Render complex scene

[ebispence]

Hi,

I've recently created a complex scene with complex models, multiple materials, two spotlights and would like to output at A4 in dimension.

As you can imagine this is a complete nightmare for the renderer and after 10mins of render time I've not even seen 1%!

Is there a way to split up the render so I can render out sections at a time? I'm thinking of grouping elements up and separating them but am worried that I'll lose the reflections from the elements missing on the elements left at render time?

Can I group elements up and make them not visible in the render but still leave they're reflections or shadows etc?

Hope someone has some ideas

Thanks

Spencer

[TGS808]

Can I group elements up and make them not visible in the render but still leave they're reflections or shadows etc?

I don't think that's possible.

That aside,  10 minutes is not enough time to expect results. You need more time. How many samples have you set it for? If you are not using a render network (and it sounds like you aren't) your best bet is to set it to render and walk away. Leave it to run overnight if you have to (this may be the case even if you are using a render network). A4 is not an extremely large size and should not be a nightmare for KeyShot to handle at all.

I don't know how complex your scene is or how many samples you've set it to but I do renderings at that size all the time. and KeyShot has no problems.  You may need to give it a couple of hours at least (if you are on a single machine). The alternative is to lower your samples (you may have it set higher then you need which will just add time to the render) or to set it to use max time instead of max samples. That way, you can determine how long it will take to get to the end (though you may not necessarily be happy with the result). If I were you, I'd set max samples to a number that gets it looking good and let it run while you sleep. Patience will be your friend here.

[designgestalt]

hello Spencer,

we would also need further information on how your setup is, to give you a better advise.
what lighting mode do you want to render in (product, interior, etc.)
this is how I approach to complex renders:
I check the framerate in the live window with the lighting setup I want to use:
IMHO Product Mode with 14 raybounces and a shadow quality of 3 is a bit overdone. Reducing the raybounces to maybe 10 significantly effects your framerate. also blending out i.e. lights and complex materials (transparencies, cloudy plastics i.e.) will show you via framerate the timeconsuming elements in you render.
this framerate check gives you somewhat a first idea of how complex your scene is.

Then I do a region render with diffrent setups:
I go to "Render-Options" and do a region render with "Maximum samples", "Maximum time" and "Custom Controls". I my case I do a lot of renders with cloudy plastics and / or other transparent materials and I often find the best results with custom controls. but, with custom controls you have to keep in mind, that you "overwrite" the lighting settings you adjusted earlier on. (i.e. if you had your shadow quality set on "2" and you now set it on "3" in custom controls, it will render with "3"!)
see, what gives you the best result: you may find, that in you render there is nothing happening anymore after more than 200 samples, so you do not have to shot higher!
now you can somewhat calculates upwards how long the whole render will take ... (I never got even close )
last, you can do a region render and so split up your render and than later assemble it in Photoshop.

last, not least:
be patient

as TSG808 said, it could well be, that you have to let it render overnight.
I render on a Z840 with 72 cores and just the other day I had to do a render 7000x4000 pixels, which took 13 hours on my pretty powerful machine...

cheers
designgestalt