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Jamar Lizarraga
I'm pretty new to rendering and working in 3D visualization. So my question is, are there any rules of thumb, or tips on how to keep render times acceptable with a good result? I know it depends on many many things, but i cant figure out, which option affects time/quality the most.
I already tried different setups ( dont know how good or bad they were) and it worked pretty well for a simple 4 Object scene with Mirror, Glass and displacemed materials as well, but when i try to put the settings to a more complex scene with about 1.5 million Polys and all kinds of materials the rendertime rises noticably in relation to the small scene.
When you render you need to decide where is your sweet spot between speed and quality, many times for the sake of speed you can decide to do some stuff in post, like large backgrounds or people , DOF, blur and similar, even effects like caustics or fog, particles they all could be done in post.
AA values, this is how much refinement for your AA and depending of what version of Max you are using also control over all refinement of glossy effects too. Latest Mental ray for Max is pretty straight forward, if you keep default values, but if you really need to improve things, then you need to change the sampling mode from unified to classic/raytracer. but be aware now every single sample in your scene such materials and lights and GI will be adjusted manually.
In the GI panel the latest version of Mental Ray has a very simple solution, but you can use good old Final Gather with our without Photon mapping, also you can choose from IBL or Skylight illumination from FG, but IBL will give you more precise GI.
I can't give you specific numbers, because has you mentioned it varies from scene to scene, but with this general understanding you could decide what method to use and read the manual regarding those areas to get the best of your render.
As there are different kinds of GI calculation, my question is, wich one is the way to go, to maintain a certain quality, but be as fast as possible. For example i've seen many people using FG and Photon Mapping in combination and getting High quality results in no time, but for me it still takes kind of year. Probably, yet i don't know which settings are useable and which are just unreal and most of all, which do have the biggest impact on time/quality
As i just render exhibition booths at the moment, i don't use any of these effects, but good to know one can do so many things in post. i knew about DOF or blur and backgrounds, but the rest is new. definitely going to have a look at that.
i mostly keep my AA level at the 'low' defaults. Rather i try to erase grainy shadows/reflections locally in the Material itself where i need it. Is it better this way or should i go to set these things globally and keep the materials settings low?
I can imagine that one can mess up the settings of mental ray pretty quick and as i said before i'm not yet at a point where i could tell, if a value is reasonable or completely nonsense. So i've also read that Mental Ray comes not with the best defaults.
So i've read the Rendering section of the manual and now i know how most of it works i theory, but still have no idea if the values are reasonable or not. Is it just something i have to learn over time and with experience or is there something like a guide on how not to completely mess up mental ray settings?
You'll find more information about Final Gather and Photon mapping because those are the original GI solution for Mental Ray, the new GI system and IBL came up a few years ago, on 2017 they just introduce the new GI method as default.
IMO Final Gather is the most flexible of all the systems, you can get really quick renders but quality wise is not the more precise. You could get high rendering only using Final Gather too but, it will require some serious render time, and at that point using it with IBL system or just rely in the new GI method it would be more practical.
The main idea of the new releases of Mental Ray is to cut the setup time, that's why there are universal controls, so no need to go per material or light adjustments. It may take a little longer to render, but you already saved a lot time setting up your materials and light so it compensate that way.
For instance for an interior to get nice quality, I will leave activate IBL but with shadows quality 1 then set point of density to 1, rays to 250 or more, interpolation it will vary depending if you have large geometry or small thing with small details, but as a rule of thumb i never use a larger value compared to number of rays, so in this specific example I may use 100 or 160. Then bounces 5 beyond there is little difference and IBL is doing a lot already.
well, my machine has a Nvidia quadro 2000, Intel Xeon CPU 4x3.07GHz and 16GB RAM and i'm working on Win 7 (if that matters) right now i render an exhibition booth with pretty simple Geometry (no curves or complex forms, mostly straight edges). I also tried different Lighting solutions. From Daylight system with photon target emission for the mr sun with mrPhysical Sky as ENV Map over a simple Skylight to a few spots. All additional Lights were Photometric ones with mostly real values. But scene firstly was created on an older 3ds Max version, could that be an issue as well?
Right, you can found pretty good tutorials and information about FG an Photon Mapping, IBL is okay, but i haven't found anything on Indirect Diffuse yet and it seems to be pretty slow, at least used all alone with iths defaults. Although it seems to be a GPU based calculation which should fasten things up a little, or am i wrong here? Also the Lighting appeals to be more natural. maybe you can give me some direction, where i can find some information in depth about it? i didn't even find something on Lynda.com
I've worked with Final Gather only in the past, as i had no clue what all the other stuff was, and i totally agree with you on that. Right at the moment i'm trying to combine FG and Photon Mapping to get reasonable rendertimes but still get good quality results. For Interior scenes it works pretty good by now, but i need to figure out how to apply the same setup to the kind of scene i have.
You computer seems fine, the only thing you could improve for now would be the RAM memory, sometimes if you are using too much RAM, Mental Ray will start to use your HHD for cash scene files, and that will make thing really really slow. Check your RAM usage hopefully you have enough for your scenes.
Regarding indirect diffuse, it is very new, so I don't think there are any tutorials about it, all you could read is on the Help menu from 3DsMax, but it is very straight forward any ways, no settings at all. as mentioned early it will seems slower compared to FG at lower setting because it is a more refined GI solution. like brute force on V Ray or Arnold.
min 1 max 6, you can get really quick renderings. they will be noisy but decent speed to test things up. For final render you'll have to check is the max of 128 will do. If not you need to decrease the noise color threshold.
Well it's the machine i have at work, so i have no influence on whats going in there. As i am an apprentice i dont think i would get a new machine or better stuff for the machen yet, unfortunately. I watched the memory while rendering a few of my scenes, and the memory usage was pretty low in most cases. Very few cases were it came a little close to the maximum.
yeah i forgot the most obvious option, thanks for the reminder here. You can really see that difference in a simple teapot plane and two boxes scene with Daylight system. The difference is immense even in a not representive scene like this. Another reason why it seems so slowfor me may be that it obviously uses GPU calculation by default (i guess its done for GPU Calculation rendering, but also can do CPU based ones, although the GPU usage will give better results.?) and as my grafics card hasn't the best GPU performance it takes longer.
I'm definitely gonna try that out in my next render, but using IBL slows things down massively for me. A render that takes like 6 minutes with FG and Photon Mapping and Skylight Illumination from Indirect takes about three times longer than a similar setup with IBL. even if i leave shadow quality at its default.
Theres a scene mostly a coworker setup, but i had to render it. With the settings of my coworker the thing rendered in 2 minutes (it was a 1.5 million Poly scene. No complex geometry or highly reflective Material.) As i tweaked on the render setup a little and tried out different things, i mostly ended up with a render time, up to three times longer than the ones with the coworkers settings. The quality improvement wasn't worth the waiting in this case. Even without additional lights the render time was outrageous. As i'm only rendering stills and almost never more than one frame, this apperas to be a lot for me.
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Setting up 3ds max.
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Basic lighting of the scene using HDRi on skylight to test the whole scene for bugs and errors.
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