Longer render times
Fabe
Posts: 212
I'll get to right to the point,what is it that some of you are doing that results in such long render times? I've seen People comment that their render took hours or even days to finish. It is extremely high render setting and/or complex lighting or something else. and does long render time equal amazing results.
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All of the above and, yes and no.
The quantity of items in a scene
The number of said items with transparency
The type of lighting
The type of shadows
The output size of the render
The quality settings of the render
The speed of the system
The number of cpus in the system
The amount of RAM in the system
All of the above factor into how long things take. I've had renders that took almost a week (rendered at 9600x5400) with hundreds of figures. ;)
Good God. I've let renders run overnight while I slept, and was annoyed if they weren't finished by the time I woke up. I can't imagine waiting an entire week for one to finish.
You'd have hated Bryce back around 2000 or so. A week was a normal render time for it back then, and some renders took as long as a month.
Oh don't rremind me. I had ne render I actually used spot render in overlapping suqares, to get it to fully render, and having finished the render, found there was a fault on it (which never did get corrected)
"Some people have been rendering in Bryce since the 1990's, and some of those renders are almost finished."
...as slow as it may be, I never had Bryce crash while rendering.
And I love, love, love Bryce's ability to stop and resume renders.
I agree Kerya, that is one of the best things going. Coupled with the ability to spot render in patches, as long as you overlap the patches,
Another biggie, particularly when using LuxRender as the rendering engine, is the use of volumetrics (e.g., real glass with caustics or homogenous volumes like fog effects). Even the basic surface/material type (e.g., highly glossy or specular items take longer to clear up than matte items) can have marked affects on rendering time.
My computer is single-core, 1.6 GHz, 3 GB RAM, with a so-so integrated video card. Bottom line is, I guess I'm lucky it can run DS4 at all...
My render settings: for test renders, I usually use the default render settings (shading rate of 1.0). I don't do OpenGL renders because they sometimes crash my system. For better renders, I use a shading rate of anywhere from 0.5 (fair quality) to 0.2 (best quality), and sometimes I'll increase pixel samples to 16. My scenes usually use UberEnvirontment2-based lighting, and often have more than one Genesis figure with transmapped hair (and sometimes transmapped plants too). Haven't gotten into volumetrics yet.
My renders take anywhere from 20 minutes to 24 hours. They seem faster now in DS4.5 than they were in DS4.0...usually no more than a few hours.
Yup, while still not as fast as Firefly at handling Transparency, the newer version of Renderman used in 4.5 is definitely faster. :)
I don't have any way to measure it, but 4.5 seems to render faster than 3. Also, once it gets done doing whatever it's doing when you first load a scene, manipulating things is faster.
Of course, you're probably not trying to do it on your netbook computer
...I liked that feature too. Yeah I know you can do the same with Reality/Luxrender, but you really need the RAM to support it. Bryce will still run on my ancient system.
I just wish the Studio3A -> Bryce Bridge was more stable. Sometimes it works, some times it turns into a heap of smouldering 0's & 1s.
...I liked that feature too. Yeah I know you can do the same with Reality/Luxrender, but you really need the RAM to support it. Bryce will still run on my ancient system.
I just wish the Studio3A -> Bryce Bridge was more stable. Sometimes it works, some times it turns into a heap of smouldering 0's & 1s.
I don't like Reality myself ...
Thanks for the "heap of smouldering 0's & 1s" - interesting image! :lol:
Not so funny when it happens, but it is a funny picture.
Someone turned me onto using the standalone version of 3Delight. It's free, and easy to use.
The difference is very noticeable.
OK, back to the original question. Here are a few concrete items I can point to as render time hogs, having been spanked by a few 15 hour render times in DS3.
Hair and feathers with transmaps. Transmaps eat cpus for breakfast. This is especially true in close-up renders.
Raytraced shadows eat up even more cpu. Breakfast and lunch! For some scenes, deep shadow maps are quite sufficient, IMO. Raytraced shadows + transmapped hair = 12+ hours.
Reflections also increase render times. In the scene with the 15 hr render time, I had raytraced shadows, transmapped hair and feathers, AND a champagne glass with reflection and refraction effects. Dialing raytrace bounces up to 6+ makes renders happen in geologic time. This is why a lot of people use reflection maps to fake reflection effects rather than use reflective surfaces and grow old waiting for the render.
My 15 hr render: http://slimerjspud.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d4eap0m Note the refraction effects on the glass and the shadows from the feathers. For an indoor scene, DSM shadows would have done almost as well.
I have run a few Reality renders (remote Luxrender actually), and I won't go into more details about how that goes as I'm a newbie there. Because everything is so much more "real" in an unbiased render with no phony constructs like distant lights, it naturally takes forever.