Exterior Architectural Renderings - Settings Recommendation?

[BKEicholtz]

I am embarking on my first Octane client project. The first phase will be exterior stills, then an exterior walk-around. I have been researching where I should begin with quality settings. We are not going to do any large scale printing of the images - it will primarily be for web images. In my digging through the forum, I found this recommendation for exterior architectural stills:

you should render them at 4x the desired resolution and scale it down on pmc or pathtrancing or even faster result with direct light in difuse mode,glossy depth 7. you could get desired resulted in once it hits 1000 samples

Is this good advice? Where should I start? Thanks!

[Polarity]

In all honesty the number of samples you need depends on your scene and how many areas inside it need to be sampled. You will need to do some tests to determine this number because it's all dependent on your scene. I honestly found that rendering a near-clean image and putting a denoiser on your rendering in post will do just fine. I haven't really found too many cases where you can just set a desired number and optimize to get a super clean image. In octane exteriors render pretty quickly even on path tracing from my experience, but also it depends on which and/or how many GPUs you are running. I see you're running 2x Titans so I don't see how render time should be a huge issue.

I would say to not waste your time using PMC for exteriors because exteriors do not have a lot of areas in which light needs to move around and explore. There will be an extremely minimal difference in quality in PMC vs PT for exteriors to the point where it's not worth the extra render time unless you are looking to add vegetation with SSS where you may want tree leaves for example to be a bit more detailed. PMC does a lot better with absorption and such. I use PMC strictly for interiors. I have run into many problems using PT with interiors.

For exteriors I would try to stick with PT rather than DL unless you're really trying to pump something out extremely quickly. DL on diffuse mode has its advantages due to its optimization attributes, but the more you optimize these attributes the more biased the render will become. If set too low this can lead to unrealistic results which is kind of counter productive when using Octane IMO. Post some images rendered from each kernel with your typical settings and post the time it takes to render. I would definitely do your stills in PT, and if it fails to meet your needs for animation just move on to direct lighting and see how that works out better for getting your frames rendered out.

[JuM]

This question does not make sense mate especialy for octane. Octane render is "whatyouseeiswhatyouget". So you can already know the result while shading and lighting. I agree with Polarity. It is always changing for your scene. Also there are already defined film values like presets which you can try. For you project if i was you i would go on direct light/skylight for the exteriors. Maybe you can make a second pass for window/glass reflections with hdr on enviroment slot without skylight in the scene. Then comp them with photoshop. I hope it helps

[BKEicholtz]

Thanks for your comments.
Polarity: I will follow your suggested guidelines and post my results.
JuM: You are way ahead of me. I have never learned to make partial renders and then combine them in PS. That seems to defy the WYSWYG approach, but perhaps really speeds things up?

I thought someone would post something like: "For Architectural Exterior Stills I use 2000x1600 size images, Path Tracing, and 1000 passes as a starting point". However, I understand your points.

Thanks,
Brian