Small Room Kit Slow to Render?
marble
Posts: 7,500
in The Commons
I bought the Small Room Kit basic set (not the bundle) and have just got around to trying it. I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed how slow it is to render?
I'm comparing it to a similar set up using Collective3D's Create-a-Room set which renders in a fraction of the time. I thought I would have a use for the SRK but if it is so slow I might have to return it.
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Comments
Hmm, toss a big mesh light on the ceiling and see if that fixes the problem. Ghost lights are ideal if you have them.
I am using Ghost Lights :) I use them for almost everything I render these days.
Small Room Kit is native iRay and create-a-room is native 3delight. Perhaps the small room kit has more complex settings. I'd check the windows too.
Are there lots of light and shiny surfaces allpowing the light to bounce around a lot? Each bounce takes time to process - adjusting the max path length in optimisation (as I recall) may help.
Hmm, try it with only ghost lights. I don't think ghost lights bounce at all. I did a quick test with a single ghost light and it took 1 min 26 seconds to render at full HD 95% convergence.
Wow - 1:26! I'd love to know how. I have a GTX1070 and I'm only using Ghost Lights (one at the window and one on the ceiling). I stopped the render at 8 minutes and I was only at 85%. A very similar camera angle to yours. Oh, I did have the dome on for the sky outside.
With Scene Only and one 700k Ghost light pointing towards the corner I get 3:28 with GTX 1070 but that's with 7-10 year old hardware (Q6600, PCI-E 1.1, DDR2 RAM).
This one is the same but with Sun-Sky Only and Draw Dome on, took 6:05.
Clearly I need to do more experimenting with light intensities and maybe tone mapping. I removed the mirror before I rendered but it didn't make much difference. I wonder if having a wall invisible for a better camera angle makes the render slower? It certainly doesn't with other sets. One of my go-to room kits is the Deco-Life series (especially the South Beach textures). Lots of glass and reflective surfaces and, full of furniture, it still renders in half the time the SRK takes.
The dome is what's causing it, because that counts as 'real light'. Notice how Tao's time doubled from 3 minute to 6 minutes as soon as he turned on dome or sun/sky. Real light feeds into picture and doubles your render time on indoor scenes. Not necessarily a bad thing, just something to be aware of.
It is possible to use entirely mesh light (what I call not-real-light). Since the product ships with a background, you could shine another ghost light on it instead and use Scene only in render settings.
Try turning off the Dome lights entirely and just using Scene.
Thanks - I will try that. I still wonder why it doesn't significantly increase the render time with the Deco Life set I mentioned. However, I didn't try that with a background image rather than an HDR dome - that's another experiment for later. The reason I don't like using backdrop images is that they catch shadows, but I'll revisit them.
As for why Deco Life is fast, my guess is that since each set uses different iray materials, the properties of those materials vary drastically in how efficiently they render in IRAY. Some properties, like displacement, I've read can greatly increase render time if used. There are likely others.
Mesh lights like ghost lights seem to skip a lot of the properties that take more time to calculate and thus the scene renders faster. At least that's how I like to think of it. :)
Using a single meshlight and it took 14 minutes to hit 95% convergence. 6700k, two 1070, and a 980ti. So annoying.
That's closer to my experience and I still have not managed to reduce the times. I'm discovering that some interiors in the store seem IRay friendly and others are a horror. Collective3D and Jack Tomalin seem to be able to produce good looking sets which render quickly. But I've also just bought the Breakfast Nook and I can say that with only a Ghost Light or two it seems to start quickly but then sits at 0% for 15 minutes before jumping to 9% where it is still grinding away after half an hour. I've deleted a lot of the glass and reflective objects which come with the kit, tried it with the dome on and off and with one or two Ghost Lights - no improvement.
I got into this situation with Reality and Luxrender and, in fact, it was the very reason I invested in a costly GPU and switched to IRay. I do wish the vendors would give some indication of render times on, for instance, a GTX 970 which seems popular. I now have a 1070.
I've totally switch to using blender cycles. Material setup etc can get annoying but it's easy to learn how to make your own shaders. A scene that takes 5 minutes in iray takes about 40 seconds with cycles. It's kind of crazy.
So do you use Casual's script? The issue for me, when I tried it, was tweaking poses, etc. Sending it back and forth is a pain. I was also scared to death of the node tool in Blender.
That's really strange, with one meshlight I get from 3:28 to 6:05 depending on Iray setup on one 1070 and 7-10 year old hardware. Slightly smaller size (1780x1041) but that shouldn't make such a difference. See other post above.