Iradium not working with Advanced Ambient Light?
Kevin Rye
Posts: 392
Even since I upgraded to Iradium, I've noticed that my render times have gone through the roof using Advanced Ambient Lights. In the past, if I dropped Victoria 6 into a scene and added Advanced Ambient Lights, it would render in minutes. Now, it takes hours, if it even finishes. Case in point, I dropped V6 into a blank scene, added Advanced Ambient Lights, dropped occlusion down to 75% and max error to .1 and hit render. After a little over 3 hours, it was stuck at 78%. I cancelled the render.
Since I'm on a 2013 Mac Pro with dual AMD cards, I can't use Iray. I have all my settings exactly the way they have been for years using 3Delight. The only thing that has changed is updating to Iradium. I just did a pretty involved scene uisng The Enchanted Forest and I stuck with the default lights that came with the set, not Advanced Ambient Lights, and it seemed to render in a little under 3 hours. This seems about right considering the image is 2560x1440 and contains a ton of assets.
Is anyone else having a problem with Advanced Ambient Lights and the new version of DS? I’ve had to basically stop using it with this version of DS because it seems to just not work. Which is a shame, because I love the way my renders came out with it.
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Comments
That is a light shader designed for 3Delight so of course it won't work right in Iray.
Iray is just an option, you can still use 3DL in the latest version (and probably in many future versions).
I'm rendering with 3DL, not Iray, but I suppose I could double check when I get home from work. Maybe something flipped back to a default with one of the point releases.
You can still use it with AMD video cards. Just rely on CPU-only for rendering art.
What I've found is that all of the Advanced lights seem to go a bit weird with each Studio update. What I wind up doing is reinstalling them; that seems to refresh ... something in Studio, and they work better after that.
As I suspected, my settings are the same as they've always been...#Delight.
Thanks. I'll give that a try.
Interesting. I changed my render engine from 3Delight to Iray and ran another render. I never bothered to try Iray becasue I thought it wouldn't work since I don't have an Nvidia card. I rendered a full 1700x1700 image of V6 in an hour, and the lighting looks great!
Thanks!
You can use Iray without having an NVIDIA card. Just select CPU and it will run fine.
The only advantage you get from having a powerful enough NVidia card (note that your definition of "powerful enough" might vary from NVidia's) is that the render will be very fast. If your card isn't up to it, or your scene uses more graphics memory than the card has, then your computer's CPU takes over; but it will be much slower.
As for the AoA Ambient light, note that ambient is a 3Delight trick to simulate the real-life lighting effects that Iray lights just go ahead and do, because they're physically based. It is quite a big difference, and takes a bit of getting used to. It helps if you know anything about actual photography; many of the principles are the same or close enough.
I'll also point out that if you use advanced 3DL lights to make realistic looking stuff (like UberEnvironment and particularly UberAreaLights), your render times will be not that different from Iray.