Lower quality for iray rendering

Dkgoose

Any settings to make iray render at a lower setting so things render faster, I don't need perfect quality, I know animation takes a long time hoping I guess with a lower quality maybe it'll take at half the time to do it, really only doing 10-30 frames

agent unawares

In Progressive Rendering settings, limit the max time to how many seconds you want it to take. You can also lower the converged ratio to less than 95%. That gives less precise control of how long it will take in a trade-off for slightly more precise control of how much noise remains.

DrNewcenstein

Smaller resolution, blackout textures on windows if the outside is not important (and you're not using a skydome), reduce the number of Iray shaders in a scene, reduce specularity, bump, and reflections on surfaces, remove things that use transparency except hair, replace non-animated clothing like socks and hosiery with "painted on" versioins where possible, remove eye reflection shaders and environment maps, turn Rendering Quality to Off.

agent unawares

DrNewcenstein said:

reduce the number of Iray shaders in a scene

This will actually potentially make it take longer. Best case (if the resulting shader actually matches) it takes the same amount of time to render but slightly longer to load the scene into memory because the shaders have to be converted. In cases where there is ambient in a 3DL shader it will be converted to emissive, and potentially add to render time.

Better advice is to make sure all shaders are Iray and hand-adjust shaders to selectively remove the things that cause a hit to render time but don't affect the result much, like Chromatic SSS, SSS at all, translucency and transmission, volumetric glass, etc, while compensating with quick-rendering things like diffuse color tweaks.

DrNewcenstein said:

environment maps

I'm a bit baffled at this one, why remove environment maps? Environment maps are generally fast in Iray, and very much faster than actually bouncing light off an environment.

kyoto kid

...also as few emissive lights as possible, the more you have the slower the process goes.

Dkgoose

Awesowe thanks guys I'll try it out, my partner watches a web show on Friday night and their findings were cut so wants me to make basically a gif image that loops for them to use in their show and to put different faces over the character face, the 1 seconds avi I made took I think close to 8 hours to render and it was only 10 frames 

Oso3D

Go to Render Settings/Optimization and set Max Path Length to somewhere between 2 and 5.

iray defaults to -1 (no limit), while 3dl defaults to 2 (I think).

MLP limits how many bounce calculations the engine takes. At 2 transparencies and refraction (Like eyes) often don’t render properly, looking black. But if the scene doesn’t have that... faaast.

3 will work on many figures.

 

Another big speed up is to shut off translucency on as much stuff as you can.

If you aren’t doing portraits or don’t need subtle detail, sss is frankly overkill. Glass can be replaced with reflective surfaces in most cases.

 

Dkgoose

Awesome thank you Oso3D :).  I'll mostly just be doing a character in some kind of dnd outfit with a simple background and the character will move, I'm gonna turn it into a gif image and have it loop

DrNewcenstein

agent unawares said:

DrNewcenstein said:

reduce the number of Iray shaders in a scene

This will actually potentially make it take longer. Best case (if the resulting shader actually matches) it takes the same amount of time to render but slightly longer to load the scene into memory because the shaders have to be converted. In cases where there is ambient in a 3DL shader it will be converted to emissive, and potentially add to render time.

Better advice is to make sure all shaders are Iray and hand-adjust shaders to selectively remove the things that cause a hit to render time but don't affect the result much, like Chromatic SSS, SSS at all, translucency and transmission, volumetric glass, etc, while compensating with quick-rendering things like diffuse color tweaks.

DrNewcenstein said:

environment maps

I'm a bit baffled at this one, why remove environment maps? Environment maps are generally fast in Iray, and very much faster than actually bouncing light off an environment.

Replace Iray shaders with solid colors, not more texture maps. Things like lamps and walls and furniture and whatnot. If there's no need for it to look like leather, steel, ceramic, stucco, or plaster, "paint it black" (or red or green or any one of 16 million solid colors).

Environment maps are texture maps. If you don't require such a thing to add that level of realism, drop it from the scene. It's not a matter of whether they render fast or slow, it's a question of how they fit with the rest of the scene once you've removed all other non-essential textures. You've got solid-color walls and floors and reflectivity turned off, but then you've got this one item that's somehow reflecting the room, or the coastline, or whatever your environment map is. It'll stick out like a turd in a punchbowl.

 

agent unawares

DrNewcenstein said:

agent unawares said:

DrNewcenstein said:

reduce the number of Iray shaders in a scene

This will actually potentially make it take longer. Best case (if the resulting shader actually matches) it takes the same amount of time to render but slightly longer to load the scene into memory because the shaders have to be converted. In cases where there is ambient in a 3DL shader it will be converted to emissive, and potentially add to render time.

Better advice is to make sure all shaders are Iray and hand-adjust shaders to selectively remove the things that cause a hit to render time but don't affect the result much, like Chromatic SSS, SSS at all, translucency and transmission, volumetric glass, etc, while compensating with quick-rendering things like diffuse color tweaks.

DrNewcenstein said:

environment maps

I'm a bit baffled at this one, why remove environment maps? Environment maps are generally fast in Iray, and very much faster than actually bouncing light off an environment.

Replace Iray shaders with solid colors, not more texture maps. Things like lamps and walls and furniture and whatnot. If there's no need for it to look like leather, steel, ceramic, stucco, or plaster, "paint it black" (or red or green or any one of 16 million solid colors).

Environment maps are texture maps. If you don't require such a thing to add that level of realism, drop it from the scene. It's not a matter of whether they render fast or slow, it's a question of how they fit with the rest of the scene once you've removed all other non-essential textures. You've got solid-color walls and floors and reflectivity turned off, but then you've got this one item that's somehow reflecting the room, or the coastline, or whatever your environment map is. It'll stick out like a turd in a punchbowl.

Environment maps are cheap, cheap lighting and background. What do you propose to replace it with? If you're lighting with an environment map replacing it it with a real environment (that presumably needs textures) and a bunch of emissive lights will be slower.

EDIT: "you've got this one item somehow reflecting the room, or the coastline, or whatever your environment map is" Are you thinking about 3DL? Using an environment map as a reflection map isn't a thing in Iray. With reflectivity turned off, this is not a scenario that could happen.