Can you make a way for VRay to reduce render time?

[johnalexander1571]

Can you make a feature for VRay to reduce render time?

An example, I render a large scene at a certain quality with brute force settings. Does VRay now "know" what my image took to render? Can an app determine how to reduce the settings to produce the same image faster?

 

I did notice that a Multi-light feature is in VRay 5! Yay!

[Andrew West]

Multilight is a miracle tool.  Probably the single greatest time saver for my work.  Lighting a scene takes a lot of trial and error.  Now if we could fix the copy texture tool that would be another great improvement.  Vray 5 is coming soon.  

[Justin Montoya]

John,

That's a complicated request since there are so many variables that make up the render time.  From the complexities of your scene, to lighting, to output image size, to computer hardware, to VRay Settings, there's a lot here that can change how long your rendering is going to take.

Let's start by sharing an image you rendered so we can better understand the complexity of the scene.

Then do a screen grab show what VRay settings you are using and tell us the output resolution you are rendering to.

Finally, tell us what computer hardware you are using.  

Between all of these, we can likely find you a solution. 

[johnalexander1571]

I actually solved my problem in a different way. I make stills, they take ten minutes to render, and then of course, the customer wants it walk-thru animated, and I am now of the mind to shut up and figure out how to deliver this. So the real time ship has sailed, they have seen the ten minute renders.

What I did. I set up a camera moving down the hall. I rendered first frame at the high quality .005 setting. I rendered last frame at that too. I rendered 60 frames of the camera moving at .05 quality. There was obviously some grain in the moving image. I found a blur setting in Adobe After effects that allows threshold and radius setting, and by the time I encoded it down to .mp4 it works perfectly.

I did the reduce render time dance with Arnold in Maya last year. That is set up so you can easily drop out stuff you don't need, but you still have to invest in the experiment part. That animation was so long we would never make shots that long again. This render settings dance is a whole facet of this I would rather avoid, because frankly it will all be some other controls different in a few years. I have to jump to pre-lit real time environments real soon. With the speed they want to see. Essentially they want real time walk-through, fully rendered. To them, admittedly, they can't see why that isn't push button for me when they see the content that's available now.

Thanks for the offer, but I think I got issue sort of licked for now. I can make what appears to be fully rendered animations 1080p in VRay files with all the lights on!

[Des]

Very nice image that and thanks for sharing your technique regarding the animation, I must try that!

Have you tried Twinmotion yet? That might be an option to get animations in a matter of minutes. Although to get it as sharp as your image, you'd need a super duper graphics card.

[johnalexander1571]

Hi Des,

The animation trick even convinced me. Once it starts moving, your eye can't settle on anything. The codec dumbs everything down anyway, for example it doesn't capture  even the whole still quality.

Thanks, I am certainly now at long last on the precipice of needing real-time. I have convinced myself it must now be explored. Now to convince my supervisors that we need 9. I really want super duper looking graphics. I dread the quality loss we'll see making this jump. I almost can't do it. Really I don't want to go real time until everyone goes, hey that looks the same.

 

I do have the RTX 2070 so we were anticipating trying some real time stuff. I'll see what Twinmotion can do.

Thanks and Cheers

[johnalexander1571]

Is it able to use all the lights as is in formZ or is it set them up again? I want stuff like ies. lights used. Does it do that? If so I'm trying it very soon.

[johnalexander1571]

Actually this project was done once in real time out of house. I'm redoing the whole thing in house because the real-time they tried to present was no where near good enough. We got the models from them, two days of polywrangling for each environment cuz polys alone kept choking my machine. I got the files down zippy and slick now tho. Be very nice to get nice real-time files. I am leaning toward Unreal.

[Justin Montoya]

Nice John!  Thank you for sharing your workaround... That's FormZ  ... you workAROUND it. 

So when you are exporting your animation from FormZ, may I ask what settings you are using?  I find FormZ lack of modern codecs like mp4, and h.264/265 really bothersome.  AVI is ancient and the uncompressed version is buggy.  I also found exporting VRay animations troublesome since it would not use the Denoiser (Mild), which greatly speeds up rendering each frame.  Are you utilizing your RTX 2070 to speed up your rendering? 

Hopefully when V-Ray 5 finally drops, we will have several new tools that will make this sort of job easier. 

First, there is the newer RTX based engine for RTX GPUs.  This is supposedly significantly faster, though like the GPU engine, not all features are carried over from the traditional VRAY CPU engine.  The faster RTX GPUs you have, the faster the rendering.

Then there is the new VRay VISION, their real time engine. - 

 

 

And the new VRay Cosmos looks pretty sweet for integrating outside assets too -

 

Now I have no idea if any of these will be implemented in our upcoming VRAY 5 for FormZ but I hope they are and especially if it adds enough interest here under the VRay for FormZ forum.  

 

TwinMotion is impressive and I'm happy it's coming to FormZ as a live link one day.  Until then, I already know VRay pretty well and these new tools are exciting to expand our arsenal.

 

[Andrew West]

I have been trying not to look at all the new and exciting things available for all the other programs out there.  It just gets me frustrated.  I do know that Vray 5 is coming to FMZ and I hope that it has all the features that are shown in your videos.  But the question persists-When?  Things have grown very quiet again at ADS and I hope that it means they have been working diligently on the new release.   

As for your animation needs I have found that TwinMotion is lighting fast and the integration with FMZ is very good.  It will probably never be up to the quality of V-ray but sometimes speed is more important.  Especially when they ask for real time VR.  Until I get a chance to experiment with Vray5 I will continue to play with TM to see how far I can take it.  

One important thing to note for now is that if you set up your model with V-ray materials they will not translate over to Twin Motion.  In my case I needed a still shot using V-ray and then an animation in TM.  It was a bit more work to redo the materials on many different objects.  Luckily the material editor in TM is pretty fast even if it lacks a lot of the V-ray depth.  

[johnalexander1571]

Hi guys,

Ok, I have the exact same problem. I mentioned upgrading to 9 and granting me some time to investigate TM. I have same problem, we want fast animation of the VRay scene. Would be awesome to be able to bake VRay scene to TM or Unreal. But I am used to redoing the mats like you say. Encouraging still, Andrew. Thanks. I also do some of my own light mixing like in Maxwell by rendering lights separately on my own. Then I mix in After Effects. Just had a walkthrough of a gym, they wanted the gym  lights and others to come on at the start of the animation I already made. I said sure, and did what I call the Fred Ricart trick. He has an x-mas commercial her locally where he has his whole car lots headlight synced up to x-mas music. He just takes a hundred different pictures, and mixes in an editor. It would be so great not to have to do it separately, especially if an animation could be so manipulated.

Anyway I am rendering 60 frames per night (done at 7:50 am this morning, just as I sat down.) of what will be the same .mp4 quality after encoded. I export all out of formZ as raw frames. And AE.This way I still have an uncompressed .avi for showing on my machine, a tradeshow, or on the big kahuna monitor in the conference room. Then I make the final shipping .mp4 using Media Encoder.

[johnalexander1571]

I also just started to learn the graph editor in AE for timing a shot. I was able take a shot that was worthlessly timed when rendered, and retimed to go just as it needed. Kills some of the attrition of clips on the cutting room floor. Coupled with motion blur after the fact I am getting some nice results.