[choo-chee]

quick and simple, what is the typical cost of a single noise-free interior render in a render farm, let's say a nice living room?
I know it can change from scene to scene but still I wanna know *typical* cost.
I'm looking for ways to shorten my render times.
thanks.

[Hillmeister]

Hi Choo-Chee,

I did some interior renderings lately on 3508x2480 with Spark Render to SL19 with 20 Nodes which took 2 hours. Cost were around the $70,- each.

Offcourse it depends on several things, but this was the interior of a ships bridge with quite some windows and a crew cabin with small window. Both with lots of interior lights and luxury materials.

Hope this helps.

[choo-chee]

thanks man.
I'll be happy to get some more replies.
My main issue is the noise, and rendering takes too long and never reaches more than SL 19, more or less.
I believe that SL 22 is good, and use about 4000X2000 resolution for interiors.

[luis.hijarrubia]

Had you checked this tutorial?

http://support.nextlimit.com/display/tu ... or+renders

[choo-chee]

not good enough. it's either noise or too bright and washed. I think a tutorial with a "real" scene (full furniture etc.) with good balance of sun and emitters and noise and render time...would help a lot of us.*edit* - plus remember you can't place an emitter on the floor when you have a carpet and a table and a sofa...

[Mihai]

I've found in interiors where you mix physical sky (or HDR), with regular emitters, you will get the slowest render times, by far. It will actually be (much) faster to do two separate renders, one with just the physical sky and one with only the emitters. The emitters alone will render very quickly to say SL 15 and it will tend to be a lot cleaner by that SL than Physical Sky at SL 15. Then, leave the Physical Sky only, to render to about SL 18-19. It will reach this SL much faster than if you had done emitters+Sky in a single render. Then just open the MXI files in PS as 32bit files and combine them.

The thing is if you do run a render where you combine these two very different types of emitters, and use Multilight, and you solo the emitters only layer you will see that it is noise free much sooner than the Sky layer which needs at least SL 18-19 for an interior. So you are then continuing to render *also* the emitters layer for nothing, and thus it also slows down the Sky layer which needs more time. And this is why it's actually faster to separate these situations into two: one render with emitters only to around SL 14-15 (maybe even lower and do a denoising in PS), and another with Sky only to around SL 18. Hope this makes sense...if others have time to test this scenario it would be great to have some feedback on what you find.

The other benefit (but this works also if you do just one render and use ML), is that since the Sky light layer will tend to be noisier, just do a heavier denoising of it in PS, and depending on your needs you can also blend it to just 60%-70% and thus you have "30% less noise" in the final image since you are making this noisier layer less influential.

I think people generally underestimate the power of denoising and especially being smart about which parts of the render and which light layers when using ML you should denoise the most. If rendering to SL 17 + slight denoising in post = 3 hours, I'll take that, compared to SL 19 and 8 hours render. Even the default denoising filter in PS CC is now pretty capable.

[choo-chee]

Mihai, that's a good advice that I'm gonna try. I now recall rendering (also posted it here somewhere...) 1 sun and 1 dome and merging them with merge MXI.
So I got cleaner renders by a bit. But your advice may be the thing I'm looking for as all my interiors has all sort of spots (ceiling etc.) and this may be the answer.
gonna try this weekend and see what happens...

[Mihai]

Just a note though, I'm not sure if Merge MXI will work ok in these cases, you might get some strange ghosting and so on. I'd just combine the two or more separate renders in PS by setting each "light layer" to Linear Dodge blending mode (in case you use 32bit files, otherwise use Screen mode), just as you would have to do when you import a regular Multilight MXI with the PS plugin, to be able to mix the light layers correctly.

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[choo-chee]

Just a note though, I'm not sure if Merge MXI will work ok in these cases, you might get some strange ghosting and so on. I'd just combine the two or more separate renders in PS by setting each "light layer" to Linear Dodge blending mode (in case you use 32bit files, otherwise use Screen mode), just as you would have to do when you import a regular Multilight MXI with the PS plugin, to be able to mix the light layers correctly.

sorry for asking dumb question but it seems as photoshop has no layer support for 32 bit images....? what am I missing?

[Mihai]

It does, starting from I don't remember which version. I'm on CC 2015. Not all the editing tools and filters will be available in 32bit mode, but you will be able to stack layers and set a blending a mode.