[Mihai]

In my opinion the most important thing to keep in mind is that you will get the slowest renders when you mix different types of lighting - be it emitters + Phy Sky, emitters + IBL.

What problems specifically are you having with that tutorial? That tutorial is ment to show that emitters will look the cleanest if you use them for lighting, in a scene where also Physical Sky is used, or IBL. You can even tweak the "cleanlyness" using Multilight and lowering the influence of the Physical Sky, which will contain the most noise compared to the emitters only version. Show some examples...

[kami]

My personal list goes something like this. It is not specially optimized on a fast rendering but more on a fast workflow, as my time is more important to me than the rendering time

- Have a clean scene: only have stuff modelled that you see
- Use as less emitters as possible and as simple emitters as possible
- Disable instances for longer renderings
- avoid too complex materials (SSS, grass, displacement) if not extremely important
- only use the masks that are really needed

[CodyKallas]

Thanks I will keep all of this in mind.

I can't post examples because I am learning this with client work. We have been really busy. Im not trying to make it sound like I am producing bad work, I am just tweaking the details as much as possible.

What I didn't get about the tutorial was it saying try to only use emitters, then it says when you use physical sky or IBL use emitters for "cleanlyness".

Well if only emitters is the best route then why use physical sky or IBL at all and just light with emitters?

But then in like this thread, we are talking about using an hdr to light the chair scene, but why not just light the chair scene with emitters if its faster?

[Mihai]

It's just for adding a bit more variety to the lighting, compared to the even, homogenous color of an emitter. Of course you can map an image to the emitter and thus have more variety. Just depends on the look you want, and sometimes it might just be easier and quicker to set up an IBL lighting in the scene.

[CodyKallas]

Okay, that makes sense then, I just thought there was more to it then that.

Thanks

[numerobis]

In my opinion the most important thing to keep in mind is that you will get the slowest renders when you mix different types of lighting - be it emitters + Phy Sky, emitters + IBL.

Of course you can map an image to the emitter and thus have more variety.

So, does this mean that a mapped hdri is not the same as when i put it into the IBL slots? When i map the hdri to a sphere and combine it with other emitters or even other hdri mapped emitters... would this be faster?

[Mihai]

IBL is one type of emitter. Emitter surfaces (planes, spheres, models) (mapped with an HDR or not) are another type of emitter.

[egmehl]

Mihai, Do you think it would be a faster render to export 2 scenes, one with all the surface emitters and one with plain hdri, then recombine in post vs. exporting everything in one scene?

Is it possible to say, or would it be too scene dependent?

[Mihai]

I'm really not sure if it would be faster to render it twice, with each emitter type, because as that lighting tutorial shows, simply lowering the influence of the Physical Sky (or IBL) would lower the amount of noise visible in the final image, since it would be the emitter surfaces that would produce the least noise.

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

So I'm doubting if the combined time of two renders will be faster, vs same render time with all emitters together. It might even be faster since you have the choice of lowering the influence of the Sky/IBL and thus reducing the visible noise and giving you a faster render time, than waiting for two separate renders to finish.