My renders are very dark and grainy

tl_ced39204

I've read the posts on here about grainy renders, and frankly, I don't know enough about this program to understand the technical jargon, so I thought I'd post my specific situation and see if anyone can help.

I first rendered my image with only a few distant lights. A friend told me she uses a couple of spotlights and maxes out the intensity, so I added 10 spotlights all pointing at my render with 200% intensity.

It's still rendering very very dark. It looks no different than when I had just the distant lights. Any thoughts?

Hylas

Brightness: Try adjusting not the intensity of the lights, but the Luminous Flux (lumen.) Add a zero or two and see what happens. (Now, if you're asking me what the difference is between intesity and Luminous Flux... I frankly don't know.)

Graininess: It looks like you might just need to render longer. Go to Render Settings -> Progressive Render and increase the max time.

Richard Haseltine

Your lights are all shinging from the front, so the backs and shadowed areas are getting only indirect light. That always takes longer to converge (lose the noise) as it relies on the small number of light paths that bounce or deflect into the area. You ideally want to add at least some light from other directions to help to fill those areas in.

tl_ced39204

Thank you both. I'll give these a try.

magog_a4eb71ab

Is this Iray or 3Delight? If its Iray, I was told not to mess around with the individual Intensity settings for added Lights when working with Iray. At 1500 Lumens, that's not really going to be noticed when rendering Dome and Scene(found under Render Settings --> Environment --> Environment Mode: Dome and Scene/Dome Only/SunSky Only/Scene Only. For Iray, I usually have to set the Lumens to around 50,000, even when rendering Scene Only. I think you can also adjust the ambient lighting strength by adjusting the Environment Intensity, which is set at 1.00 by default.

Rendering at that resolution is also going to require more Samples and Time, so be sure to check under Progressive Render in the Render Settings Tab that you have Max Samples set to its maximum and Max Time set to however much time you feel would be necessary. For my system, something like that would probably take around 12+ hours without any kind of scene optimization used. The units are given in seconds so 60 x 60 x # of expected hours will be the number you want to use for the time.

Oso3D

Generally it’s better, in Iray, to render in the bright side and adjust it darker in an image editor than to try to render as dark as you want.