Best render for highly detailed work

[remodeler8]

Hello,

I am not a professional CG person but I have been "working" at trying to be creative at designing some educational materials for my dental school colleagues.  The main project that I have been working on for several months (I am now retired) includes outside shots (and possible some animation) of a large building and then inside shots and animations of several large and small mechanical devices.  If I ever finish the project, it will be shown to students in a large lecture hall where it will be projected in HD onto a very large screen.  Because of the size of the screen, I feel that I must have a very high level of rendering where pixelization is not a visible issue.

I am working in 3ds Max 2013 and have used all of the included renderers and have bought Maxwell and have just tried out the demo version of Mosquito Render.  I realize that rendering quality is relative to a considerable number of variables and is certainly not an exact science where one formula fits all situations.  What I would like it to have is feed back from others who have tried various renderers and concluded that there is one that gives the bests results with relatively the same amount of rendering time.  My computer setup has: CPU i7 980, 48 GB RAM, all HDD 7200, GTX 780 video card (3GB memory) and Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate. 

I did some test renders of a small section of a project so I could compare the amount of pixelization from one to another.  I used the Mosquito Render program and did 500, 750, 1000, 1500, 2000, and 2500 passes.  I saved all of these and imported them into PhotoShop and cropped down to the same rendered region of each.  I then placed all of the images side by side to compare them.  To my surprise, there was no difference among them.  I then changed the render subdivisions and did more renders.  I tried subdividions of 2, 3, 4, and 5.  I could tell almost no difference between the higher ones and the lower ones.  There is still a very high degree of pixelization present.  

I am certainly open to any suggestions of how to improve the rendering quality without it taking the rest of my life to accomplish.

Thanks,

Tom  

[darawork]

Purely for the sole reason of not spending the rest of your life rendering out the project, I would go with a GPU renderer of some sort. iRay would be my choice, because I have been using it for a few years now and like the speed and character of its output.

Plus, it would love that 3gb 780.

There is a helpful thread here, you might want to have a read over it: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-Max-3ds-Max-Design-General/How-to-render-video-in-1080p/td-p/42426...

Good luck 🙂

[remodeler8]

Darawork,

Thanks for your reply.  Indeed, I have tried iRay and will work with it again to see what kind of resolution I can achieve in a reasonable amount of render time.  I know that the "render scene" changes rapidly as new technology and equipment become available, but the down side is that if someone is not a professional and working at rendering on a daily basis, it can get very confusing.  One of the things that I thought was very promising about the Mosquito Render software is that it uses the materials that are native to 3ds Max and should not have any materials compatibility issues.  I guess that I just have to keep working on tweeking the settings to see if it is capable of the resolution that I think I need.

I am very happy to have gotten the GTX 780 card since it speeds my GPU rendering greatly over that of my previous card.  One of the things that I have not yet tested is what images look like in the lecture hall where the presentations to the students will occur.  It may be that I am "over thinking" the need for ultra sharp images: however, so much of what we do in dentistry is on a very small scale, it is necessary to use high resolution images in lecture presentations to be sure that the required level of detail is visible.

To close, just a personal observation: it is a very exciting time to be working (and trying to learn) with CG projects, especially since someone like me (a novice) has access to such powerful technology and software programs.  It is also very helpful to have people such as yourself who are willing to take the time to help others.  Many thanks.

Regards,

Tom     

[Stefan_L]

Regarding the "ultra sharpness" and HD projection:

Imho you either render to the exact resolution of your beamer (it is a beamer, isn't it?)

or you need - as a rule of thumb - at least a 2.5 times higher resolution to avoid artifacts from scaling and resampling the images.

You could render to full HD, display the image in fullscreen on a full HD laptop with a full HD beamer attached to it. So no scaling is needed, you get out what you put in.

But if you plan to put the images in some sort of layout, where they are scaled in a way you don't know yet, with some headers, text and whatnot (the InDesign-PDF-thingy), you need some more bargaining chips to keep things smooth after scaling.

[PROH]

Hi Tom

Here's my 2 cent on your original post regarding renderers. I have for many years now used mental ray, and have followed iray with great interest, and tried it out many times during the past few years. So far I've haven't found it useable for my daily work, mainly because of the RAM issues and the amount of work regarding manually converting materials. So I fully understand why Mosquito got your interest.

But there is an great alternative that I think you should look into: Corona. At the moment it's in Alpha mode and free to use. So far it's the easiest render I've tried. The default set up work great in most cases, and there is a great material converter script, that converts all your scene material with one click. Often you only need to readjust a few of them. It's an unbiased renderer, but it's using CPU instead of GPU, which In my case is great.

Check it out. Here's a link to it's website: https://corona-renderer.com

Enjoy and good luck.