Turning time limit off?

Luzfenix

Is there a way to turn the render time off of an iray render. Sometimes it can render for what I would guess would make it be complete. Say a couple hours. But it is still not done. Is there a way I can turn off the time limit so it keeps rendering and rendering like it luxrender. I'm going out today all day and I want to set up the render so it just keeps rendering until I say stop.I've even tried cranking it up to say 3 hours. And if using glass, it is still grainy as all Hell in the glass area. So I want to turn off the time so it will keep going while I'm out today.

JackFoster

You can turn Max Time to zero under Progressive Rendering in the Render Settings tab. I think if you also turn off Render Quality Enable, it will render until you reach your Max Samples. If you want to ensure it renders the entire time you're gone, you could turn off limits for Max Samples and set it to something extremely high. The absolute maximum seems to be around 2.14 billion or so. Setting it higher than that makes it a negative number.

Luzfenix

I thought that setting it to 0 would break it. I don't know that Much about iray yet. Thank you for replying. I thought I wouldn't get a reply before I left. So time to 0. Render quality off. What is render quality?

JackFoster

It seems to be just another way to stop the image early. With it on, it uses something called convergence to determine how close the render is to no longer changing with more samples. Supposedly, 100% convergence means that it no longer needs to do anything, but I've never tested that claim.

If you use the default settings, the render will stop when either it has rendered for two hours, reached 5000 samples, or when it's 95% converged. You can turn Max Time and convergence (Render Quality) off completely, but you still have to set a max number of samples. The default of 5000 shouldn't take very long, especially if you have a decent GPU, so make sure to set it higher too.

Luzfenix

I don't have a you gpu option which is why my renders can take awhile when using glass. I'm cpu only. I don't mind long render times tho. I am used to them.

JackFoster

Well, most of the scenes I render look perfectly fine with 5000 samples, but sometimes I need more, especially with a lot of reflective surfaces. I've never needed to use 50,000, so that's probably a safe upper limit if you don't want to set it too high.

Luzfenix

Yeah I think I'll set it to 50k while I'm out. That seems like a good amount. Then turn the time thing off and the other bit off. Hopefully it is done when I get back. Like I said, I'm used to long render times when I make fractals. They take anywhere from 10 minutes to 5 hours depending on complexity and size.