The worst thing is how it utterly nuked your computer whilst you’re doing it. Obviously I don’t have the greatest rig, but it’s not dire, and rendering just makes it useless. Can’t even piss about on Total War!

Tempy wrote:

Cheers! It’s not perfect and I haven’t been able to tweak textures as much as i’d like but I have no time, each render is about 5 hours and and I have to hand in 6 on Monday... Discovered the joy of the active shader render window last night though. Wonderful when it work, but some times stuff breaks it and fixing it is laborious. Ideally I wanted heavier god rays and some particle effects, but researching the way to make it work wasn’t fruitful. My current rays are given noise by a noise image plugged into a gobo filter, and then the arnold environment map has one of its settings up to give an edge to the light... problem is trying to make strong rays with that setting... ideally I probably want to use a different render engine, like Vray

Looking good Tempy.

If you haven't already try to find out how to optimise your render times (in 3DS Max/Maya IIRC?). There's some great videos about it for Blender, many of the same concepts should apply, look for Blender Guru's stuff, he's done quite a few on the subject now.

There's basic things like GPU rendering and appropriate tile sizes, light bounces, samples, and some more nuanced stuff like object instancing. I'm sure you know a bit of all that by now, it's very much worth trying to optimise it, especially if you plan to be doing a lot of rendering.

Honestly there's no fucking way that your scene should be taking that long, my rig is only just a little bit more powerful than yours I think. Here's a render I just did of the Blender Junk Shop demo scene I got from here -



That took my GTX 1080 2 minutes and 36 seconds to complete, 200 samples. A render done at 50 samples took 1 minute 11 seconds and would look very similar from a quick glance.

The biggest trick is the use of a new denoising node -



It can massively reduce the time you need to get a good result, and looks better than some older denoising methods. I think there is still work to be done to get it working well for rendering many frame animations though, that will be a game changer. I would hope 3DS stuff has implemented something similar, if not the exact same plugin as it's open source I think.

It pains me to think of all that machine time and creative time you are losing here, I'm sure we can get these render times cut right down.

Are you using denoising currently?

Looks like Arnold has some denoising capability, not the Intel one unfortunately but an Nvidia version, and it has it's own built in apparently -



The idea is you render out with a much lower sample count than you would normally then apply denoising as a postprocessing filter which cleans it up. The resulting render can look indistinguishable to a typical render with many more samples.

Intel's denoiser is one of the best solutions so far I think, because you can plug the normal and albedo information into it for a better result. Other kinds of denoise are pretty good too though.

It might be the case for your software and renderer that this won't help and the bottleneck is something other than number of samples. Hopefully there is a solution because a 5 hour render for an interior scene seems like madness to me.

Definitely gonna be worth investigating that but it is basically all technobabble at the moment, I only had time to give myself a crash course in rendering due to my deadlines

Looking at your renders, do you have a volumetric effect on the lights creating a dusty feel to it or is that just how it is rendering?

If you have dust, fog etc in the lighting that will massively add to render times.

Could be it.
Have you tried a render with that turned off?

They give a cool effect but tend to be very demanding. Similar to caustics which produce those awesome light beams that you get with say a cut glass decanter.
I would love to use both more but they add so much to the render time I rarely bother.

Those are real nice!

get outta my kitchen smoothskin

That’s beyond me Gurt, i just press the button and let it go

Aye no worries. It should be a fairly straightforward render settings menu thing somewhere, but all software is different and it sounds like your setup is a little more convoluted. Just something to try that might save a bit of time.

Trying to get an object to snap to another object in 3DS max should not be as insanely infuriating as it is. I actually have a headache from how angry I am getting at this stupidly complex program failing to do what should be an incredibly simple thing, and the lack of any decent tutorial that can explain it without spending 50 minutes talking about every useless variant on snap. I JUST WANT A FUCKING FACE TO SNAP TO ANOTHER FUCKING FACE SO THE OBJECTS LOOK LIKE THEY'RE STUCK TOGETHER FUCKING HELL. HOW IS THIS SO FUCKING DIFFICULT?!

Wish I could do that. I am trying to align threaded knots to a curved surface (samurai helmet) and it just seems like it isn’t physically possible, and fuck doing that by eye, it’s working in too many dimensions

I was messing around with the spacing tool, to some ok results but it wasn’t perfect. Array along path might work, will have to tweak the angles though I think? It just seems baffling you can’t snap things easily.

I think you should be very pleased with the results Temps. Looks great to me anyhoo.