Arnold render extremely slow & Grainy

[LiamBM]

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

[leeminardi]

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.

[madsd]

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.

[madsd]

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.

[madsd]

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

[madsd]

 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.

[zakirjoy]

right

[Anonymous]

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.

[madsd]

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 ) 

[madsd]

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.

[Anonymous]

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. 🙂  

[madsd]

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.

[Anonymous]

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 😬

[Anonymous]

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

[paulo.belesa]

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 

[CiroCardoso3v]

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

[Anonymous]

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

shawn@dehartdesignstudio.com  

[Anonymous]

me too.

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

please respond to this email.

[CiroCardoso3v]

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.