Too many lights / huge rendertimes

[direwolf]

Hi guys,

i'm working on a complex building. The animation is supporst to goes around the building and then into it. The building has a big glass facade.

All goes fine until i add 158 interior lights. I've tried all different lightsources but i can't seem to get the rendertime down.

With just a skylight and sunlight the rendertime for pal is approx. 2 minutes per frame. Which is excellent for animation.
But with all interior lights the rendertime goes far over the 40 minutes per frame. Some even higher then an hour. Even with shared gi for all frames.
With rendertime over an hour it would be impossible to render a 1500 frame animation.

Any suggestions?

[florian]

Have you tried using luminous polys?

Cheers Florian

[Captain Obvious]

I think this is a good example of how the actual ray tracing speed of Kray isn't really that high. If you render something like just ray traced reflections or refractions, or ray traced shadows, etc, no GI or anything where Kray can use its smart adaptive sampling, even Lightwave's built-in perspective camera is usually faster. There's a LOT of room for improvement in this regard.

[silverlw]

Under quality tab/arealights/compute separately - switch it to Compute with luminosity. That should speed things up.

[direwolf]

Arealights and luminous polygons have quite a big rendertime and they end up really noisy.
I'm using pointlights now and changed some settings. The rendertimes are more acceptable now (read approx. 5 minutes), but the quality is a bit less.

BTW Rendering on a Q6600, 8Gig of RAM, Nvidia Quadro FX550.


I'll keep you all posted and i will upload some final images or maybe even the entire final movie once it's done.