Slow ART rendering issues

[Anonymous]

Hey there,

Hope someone can help. A while back I produced my first large interior environment render. Due to the inexperience of rendering this level of detail, it was poorly optimised and took three days to render fully. I researched into why this was and I found that high polygon counts can reduce the speed dramatically. This made sense as it was a 19,000,000 polygon model. 

To get to the question, I have a new environmental render to create and I have managed to produce it to under 500,000 polygons. However, after leaving it to render over the weekend I came back in to discover it still had countless hours still to go and wasn't near the quality level I would expect. Can anyone give me any indication as to why this significantly lower poly scene is taking substantially longer to render? I have attached both renders for comparison, the blue lighting scene is the high poly count, and the red is the low poly count that is causing me issues.

Any help would be amazing.

BenHigh Poly COuntLow Poly Count. (Causing the issue)

[madsd]

Any reason not to use Arnold? Use very old max?

[Anonymous]

The only reason I am currently using Art is based on the tutorials I have learned all used Art. Would Arnold be a better choice? I have the 2020 version of 3dsmax. Would it take me time to learn Arnold if I am used to using Art?

Thanks,

Ben

[madsd]

Let me work a bit.

Im replicating your scenario and Ill show you something.

[Anonymous]

That would be very helpful, thank you!

Unfortunately, I will now be out of the office for the remainder of the evening. However, I will take a look at your response at 9 am UK time. I am keen to progress with 3ds max, pretty much everything I know is self-taught, so any advice is more than welcome.

Thanks again,

Ben

[madsd]

Ok Ben,
We need to get you up on speed.
Have a nice evening, Ill plop some initial posts for you and scene you can profile against later.
I am confident we can get you up and running in no time.

[madsd]

Had an initial look and build a refference case, forgive me for not caring about details.
I rendered the room in about 4900x2800
Render time 3 minutes and 15 seconds, that was first render test, before optimizing.
I belive those times stand as contrast to your current experience and you wont find any noise in the image.

Arnold is brute force so GI is always spot on. You can however, manipulate all aspects of light and surface contribution to your liking.
Controls and management very easy.

You can add volumetric lightning like of there is steam or fog, virtually free in terms of render speed.

Let me know if this has sparked an interest, then I can give you the scene and some guides and custom R&D tool to aid, and show you how to have a nice RealTime Arnold instant feeback setup that renders room instantly while you click buttons and calibrate details.

Note, You cannot frighten Arnold with Polygon amounts, its the best engine to scale on that account, in fact, the more you add the more obvious it becomes.

[madsd]

Try look at the attached video.
I move around in the viewport with Arnold rendering directly in the viewport.

Notice that everything resolves to something you can use when moving things around, adjusting things, doing things.

The days where you had to use production render and do some changes and do test renders are over, if you are ready to embrace, that is 🙂

[Anonymous]

Good morning,

Thanks for your advice so far! If Arnold can handle my requirements better, then I will definitely look into this.

I am a 3D visualiser/Cad Designer, but my background is mainly based in the CAD modelling side, rather than the rendering, and I have only been using 3ds max for four months or so now. I will experiment with Arnold and see if I can continue to push these larger detailed renders further. I think this environmental rendering is going to become a larger part of my role in the future so I am keen to keep progressing.

Is there any advice you can give me about the differences between using Art and Arnold? For example, I know that the basic scanline renderer doesn't always recognise some materials used by Art. Is there anything else I need to take into account along this sort of lines?

Also any tutorials you can recommend, I would be keen to see.

Thanks for all your help so far,

Ben 

[madsd]

Attached the scene I build.

Yes, the main advantage of Arnold is that it has very high quality and its very fast if you know what you are doing.
You use Arnold lights exclusively, and in general avoid using old max legacy maps, but use Arnold maps instead, and OSL.
The render panel is very simple yet flexible, I would suggest you just start to test on the scene here as that is pritty much exactly what you want.
Notice that the light beam cylinders has a special modifier on, Arnold properties, and a specific ray is closed down, so that the GI from the actual pole is closed down and only the cylinder light emits, that removes all fireflies that would take longer to render and contribute with nothing.

You would want to work like my qwe video, and avoid using production render, rendering an image, and then wait till its done, its incredibly ineeficient to work like that and a person that use Active shade rendering, which the scene is set up for will always win on workflow speed.

Make sure you use Arnold GPU on a Nvida card for the fastest experience, and use the Denoiser.
I have already set up the denoiser in active shade in the scene, so you simply just hit "render" without switching or changing anything, especially switching to production is bad for experience, then switch to DENOISED_RGBA AOV, you do that IN the render window, small drop down center top.

Let me know if you want a walkthrough of the scene from clean max to navigating, I can make a twitch video.

[madsd]

And also, take a stab at this site, super general info about anything and everything.

https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AF3DSUG/Arnold+for+3DS+Max+User+Guide

[madsd]

Let me know if you want to sit in on a live Twitch stream, we can communicate as I go around the things in the room.

I can set it up now, in a bit, in 1 hour, in 3, whatever fits the bill.

[Anonymous]

That is all massively helpful! I will certainly go through the user guide in detail and spend the time to test out Arnold to get up to speed with is as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, I am in the office and am rather busy for the rest of the week, working on the other projects. I really appreciate you taking the time to offer a twitch stream, but I'm afraid I won't have the time just now. 

My plan is to research and experiment with Arnold, starting with your user guide and a few tutorials in my spare time and on smaller projects at work. I'm sure I will get to grips with it over the coming weeks.

I can't thank you enough for your help so far, I'm glad I was able to get some advice on this, as I wasn't very sure as to what the matter was. But I feel I can make progress now!

Thanks again,

Ben

[madsd · Accepted solution]

Sounds good, let me know how it pans out.

There is no chance ART can rival Arnold, you are in very good hands if you put in the time to migrate.

Arnold is constantly getting upgrades, ART gets zero, and it will remain like that, ART was created to create a new API standard for hooking up render engines, it's not a final product although you can use it, Arnold will crush ART in so many areas its not even funny to start to list.

[adabrownRTV7B]

I am running into this problem as well. With the ART renderer it estimates my render, at medium quality and 800x600 image at over 300 hours. I am reading where you say Arnold is better. However Arnold crashes max every time I try to render with it. I am running 2019 student edition because 2019 and 2018 were the only options given for a student download. I feel my massive amount of time put into this max model are wasted if a 2:00 video would take roughly a year to render and all of the working renders are very low quality. Any idea how to get Arnold to work?