Need help lighting and rendering an interior scene

[JHoagland]

I'm trying to render an interior scene of a digital model based on the Enterprise bridge. The problem (as with all interior models) is that the regular HDRI scene lighting can't get through the walls, so I have to set the "light" materials to illuminate the scene.

I have the following materials:
Overhead Lights, Floor Panels, and Floor Lights: all set to Area Diffuse Light at 2 watts. (When I used the default setting of 10 watts, the scene was overlit and washed out.)
Wall Spot Lights: set to Emissive instead of an area light.
There are a number of monitor displays that could be set to have Emissive or a high ambient setting, but I haven't set those.

After I set the materials to the settings that I thought looked good, I started rendering the scene. At the default settings, and at 800x800 pixels, it took almost 2 hours to only get to 2%! At that rate, the image would take around 100 hours to finish!
I changed the render options: I set the ray-traces to 6 and samples to 4, but then I saw little spots on the rendered areas.

Does anyone have any good ideas on how to speed things up? Or am I overloading KeyShot with all the illuminated materials and reflective surfaces?

Thanks
--John

[rkulshrestha]

Hi John

Can you attach the bip file please? Ofcourse if it is an NSA project, we will understand

Raj

[JHoagland]

My bip file is over 21M in size. I tried attaching it to my previous reply, but it didn't upload. Then I tried attaching a zip file of the bip file (which was 10M) and that didn't upload either.

Do you have any ideas without seeing the bip file?

Thanks
--John

[TpwUK]

Well you have said that lights set at just 10 watt over expose your scene, try setting the units to inch's or greater. That should be good starting point. If you can't find the units then scale your model to say 10x current and see how that works. Of course you could also sign up to GrabCad and post the BIP there, it's free, and you can always close down the account when your problems are resolved

Martin

[JHoagland]

Thanks for the ideas.

I scaled the model up (from 2 to 12) and then adjusted the lights. The scene didn't look as washed out, but it still seems to take forever to render. The render was still at 2% after 20 minutes of rendering.
I'll try adjusting the render settings to see if that helps to speed things up.

Thanks
--John