Page 1 of 1

Need help optimizing a scene with lots of lights!

Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2013 3:26 am
by Jani
Hello,

I have encountered a problem... I'm having to do some renders of a scene for uni, for the coming friday, and I've realised that having a lot of low-power IES lights has ruined my render speeds. I'm trying to optimise it as much as I can, playing around with exposure and power settings of the lights/ gamma/ ISO -> you get the picture... Sometimes the results are a lot faster with the power of the lights cranked all the way up, sometimes when they are down, then I get a lot of noise in certain situations, and the possibility for a nightime animation is becoming more of a dream than reality.

Could anyone take a look at it and tell me where I'm going wrong? Or it simply IS that long to render, even with octane?

There is around 35 IES lights in the scene, with the final predicted count being closer to 60.

Also, has somebody found a workaround hot-pixels? I seem to get them a lot, the render would look soo much nicer without them. They show even after the hotpixel removal is set to 0. If I understand this correctly, then hotpixels appear in areas where the ray bounces from the environment back to the camea at a very shallow angle right? So if there was a way of blurring them out?...

Any help appreciated.

P.S.: You can use the models in the scene in your own scenes(so long you help me! :D). But only 2 models in there are really mine, the table and the building, so the rest is at your own risk of getting caught. :D.

Anyways, any help appreciated. If you download a scene and find a cure, could you upload it back please so I can see how you set it up? Saves time -> $$ :).
Thanks :).

Jani.

Re: Need help optimizing a scene with lots of lights!

Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2013 10:35 am
by bicket
could you save it as max 2012 so i can have a look

Re: Need help optimizing a scene with lots of lights!

Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2013 11:01 am
by Jani
Here's a 2012 file for you :).

Also, before anyone asks, I have 2x gtx 570 clocked up by 20%(so roughly equal to 2x stock 580s).

Re: Need help optimizing a scene with lots of lights!

Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2013 7:59 am
by bicket
Hi, I can't open you file ...
I don't have PhysX for 3dsmax, and don't want to install it => make the files crash on other computers.

Re: Need help optimizing a scene with lots of lights!

Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2013 1:41 pm
by Jani
Nevermind I found a way around my little problem :)...

Thanks Bicket for trying though...

I found that comping a 1000 sample PMC at 1 bounce gets me the right lighting and almost no grain in ~1 minute, and then rendering a 3 bounce PMC for GI in ~4 minutes gets me all the reflections, while comping the 2 of them together gets me acceptable noise levels and keeps the quality high :).

Had to tweak the light settings to real life parameters, and set sampling rate on the adequatly :).

Thanks again :P