OTOY Forums

I'm a bit stuck.

With simple lighting (sun or single source) - renders are VERY VERY fast. However, the render looks cheap & simple.

However, with a few dish lights (all using simple lights, not textured or ies), lighting is excellent but renders are really really slow (well, for Octane) to get to a good quality (takes more samples to look good).

Is this simply the math - or - is there a guide, or better set of lights to use so that lighting and quality and SPEED are all balanced?

(ANY HINTS WELCOMED).

Thanks,

thinking about the sun environment: playing with the geo parameters and time (of day), and esp. making the sun size bigger will often give nice results - still meant to mimic outside sceneries.

i usually have hdr + 2 emitters (close and distant), maybe a third for inside environments. indeed it brings render times down, but all you do that pushes quality (like using more complex materials) has this effect

what is imo important is to keep light intensities balanced: instead pushing the emitter power if i.e. the scene is to dark, i'd rather go to the imager and tweak the exposure settings (fstop, exposure, iso); maybe in combination with lowering the hdr power also. usually extreme bright (and small!) emitters raise render time and also hot pixels and noise.

another option would be such a tool: http://www.hdrlightstudio.com/ - this allows very comlpex lighting through hdr while still being more efficient than a couple of light sources that create a similar setup.

on a general note i'd advise to play with the tonemappings. other camera tones can have a big impact on the overall look; my favorites are the ektachrome/kodachrome types, which usually require to raise gamma (from 1.6 to 2.2 i'd say) as they are very dark.

my personal opinion is, that 50% of the final quality depends on the imager settings, like playing with tonemappings (cameras), white balance, saturation...) and even adding some post processing bloom/glare can freshen up an image even if there are no shiny materials, i.e. by adding a tad softness to it...

excellent comments. thanks.