Yikes can anyone help troubleshoot these settings (light / Rendering)
blue6string
Posts: 60
Started a new project. Most elements stayed the same minus the type of environment lighting. I had environment uber lighting before, buut now my render times have shot thru the roof. So I started manic slider tweaking, with no success. Here are my settings is there an obvious screw up.
Render Settings (master slider all the way up)
Bucket Size=16
ray Trace=6
Pix Samples x=4 y=4
Shadow Samples =18 (I have had this up to 32 in the past, with no problem)
Gamma =1
Pix Filter x=6 y=6
Lighting Setup (3 parts)
Dome- I have this located about 30 feet in the air. No settings on this really
Specular- I have these arrows pointing at subjects with the following settings:
Illumination=Specular only
Intensity= 122%
Diffuse- I have these arrows pointing at subjects with the following settings:
Illumination=Diffuse only
Intensity= 42%
Shadow softness 30%
There are glass surfaces, but I had the same in the previous project... One character has Olympia HD details which is different.
There is some shiny leather, but the rendering slows to a halt before it reaches that part of the photo. slowing start when it hits the hair.
Thanks
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Comments
Ummm...raytraced shadows?
Raytraced shadows + transparency mapped hair = long renders....
NOD!! Transmaps on the Hair is your issue.
Yup, hair will get you every time!
The tradeoff with transmaps is the longer render times. You can disable raytracing for the hair, but it can lead to odd-looking shadows. If you're using UberEnvironment then ambient occlusion can make it take even longer. It's important to note that every time a light beam hits a transmap, the system needs to analyze where on the transmap that beam hits so it can tell whether it passes through and at what intensity. For things like ambient occlusion which does dozens of raytrace calculations, that is only magnified.
Of course, having those on does make for a more accurate final render, but the tradeoff for quality is time.
And using indirect lighting instead of AO takes even longer still, since it now bounces the light and collects color information instead of faking it like AO does. I have noticed that some hair renders better and faster than others. If the transparency map has a lot of contrast, rather than being poor quality and fuzzy, it renders somewhat faster.
Somewhat being kinda-sorta subjective.
Not all AO is created equal...some uses of AO are 'real', not 'faked'...but I belive Uber's is the 'faked' kind...hence the optional indirect, too...real AO and indirectdiffuse actually use the same shader functions...minus the color information. Think of AO as 'greyscale' ID, in this case.
As a side...I did a brief test on shaders, last night...it wasn't all that extensive, but the results were interesting.
The omnifreaker products are 'expensive' shaders...and slow. And can't be recompiled on the fly. But what I found out is rather interesting. The optimization level at compile time will make a huge difference on render speed. If the Uber series are compile at the default level (or lower), significant increases in speed can be achieve by compiling them at the maximum optimization level. The shader I tested this on wasn't UE...but I cut the render time by about 1/3...going from 6 mins to 4. I'd expect similar for UE. That was for a shader compiled at -O2 (default)...if the Uber line is compiled at -O1 or (shudder) no optimization, then there would be an even larger boost.
In 3Delight, there are 3 ways of doing AO...as a function of a surface shader, as a light or as a camera. Obviously, lights and cameras provide it globally and as such are inherently slower. There is another way to do it using a point-cloud, that is very fast, but the scripts to support it in DS don't exist to use all the point-cloud's power...there should be an example point-cloud occlusion under the Scripted Render options.
One thing that does speed up times with the Uber products is using the minimum number of samples you can get by with...in other words if you can get acceptable results at quality level 2x, don't even think about going to the max...you'll slow down the render to less than a crawl. That also applies to any AO/ID/global lighting, in general...
Basically, the point of all that, is that there are other solutions than the Uber line that can give the same results, without the major hit to render times.
You can negate the hair (transmap slow down) a little more by using Uber Surface and use the AO Override at the bottom of the shader and set the samples to say 16 - 32. This will still give AO and Raytracing but a little faster than using Global AO from UE2.
Ok,.. wow! Im processing things. Advice and info. is awesome. Sometimes i forget to mention what might be a pertinent fact, but I think you guys pulled them all out.
In my manic tweaking stage, I did turn on/up --- Indirect lighting, and that occlusion thing.
I wished that I naturally did the right things, as much as the wrong, lol
Thanks for the help, I just need to hunt down those settings, and do some tweaking now