trying to understand this problem for a number of days.

 

I have what I would consider a relatively simple interior scene within 3d max but it is taking ages to render (mental ray), it was running for 17hrs the other day and only managed 50% render and that was with a saved FG file being used.

 

My desktop is under a year old, stats below:

HP Elite7500 series MT

Intel ® core ™ i7-3770 CPU @3.40 GHZ (8 CPU's in total)

RAM: 16GB

Graphics card: NVIDIA Quadro 4000

 

I'm using 3d max 2014 driver: nitrous (direct 3d 11.0 feature level 11 nvidia Quadro 4000

 

I have Norton internet security installed

 

The scene I am rendering contains:

160,023 polys (already reduced as much as possible)

9 lights (1 daylight system, 8 portals)

All materials are arch and design (removed all 3d max inbuilt materials)

 

It is an interior scene (single image) output size 2338x3311 with:

final gather set to medium

photons- 500 per sample, 2000 per light

Sample quality- 10

Raytrace- BSP2

 

I have run malwarebytes several times and norton to see if the computer has any issues but none found. When I run the render it uses all the CPU's usage and about 45% physical memory.

 

Please can someone advise me on what is going wrong, is it that my computer has reached its max capability and needs more memory?

 

I have produced scenes similar to this one and it never took this long, yeah it would take a couple of hours or over night but at this rate I won't be able to use my computer for a couple of days just to render 1 image. I have tried using the backburner to manage my renderings and although that worked fine, I don't have a network of computers to utilise so did not see how that would help decrease the render times.

 

Please any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks

Jo

[vincentg87]

Did you try rendering another scene in the same period? If it renders fine, that means there shouldn't be an issue with your hardware.

 

Try isolating the problem in your current file by:

1.) deleting all the lights objects and render.

2.) applying a plain material on all objects and render.

 

 

if either one of the steps show an increase in render time, that means the problem lies in one of the light objects, or material. I hope this would help

[joeddy]

thanks Vincent, it was due to some of the materials in the end managed to get the render down to much more reasonable time.