Too poor rendering speed

[Jon Berntsen]

Hi! I know this is quite a big topic, but currently we're having issues with rendering time for animations.

 

Other people on the house are using Infraworks to plan projects, and are now rendering nice 30 sec animations in a matter of a couple minutes. MINUTES! On the workstation! In 1920! We're using 1 week for the same task with vray, at least, with a small renderfarm. I understand the raytracing and GI, but there should be some kind of trick/option to make it happen as fast with vray. But no, currently it doesn't seem so. Result is that we're loosing projects to people rendering animations with Infraworks, as it seems well sufficient for the clients. I have to admit, that for animations, it's looking pretty neat. And they even have car tracking in that program now.

 

I'm willing to make it look unrealistic, in terms of turning GI off. But even with GI off and VERY VERY low IM/LC, render times are a few days for the specific shot, and with too much noise. This is not okay. With nice settings BF/LC in HD, 700 frames are even estimated to run for a couple of weeks on the farm.

 

Why the hell can Infraworks render so fast? We're loosing clients on this. Would we need to change software to be able to compete?

Edited March 15, 2018 by chroma

[Stephen Thomas]

I would imagine that Infraworks isn't using any GI which would account for the speed. To replicate this in Vray you could try using a simple VrayAmbientLight plus direct/sun setup. No dome light or environment light and GI turned off. You could always render an AO pass as well to increase realism with some contact shadows.

[Jon Berntsen]

I would imagine that Infraworks isn't using any GI which would account for the speed. To replicate this in Vray you could try using a simple VrayAmbientLight plus direct/sun setup. No dome light or environment light and GI turned off. You could always render an AO pass as well to increase realism with some contact shadows.

 

I did try sky / sun as alternative to hdri, but not VrayAmbientLight - however with GI off, and still had rendering turnaround at 30 hours for what Infraworks does in 3 minutes. Would replacing the sky with VrayAmbientLight make such an impact? Not to be negative, but I don't think so?

[Jon Berntsen]

Thanks for the idea, though!

[James Vella]

I would imagine that Infraworks isn't using any GI which would account for the speed. To replicate this in Vray you could try using a simple VrayAmbientLight plus direct/sun setup. No dome light or environment light and GI turned off. You could always render an AO pass as well to increase realism with some contact shadows.

 

I have done this for past tv commercials and it is indeed super fast and allows you to have animated objects in scene without having to precalc any light cache.

 

Put the ao pass into the ambient light and adjust, you will be surprised at the results you get.

 

As for 700frames at HD you should be able to adjust your render settings to look clean and render this over night on 2 decent machines, usually i would expect 300 frames per 24hours @ 1920res for an outdoor scene, a lot less frames for an interior which requires more gi bounces - which is where the ambient light trick comes in handy.

 

Alternatively, If its just a walk through with nothing moving you could easily do this by saving out the caches prior to rendering the final animation

Edited March 15, 2018 by redvella

[Stephen Thomas]

I did try sky / sun as alternative to hdri, but not VrayAmbientLight - however with GI off, and still had rendering turnaround at 30 hours for what Infraworks does in 3 minutes. Would replacing the sky with VrayAmbientLight make such an impact? Not to be negative, but I don't think so?

 

As far as I know it simply applies a base luminance to all textures so there is no raycasting going on at all, that should give you a fair increase over Vray sky. Although adding the dirt texture might slow things down again.

Edited March 15, 2018 by stef.thomas

[Francisco Penaloza]

Well, here is the thing, Infraworks uses another method to 'Pretend GI' if any and illumination in general, for you to compete with that turnaround, you should be thinking Lumion or twinmotion. Those engines are using similar tricks to output images.

 

Now if you are stubborn and want to keep trying with VRay you could try an old trick that I used. I think I already posted this in this website a long time ago but is similar to what was suggested here.

 

Place a VRay sun/sky combo, then turn off GI, place a V-Ray ambient light and place a Dirt shader on the lightmap.

 

Drag your dirt shader to the material editor and increase the radius, about 2 Ft here in the USA. Then click the box of environment occlusion, what this will do is use the 3DMax environment to tint your ambient light, in this case, it will be your VRay sky if you place an HDRI it will take the colors from there.

 

Then be sure to also check 'work with transparency' otherwise your glass will block or render wrong.

 

Then you need to adjust the lightmap intensity in the ambient light.

 

So what I used to do was to put my sun/sky and do a quick render with GI, then set up this new lighting rig and do test rendering adjusting the lightmap intensity until I got the same brightness and colors than typical Gi method. When all is done, voila you have something very similar to what Lumion/twinmotion gives you, without GI.

 

This should render a lot faster than using VRay dome light, also less noise. This is the fastest that I got VRay to render other than manually placing omni and spots lights all around the scene and main objects (old school light rig)

 

Now, even tho this give's you very quick rendering it also create that effect you'll see in any 'game engine renderings' than interiors will be brighter than what they should, and this is obvious because ambient light doesn't get block by geometry so, it is what its name says, ambient lighting.

but depending on your scene, this won't be a problem.

If this really bothers you, you can place omni lights inside the building but with a negative value ( extra tip free of charge

 

Otherwise, maybe you should look into Lumion or twinmotion and use that software with those 'cheap clients'

 

 

Best luck.