Renders grainy

[gotphish001]

Am I missing something? I'm starting to mess with render in ACA 2017, but everything always comes out grainy. Including 2 renders of the same building. First one is a 60 minute render which is pretty grainy. I thought maybe if I did it longer it would fix it, so the second one is a 12 hour render. The second render I also added a distant light to brighten it up and also made it in a higher resolution which I thought maybe was the problem. I've gone through a few tutorials, but some settings are a bit different as they are using much older versions. 

[pendean]

What materials did you use?
Any chance you can post your DWG file?

[dbroad]

I have been extremely disappointed with the quality of 2017 renderings using both AutoCAD and Revit.  Autodesk switched rendering engines in 2017 from Mental Ray to Physical to reduce dependence on graphics card drivers.  Instead of rendering using the multiple processors in a good graphics card, all the rendering is done using the computer's main CPU.  So buying a good graphics card using 2017 seems a waste of money.  In my opinion, they should have tested it before releasing.  The only way to get a decent render out of the software IMO is to use the cloud render features, which cost cloud credits.  Don't do that though until you use the draft renderings to get a really good looking result.  In your rendering, for example, you probably need some entourage and control the eave and rake colors better before doing a 12 hour render.  Also limiting your desktop renders to a region can speed you up.

[gotphish001]

I'm not sure if that .dwg will even help. It was someone else's project that I was trying to learn rendering with and I have no clue as to what materials they used. I'm not exactly sure how it was set up as we are still in the figuring out stage of ACA. I'm actually in the process of trying to get everyone on the same page and get some standards set up. Just taking a break from that and playing with rendering to see if we should use it instead of sketch up. 

I got it to work much better by upping the resolution from 1920x1080 to 5000 something. That also upped the pixels per inch from 150 to 300 which I think was the main factor in a better look. As dbroad said it obviously needs eaves and things fixed. It's not a project render that will see a customer though. I'll include the 300 ppi version. Much better but still pretty lack luster as was mentioned. 

More than likely rendering is something that we could probably have a person do just that full time and I'm not going to get great results doing it for an hour or two a week. I thought if I could get a pretty decent result rendered from a project that is already done then that would save all the time someone had to do it with sketch up and totally eliminate that part of the work flow saving many hours. The more I mess with rendering the more I'm thinking that might not be an options. Unless I get really good at it. It will make a nice side project to learn at least.

[gotphish001]

That version 3 of the render was a quick 5 step render. I tried once before lunch and once during to run an hour render at that quality and both times it crashed autocad, outlook and chrome that I had open on a computer that is only like 3 months old and is pretty stout power wise. I also wasn't using the other programs. It was just sitting idle and they were just open. I'm not certain if it crashed the computer and restarted it too as I could have easily missed that as I wasn't sitting there watching it. I'll try it again right before I leave for the day with everything shut off and see how that goes.