[photomg1]

Mihai wrote
[/quote]I think people still don't really get how much more difficult it is to render a closed interior, compared to a semi open or open one. If you plan a bit more carefully you could easily have at least twice or 5 times faster render times if you for example have only one or two real walls etc. in the scene, and the rest is lit with an HDR map. Sort of like a real TV studio set.[/quote]


This is what I'm trying to get more info on ,

hence my replies after that post Mihai, pointing out pitfalls and wondering if there was solutions I didn't know to those pitfalls. I completely get your last post regarding the chair example and its what i agreed with you on from the start .Sorry it wasn't clear what my replies where in reference too. Hope they make sense now.


Best

[RobMitchell]

I can't really add to this topic as it's beyond my workflow and general knowledge of this matter, however...

I understand and appreciate the issues of Maxwell and closed interior renders taking a long time, so I've always been ok with finding ways around it, but that workaround just seems crazy to have to set up regardless in order to get that result. Also there's probably quite a big chunk of time taken by extra set up steps and post production from that method too, I'd imagine?

[photomg1]

The chair workaround makes perfect sense to me Rob , the post time would in no way compare to doing 10 full renders.

[Mihai]

I can't really add to this topic as it's beyond my workflow and general knowledge of this matter, however...

I understand and appreciate the issues of Maxwell and closed interior renders taking a long time, so I've always been ok with finding ways around it, but that workaround just seems crazy to have to set up regardless in order to get that result. Also there's probably quite a big chunk of time taken by extra set up steps and post production from that method too, I'd imagine?

I don't know how else to say it - this isn't a RULE. It's a suggestion. It's up to your judgement to see if it will in the end save you time or not. I'm not trying to hold anybodies hand and say DO THIS, PRESS THIS BUTTON. Use your judgement.

In Erics case he has 10 interior renders to do with 10 different chairs. A simple calculation shows that there is a way to get 5X faster renders, since he has 10 of them to do. Is it worth it IN THIS CASE? Yes. Copy pasting the shadow pass inside a PS document, then the chair render takes a few seconds per render.

Other case: You have 1 interior render. Do you need to make such a setup? Probably not.

Other case: 250 frame animation of a few objects in an interior. Each frame takes 5 hours because it is an interior. Is it worth it to explore an option of replacing that interior with a 360 view of it? Probably worth exploring that option yes, and get your render time per frame down from 5 hours to 20min.

[photomg1]

Did you see this Mihai ?
thanks

Mihai wrote

I think people still don't really get how much more difficult it is to render a closed interior, compared to a semi open or open one. If you plan a bit more carefully you could easily have at least twice or 5 times faster render times if you for example have only one or two real walls etc. in the scene, and the rest is lit with an HDR map. Sort of like a real TV studio set.[/quote]


This is what I'm trying to get more info on ,

hence my replies after that post Mihai, pointing out pitfalls and wondering if there was solutions I didn't know to those pitfalls. I completely get your last post regarding the chair example and its what i agreed with you on from the start .Sorry it wasn't clear what my replies where in reference too. Hope they make sense now.


Best[/quote]

[egmehl]

I did exactly what Mihai described (well actually I baked the shadow pass into the base render because only the fabric on the chair was changing).

Rob - it wasn't really all that much extra work, and as Mihai said, especially not compared to doing a bunch of full renders. I just modeled the scene like normal, did my test renders with everything included, then at the last minute separated out the chair, rendered with the spherical camera, etc. I rendered the chair fabrics as an animation and comp'ed everything in Nuke so it was pretty straightforward.

Back to the topic of rendering the animation, I'd definitely say it's worth experimenting with and doing a partial test to see what kind of speedups you can get. The other thing to think about is what is the client likely to change at the last minute? If they are happy with the room set, render it out and get it done separately so you don't have to create a brand new 1250 hr render when they choose to extend the chair back up an extra inch or two.

[RobMitchell]

I can't really add to this topic as it's beyond my workflow and general knowledge of this matter, however...

I understand and appreciate the issues of Maxwell and closed interior renders taking a long time, so I've always been ok with finding ways around it, but that workaround just seems crazy to have to set up regardless in order to get that result. Also there's probably quite a big chunk of time taken by extra set up steps and post production from that method too, I'd imagine?

I don't know how else to say it - this isn't a RULE. It's a suggestion. It's up to your judgement to see if it will in the end save you time or not. I'm not trying to hold anybodies hand and say DO THIS, PRESS THIS BUTTON. Use your judgement.

Hang on a minute... It's pretty shocking how often you snap at people for posting their thoughts on a comment. I didn't say it was a rule (I clearly mentioned it as a workaround in the post you quoted) or even a bad way to go around achieving that particular result. It was more a point of it's not a natural way to think about rendering and I don't think many people would think of doing that without having to seek help first. I mean, say someone downloads Maxwell for the first time with the intention of creating an interior render (still or animated) and has, rightly, modeled and materialed everything as it would be in real life only to find it'll take x amount of time, that's one thing, but without a lot of experience in Maxwell you'd have no idea about how to create that workaround to speed up time.

