Render Times

[Don Cheke]

I am curious as to render times. I typically render everything at 3750 x 2100 px for 500 samples. Most of the models/scenes I do take anywhere from 40 minutes to about 3 hours, depending on complexity I would say. http://www.textualcreations.ca/Flash_Gallery_KeyShot/KeyShot_Gallery.html

Over the last two days I have modeled and rendered two enclosed architectural scenes that are large (in scale) but also use a lot of area lights.

This board room took just under 6 hours. https://imgur.com/x1ADwtQ

This warehouse was about 10.5 hours and only about 60% done when I stopped it. I had noticed a post had accidentally been deleted. https://imgur.com/c6heebH  I have to rerender it.

The question I have is this. Is the size of a model and/or the amount of area lighting what is causing the longer render times? I am assuming it is not the scale but the area lighting with all those light particles to calculate, as I did another warehouse not long ago that had no roof and did not use any area lights which didn't take too long to render save.

BTW, I am only showing my work to show my style, I am not looking for any critiques at all.

[Will Gibbons]

Other than the 500 samples you offered and resolution, are the real-time render settings and render settings the same when comparing the board room and warehouse scenes?

[Don Cheke]

Other than the 500 samples you offered and resolution, are the real-time render settings and render settings the same when comparing the board room and warehouse scenes?

Yes, everything is the same. As I did here, I typically use the interior lighting scheme with its default settings. I always like the results of that.
https://imgur.com/FjfgUB2
And my typical still render image settings are simple
https://imgur.com/d7g34fW
https://imgur.com/Vm1UIef
Occasionally I will uses some of the layer passes, but not often enough to make any difference in this discussion.

[Don Cheke]

Nobody here does architectural rendering that can answer this?

I did another architectural one last night. it took 9.5 hours to render. The BIP file is just over 5GB. Must be all the curves in  the ceiling component, with high tessellations to keep the arcs smooth.

https://imgur.com/ERzcofS

[Will Gibbons]

I'd love to hear someone from Luxion chime in since my thoughts are just speculation... Unless you're rendering NURBs, then I'd assume it just has to do with scene complexity/size + number of area lights.

[Zeltronic]

I confirm that the massive use of area lights significantly increases rendering times, proportionally much more than increasing the resolution of the scene rendering...

[Don Cheke]

I'd love to hear someone from Luxion chime in since my thoughts are just speculation... Unless you're rendering NURBs, then I'd assume it just has to do with scene complexity/size + number of area lights.

Thanks for taking time to answer and for prodding the masses to chime in. I appreciate it.

[Don Cheke]

I confirm that the massive use of area lights significantly increases rendering times, proportionally much more than increasing the resolution of the scene rendering...

Thanks for taking time to answer and to confirm what I thought must be the reason. I appreciate it very much.

[Will Gibbons]

If you haven't tested it yet, you can use the heads up display and hide all the lights. Turn on each light one at a time and see what that does to the FPS. That will tell you what impact each light has on the scene speed.

[Don Cheke]

If you haven't tested it yet, you can use the heads up display and hide all the lights. Turn on each light one at a time and see what that does to the FPS. That will tell you what impact each light has on the scene speed.

This was a good idea. So I used the boardroom for this short test. It has 12 area lights (8000 Lumen each). There are only 9 lights in the view, but there are three more at the back of the room. I let each light render about 20 seconds to try and keep some consistency.  I started by turning the front left light on, up by the window. The numbers are below, but I would say, that the farther I got away from the window the less difference it made. There is additional lighting from the HDR environment outside, so that is perhaps why the greatest difference was by the windows.

7.2 FPS, 0 area lights
6.3 - 1
5.8 - 2
5.4 - 3
5.2 - 4
4.6 - 5
4.3 - 6
4.1 - 7
3.9 - 8
3.7 - 9
3.6 - 10
3.5 - 11
3.2 - 12

[Furniture_Guy]

HEY! That's our chairs...

Perry

[Don Cheke]

HEY! That's our chairs...

Perry

The chair was based on a MoI 3D tutorials by Mike Maynard. A 9000 series by Virco, he said - which I see is who you work for. I bet that is a great place to do design work for.
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5893.1

I used the tutorial but modeled it in TurboCAD with a few tweaks as needed. It was a very good tutorial.