Taking way too long to render

in The Commons
Is there a reason why my seeming simple render is taking over 200,000 iterations before looking nice? I noticed right away something was off, so I left on it on overnight and when I woke up, I was 200,000 iterations in, and still only about 85% converged. Is there any settings that highly impact render times? Also my setup is i7-7700, 32gb ddr4 ram, and GTX 1080.
Comments
a lot of things can affect the render time and the lack of convergence.
The question is, what are you trying to do? 200,000 iterations? I'd be at 100% and done with most of my scene setups.
(I'm guessing it's overly dark, where many multiple passes won't give you enough light through the aperture. I'll always guess the issue is not enough light and too few light sources rather than too many.)
200,000 iterations? Wow. Most of my renders never go over 2,500. And keep in mind that "done" is subjective. Many times stuff can look done at way less than 100% converged. When it looks done, it's done...that's pretty much it.
Stop when you like it.
That is the only measure you need.
The denoiser option in the filtering section of iRay can do wonders, and you can have a decent looking render in half the time compared to not rendering with it.. I get a pretty decent looking image from between 300 and 600 iterations depending on the scene in about 10 minutes or so..
shiny reflective surfaces, transparent items, glass, water dark shadows. all can take time to clear in renders. but 200k is high, what are your completion settings cause scene usually look presentable at around 600 - 800
...lots of emissive light sources (mesh lights) will slow the process down as well. as will well lit interior scenes because they tend to have more ray bounces. off of walls, the floor and ceiling.
I wonder what happened. If it takes 200k iterations to get to 85%, it's another 200k at least to get to 95%.
..yeah the most I end up with are 1,500 - 2,000 iterations and that's when I turn up the render quality a notch or two.
I don't care about itterations, only about what it looks like.
Example:
It takes me 25 minutes to get to work; I'm going to drive for 25 minutes and then stop. Result: sometimes I'm at work, sometimes i've driven passed, and others I'm not there.
Reason, I mistaking the measure of success to be an arbitrary number, not my actualy requirement. Travelling to work is easy, we know when we're there.
Rendering, is actually just as easy: when it looks good: Stop!