It's a not a dig at the suggestion at all - that all seems fine and I'm sure it'd work perfectly - but coming at it from the perspective on the average user, it's a workflow that would be easily missed in my opinion and that just stuck out to me.

[Mihai]

My mistake then, I guess I interpret english in a weird, strange way:

but that workaround just seems crazy to have to set up regardless in order to get that result. Also there's probably quite a big chunk of time taken by extra set up steps and post production from that method too

It's a not a dig at the suggestion at all - that all seems fine and I'm sure it'd work perfectly

Thanks for translating for me, now I understand what you ment.


photomg1, I didn't understand what exactly those pitfalls are?

pointing out pitfalls and wondering if there was solutions I didn't know to those pitfalls

[photomg1]

Hi Mihai,
thanks for the reply . I'm trying to get you to expand on what you said here.

I think people still don't really get how much more difficult it is to render a closed interior, compared to a semi open or open one. If you plan a bit more carefully you could easily have at least twice or 5 times faster render times if you for example have only one or two real walls etc. in the scene, and the rest is lit with an HDR map. Sort of like a real TV studio set."

i'm after any speed up I can get and have no objections to setting up an interior as if it's a room set (in the photographic sense) .

For example using Egmehi's scene , in a room set you could remove the walls out of shot .But because his scene is lit with a hdri now those walls are gone its going to be lit up heavily by the blue in the hdri and the reflections are all from the hdri not the missing walls. Now as on a room set you could place white/black poly's to cover the reflections and also use panels to flag the brightness down on the set were desired. But as its a 360 degree light that blue is everywhere and not the bounced colour of the sun on the interior walls in his image.

So are you suggesting as in the real life video I posted here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv3o2h5iDBo to forget about the hdri , and to light the whole scene using emitters to get the speed up OR are you suggesting to manually alter the hdri removing colour and lowering the density to simulate where the removed walls would have been.


If none of that makes sense , in effect I'm asking you how you would set up Egmehi scene . So it looked similar but followed your suggestion of treating it like a tv studio set to get the 2-5 times speed up.

Thanks

[eric nixon]

Egmehl, dont forget render-region as an option here. It would be better all round, easier and quicker,.. but i'm ipressed all the same that you got good results this way.

nice renders.

[hatts]

Yeah, it's sort of funny that one of the nicest Maxwell renders I've seen in a while was just nonchalantly plopped down in the middle of an advice seeking thread. Nice one egmehl

[Mihai]

photomg1, ok I see what you mean now. Well, once you've rendered out your 360 view of the room:

1. Take out two of the walls, lets say in this case the grey walls, and we keep only the wall with the windows, and the other wall.
2. Replace that HDR you used for IBL, with this new 360 view you just created.

So now you have your grey walls "back" right? Now because the part where the blue bright scene outside is no longer in this new HDR (or at least it's not correct since it will have the windows etc. baked into it), I would maybe extract that view of the trees outside and map it to a big plane as an image emitter, and place it right outside the windows. Or of course, you could simply extract parts of the blue bright HDR and use it as a large emitter outside the windows directly, and just remove two of the walls so you just have blackness there instead, but I think you would loose too much then.

EricN, how would render region speed up anything in Erics case? Maxwell doesn't stop calculating stuff just because it's outside the cameras frame.

*how to extract parts of the HDR? I like to use the Photoshop plugin Flexify from Flaming Pear. It's great for cleaning up HDR panos too.

...and yeah, great renders Eric!

[photomg1]

Thanks Mihai !

I'll give that a go. In my mind I'm concerned that the sun in the hdri will not work the same being on a plane outside the window (I'll get a big soft coloured light coming through the windows rather than how it worked being placed at infinite distance on the sky dome). Need to try it first ,I can think of one workaround on that by having two emitters planes outside the window.A smaller more powerful one on the sun mapped hdri emitter plane , and the large one on the sky mapped hdri emitter plane.

Anyway best I test it now

[photomg1]

Hi Mihai and all ,
Some quick tests ,I kept all materials very simple so I could see what was going on. I'm going to assume I'm doing something wrong as I cant see any speed up. Do I look like I have set this up wrong somehow?

original enclosed room



result after 30 mins



now 2 walls out of shot removed also the ceiling , spherical hdri of the room used as global hdri.Plus hdri emitter infront of the window



result after 30 mins



The only real difference I can see on this second image is how the hdri is filling in the shadows where the two remaining walls meet , the right side of the image around the chair is just as noisy and the floor actually seems to contain more noise.What is noticeably cleaner is the reflection on the chrome that see the hdri .

Have I gone wrong somewhere , or does this not actually work in practice ? I'm actually quite surprised at the results so far.

Thanks

[Mihai]

Can you try also with only the HDR, hide the emitter?