topic Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy in 3ds Max Shading, Lighting and Rendering Forum

Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

LiamBM — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 11:16:28 GMT

Hi guys,

I've decided to render one of my old mental ray scenes using arnold lighting to see if I could get a nicer render, however arnold has been nothing but a pain. The render times are extremely long, and the results are horrific. Am I doing something wrong? The lighting setup is the same as my mental ray scene, which is a sky light, and portal lights at each window (i don't want any lights inside the room). I've played around with samples, but i'm already at 1 hour render times, and the grain is still extremely bad (renders below). Why are my results so much cleaner in mental ray and faster to render?

I've attached both my mental ray and arnold renders down below. I'd love to know if I've completely missed a trick somewhere. ps, i've also tried noise reduction, but the quality is far from amazing.

using 3ds max 2018

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

leeminardi — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 01:14:35 GMT

I'm new to Arnold but have found using Arnold lights and not Photometric lights to be very important. E.g., use a Skydome Arnold light as described here and get rid of your old lights. The tutorial also has some suggestion for Intensity and Exposure settings which greatly affect rendering quality and speed.

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

madsd — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 16:38:45 GMT

I Just made a test on some random Vray scene I converted to Arnold.

- resolution is 5000x3000.

- 1 skylight, no portals, no tweaking, no custom settings.

- Render time 2 minutes 38 seconds.
- Using a single, second generation GFX card ( 10 series )

So 5k under 3 minutes, and no noise.

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

madsd — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 18:38:37 GMT

2 minutes and 14 seconds render time.
3000x1800.
I guess those spheres are some kind of sketchup construct, just grabbed another random scene and pushed the render button.

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

madsd — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 19:59:08 GMT

Point camera the other direction and click render and wait some minutes.

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

madsd — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 20:08:27 GMT

You can undersample and stick this into the viewport and use walk trhough agent, the circle with the dot, then use WASD + mouse. Move around in this, move items, color them.

We can set up cases that are faster than DirectX implementation in viewport even.

Alias + 1 reflection cleans faster in Arnold than the viewport is set to refine Alias on mesh when you let go of everything.

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

zakirjoy — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 20:42:15 GMT

right

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 15:14:22 GMT

Hi Madsd,

Cheeky question:

Would you mind terribly posting a couple of screenshots of your render settings for that image please?

I'm having the same problems with Arnold as LiamB. It doesn't seem to matter if i use CPU or GPU, if i ramp up the samples to reduce noise, the render time goes through the roof.

I seem to be just chasing my tail trying to get it to work.

Thanks.

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

madsd — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 15:42:29 GMT

Which one?

The general idea is you just add a skylight and let it render on the GPU for some minutes, then utilize a post denoiser.
I am using an experimental one from one of the Arnold devs, which is better than OptiX, ( not noice.exe but an inteldenoiser implementation, I wrote a small tool so I can use it for animation, I can crank out 2k volumetric renders in 90 seconds with motion blur )

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

madsd — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 10:37:17 GMT

I just asked Declan if I could write an article about his stuff, and mine and he said fine!
So I will make a video at a point with links to downloads and stuff and then we need to make sure it channels out to the archviz communities and well everywhere, it's not just Archviz interiors that can render in minutes, its also otherwize expensive effects that render ultra fast.

We also did some testing and a raw brute force render, Arnold comes out in front of V-Ray and Redshift in recent tests against newer builds, so lets get this going.

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:50:01 GMT

Hello ,my Arnold render is very grainy, sorry arnold render newbie here.

I have fitted Arnold lighting and tried many different things. I am getting a lot of render errors in the render output.

" This material is not supported: PillarRoots (Standard). An approximation will be used.
This material is not supported: Leaves (Standard). An approximation will be used.
This material is not supported: Canopy (Standard). An approximation will be used.
This material is not supported: 09 - Default (Standard). An approximation will be used.
[Arnold]: [photometric] can't open photometric file, no filename supplied
[Arnold]: [photometric] can't open photometric file, no filename supplied
[Arnold]: [photometric] can't open photometric file, no filename supplied
[Arnold]: [photometric] can't open photometric file, no filename supplied
[Arnold]: [photometric] can't open photometric file, no filename supplied"

I do not know if this has something to do with it or not. I have enabled legacy 3dsmax maps.

in the settings i am rendering at 1080p but the video output is 720. could anyone help why the Arnold render is so grainy.

Thanks is advanced. 🙂

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

madsd — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:55:42 GMT

Try Archive the scene and upload it here.
I think you need to adress the fact that you are using very bright light sources, they cause a lot of indirect noise, but you can control that in multiple ways. Using a lower indirect value in the firefly setings area and then by using denoiser if you have an Nvidia card in the machine. Perhaps some finetuning of the sampler, using progressive, adaptive and threshold.

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 02:48:02 GMT

I hate to jump in randomly here, but I just can't reproduce what you guys are getting either. I've imported a basic model, added one Arnold Physical sky and increased the samples from 1 to 3. That's it.

I'm still getting a grainy mess that takes around 10 minutes to render. Increasing samples in render settings massively increases render time, and if anything makes it grainier - I never had these issues with Mental Ray.

@madsd could I be an enormous pain and ask you to give it a quick look? Totally understand if you're too busy, I've just spent days on this and must be doing something wildly incorrect 😬

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

Anonymous — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 14:20:22 GMT

That's great, but that is a still and not an animation. Took 8 hours to render a 15 second animation.

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

paulo.belesa — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 18:14:57 GMT

I Get the same problems, almosto nothing in the scene and render times are over the roof.

Im using a revit imported file, converted all to arnold surfaces and nothing changed.

Please advise.

Im using CPU for render and using AMD Ryzen3700x

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

CiroCardoso3v — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 18:52:23 GMT

Do you have a screenshot? Is an interior scene? Exterior? Which lights you have on your scene.

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 21:38:52 GMT

did this ever get resolved? i'm having the same issues. can you please respond to this email?

shawn@dehartdesignstudio.com

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 21:41:03 GMT

me too.

i can't seem to clean this up. i have been reading for days.

please respond to this email.

Re: Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

CiroCardoso3v — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 12:32:40 GMT

Create a thread on Arnold Answers. You will have more help there. And when you do that, share your render settings, how many samples for each light and if possible a log. This is a very old thread so it is better if you start a new one.