Photo real architecture

laim1991

Hi Polycount, i'm currently working on an architectural assignment, the main aim of this is "photo realistic renders" using the Mental ray renderer. The main problem i'm finding which of course was to be expected is render time. I've finished the scene now, it's not perfect and it's only using the standard arch and design materials as instructed by my lecturer so i'm not looking for crits on the scene exactly, more how i can push mental ray to give me more realistic renders with the shortest render time possible. I'm hoping that these won't take longer than two or three hours each at the max due to time constrains.

Here are the sorts of things i'm coming up with so far.





These are taking anywhere between 30 minutes to 3 hours. I've got a daylight system set up and am using sky portals on all 17 of the windows.

laim1991

Oh and for anyone interested it's St Clement Danes church in London

jackalope

im not an expert, but i would say your wood is a little too glossy.
and you might need to turn up the samples.

Razgriz

I'm guessing that most of your render time is being eaten up by your anti-aliasing, which isn't doing a good job anyways - since for a scene like this, having a low final gather and GI should be fine. Make sure you've run your GI on the scene and saved it to a file, so you only have to do it once, and set your camera angles and store the FG the same way.

For the anti-aliasing, (assuming that you're using Arch and Design materials) look into using the "highlight + FG only" checkbox, and the fast glossy interpolation rollout tab.

A scene like this shouldn't take nearly that long to render, but if it's re-running GI and FG every time, it will - and that's very unnecessary. Hope this helps.

laim1991

Thanks for the reply, yeah I think you're right about the wood I'll give it a go. I'll also turn up the samples a bit and see what that does. Does anyone have any tips for optimising Final gather other than using the default settings?

laim1991

ah awesome that's exactly what i needed to hear, i hoped i was doing something wrong> i'll try that out now

laim1991

You're a life saver Razgriz, cut my render times to under 10 minutes, still don't look quite right but I think all it takes is a little tweaking i'm not using GI though, when i turn it on calculating GI gets to about 17% then stays there, not sure why this is. Tried turning down ray samples but no change.

SanderDL

Razgriz wrote: »

I'm guessing that most of your render time is being eaten up by your anti-aliasing, which isn't doing a good job anyways - since for a scene like this, having a low final gather and GI should be fine. Make sure you've run your GI on the scene and saved it to a file, so you only have to do it once, and set your camera angles and store the FG the same way.

For the anti-aliasing, (assuming that you're using Arch and Design materials) look into using the "highlight + FG only" checkbox, and the fast glossy interpolation rollout tab.

A scene like this shouldn't take nearly that long to render, but if it's re-running GI and FG every time, it will - and that's very unnecessary. Hope this helps.

Not that I'm doing Photo realistic renders a lot but this is really usefull information. Finally I get why you would do multiple passes.