Good quality renders minus expensive render times help

[Anonymous]

Im not an expert on 3ds max, was following a bunch of tutorials to get better quality bc of graininess in renders...these are my current settings (not sure if they're set too high). image precision set to 2.0, glossy reflections precision: 1.0, soft shadows precision: 2.0, glossy refractions precision: 5, final gather precision medium, max reflections 4 max refractions 6, and FG bounces 3. Also my material samples are set to 16, as well as the mr area light samples. Is there any advice on how to get faster renders minus the graininess? Are some of my settings perhaps a little too high? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. 

[Anonymous]

There is no one answer fits all scenes. If it's grainy, your sampling is too low not too high. But there are methods to optimise render quality and speed, but they will vary depending on the nature of the scene and many factors, animated of still, types of material, flat objects or curvy ones, interior where reflections/refractions are of objects, or exterior where reflections/refractions are mainly environment, etc...

So I can't advise without knowing the scene, other than re-writing the whole mr A&D manual, but that's already been written.

Those precision sliders are multipliers for the settings on the materials/lights. So for example if samples are 16 and precision is x2, your samples are 32. They are just a quick way to adjust things globally, without having to adjust every material between doing draft and production renders.

At the end of the day, good renders do take time, get used to it.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Thats exactly what I was thinking, bc there was a lotta graininess in the beginning with lower settings and my employer was complaining of that, when I cranked em up it solved all the problems. Now since we solved the quality problem, they're complaining of the render times hehe. No pleasing these guys I guess. Thanks for the help buddy, greatly appreciated. 

[Anonymous]

Also I know they take a lot of time, which is why I ship out my renders using renderfarms. Only problem is these guys are too cheap to do that lol.

[darawork]

Have you tried iRay instead of Mental Ray?

I got a nice card for around €200 (A PNY GTX760 2GB).

Works very well with iRay. Complex renders (2million faces, 200lights) take about 20mins for 500 passes.

Although to get a really crisp render it can take up to an hour.

I those instances I just leave it overnight batch rendering a few pics.

I've not used Mental Ray for nearly a year now.

http://jeffpatton.net/2011/10/iray-and-gpu-faq/

[Anonymous]

Never tried iray, I use vray and mental ray. I like vray much better, tried convincing my employer to buy it but they said its just way too expensive lol. whats the difference between iray and vray?

[brianchapmandesign]

Re your "what's the difference" questions: beyond the material differences IMO VRAY centers around the combination of use of photography / lighting and dslr-like camara techniques giving more control over a scene's image using global illumination, ray tracing, photon mapping, etc and relies heavily on the CPU for processing while iray utilizes more resources (such as your graphics card) speeding up renders... in many cases making them instant... (though reducing grain when it appears might take more effort) and leans toward an optimized system and sort of one-size-fits-all algorithms for rendering but making scene setup and rendering easier.

[darawork]

The new version of Vray (Vray RT) will use GPU processing too: http://help.chaosgroup.com/vray/help/rt100/render_gpu.htm

The hard part will be convincing your employer though. Still some form of excuse can usually be formed out of the root equation:

(rendering x)Time%hassle=Money

[brianchapmandesign]

Good point 🙂 Though some cards not supported.

- B

[jeff]

One thing I've noticed: If you are not using motion blur, the new anti-aliasing settings are slower for lesser quality. Could be my typical scenes, but you might want to try using "Classic" AA set at 1 and 16 samples, triangular filtering at 2.0 pixels. Use default values for reflections and shadows (1.5 I think?) My guess is that will gain you a ~20% speed increase.

-Jeff

[Anonymous]

I'm going to give that a try. I figured leaving the glossy reflections and refractions at 1.5-2 should be more than enough, not sure why i followed that advice on the forum on cranking it up to 5, seems a bit excessive. Hopefully I can still get that great quality with soft shadows, glossy reflections, and glossy refractions set to 1.5. Thanks a ton Jeff