Advice needed: Cloud of plastic objects

[nathanpeucker]

Hi there,

 

I am looking to render a sculptural form, with tens of thousands of plastic bottles. I'm using V-Ray Next on Rhino. I can get an individual bottle to render correctly, but when rendering them together I end up with a big glittery blob. With no means of identifying what the constituent objects are.

 

So I have two questions:

A) If you guys were to approach this, what material and render settings might you use? I'm not concerned with realism per se, more the illustration of intent. And;

B) Aside from using proxy objects, any advice on making the scene more economic?

 

Thanks

[Nicolai Bongard]

Pretty hard to tell what the problem might be without render and material settings, or even the test renders to see whats going on. If you have "tens of thousands" transparent/translucent objects on top of eachother it is going to take a pretty long time to render as you would need to up the Max transp. levels – The depth to which transparent objects will be traced - to some insane numbers. Also dependent on their coloration you may end up with a grey/green/whatever color they have kind of blob looking mass in the middle/wherever the depth is the largest.

If possible perhaps you should start to render fewer objects in a pile, with an alpha channel behind and then comp some copies on top of eachother in whatever compositing package you prefer? Then you would get the general look without it taking forever with the render.