Well, I hate having to redo this but due to overly long render times, I've been assigned to get a final set built and relit. Here's the start of 1-02-04a.

Very nice.

Nice. What did you change?

The light rig. It went from around a 60 hour render per frame, roughly (according to Martin) to 29 mins. I never completed a render with the old rig, over an hour for first pass and still going, so aborted the render.

This is good looking.

Thanks Ives, at least I know I'm on the right track, I think. It's not great, but I guess it will do with some tweaking. Also still need to add more props to the background yet, a couple of tree tops showing here and there. Lighting 1-02-04 now, render times are gonna go up, the castle, more reflections.

THe background really adds a lot to the scene. That is a very good addition.

As for render times, when I read about that 60 hour vs 29 minutes render time comparisons, I had to run a test. This 60 hours was with v13, several months ago. Since then I made several improvements to v14 renderer. Some of those improvements were specifically done to improve rendering scenes with a lot of reflective surfaces like thoise scenes. So I ran a render test in v14 with 1_02_03 and I get 7m40s average render time per pass on a 9 pass render. It is not finished rendering yet but at this rate, I expect a little over 1h of render time. I never lighted scene 1_02_04a because there was a glitch in the chor file that prevented me to open it. But my next render test will be with 1_02_04.

That's good to know, but I don't have v14.

1_02_03 rendered in 1h6m. I was going to run a render test with 1_02_04 but I found out that the lighting rig I setup in that scene is gone. So, in order to run my test I will have to revert to a previous version. But consider those render test just for the sake of getting our render times comparison on a more current perspective because I have no intention of redoing the lighting on those scenes again. Thay are all yours to light the way you want.

I'm setting up 1_02_03 and will render with 9 passes, previous renders were 4 passes. Even with your lower render time in v14, my renders will also be shorter, correct?

Also, 1-02-04 didn't have your rig in it for me either.

I won't be able to light the scenes to your quality, I just hope they'll do, since I have no clue to what I'm doing. Not sure how I even got involved in lighting anything.

Here's 1-02-03 rendered in v13, 9 passes. The render took 1h 8mins 41 secs. The lighting needs adjustments, but I wanted to check the render times. Ives, what was the render time with you rig in v13?

Not sure. It will be interesting to see the difference. One of the main differences is how reflection is handled. In v14, if the reflections are 100%, the surface shading is not even calculated because at 100%, all the surface color comes from the reflections. v13 does not do that and computes the surface shading even if it is multiplied by 0% later so that amounts to a lot of calculations for nothing. My guess is that if you get 29 minutes render time in v13, it should be even faster in v14.

No. I know. The light rigs got lost a few months ago.

Sincerely, Mark, I think you are doing a very good job with the lighting. I thought you were doing a good lighting job with Nimmie house and you are doing a good lighting job here too.

I don't remember. I will run a test render in v13 so we can compare. But I know it is significantly longer than 1 hour.

Well, at some point I'll upload the scene to the svn and you can test the render time with a different rig, to see if there is a difference.

Cool!

Mark,
This is really outstanding work.



I just added the image in your earlier post as the Featured Image on the TWO wiki and already you've got me thinking its time to update.

Beautiful.

Edit: I compromised and just added both.

Didn't Woot used to run down the center of the path?

Anyway....what lights are you using Mark? A sky rig? Is there any reason that you chose to have the sun to the right of frame? I assume that's consistent with the sun in previous scenes. Give us details man!

Woot runs from the side towards the center of the path, he's just not there yet.

This is the all-in-one model I refered to in another thread that I was working on, it's made up of 4 sun lights. The sun direction is roughly the same as the old rig, will be adjusting that more to what it was, don't like the shadows coming directly acroos the path, but I was trying to keep it consistant with the previous render of woot on the bridge.

For comparison, 1_01_03 took 4h25m to render in v13. Same lighting and setup I was using with v14. So for this particular scene, v14 is 4 times faster than v13.

Wow, nice job on optimizing v14's renderer. I just hope my setup will render in half the time.

Wow! More giant steps from Yves!
Thank you so much!

Well, I'm not too happy with it, but here's 1-02-01b

Looks good. That oak behind his head is awesome.

I can't really pin point the light problems....it just feels abit off though not terrible. But those lashes on woot aren't working too well and there seems to be alot of reflection in his eyes which is distracting.

It's the same light setup as Woot on the bridge, I'll have to make some changes.

A rim light behind Woot's left side would help a bit in this shot.

Well, I added the rim light. That darn shirt acted up, I think it has something to do with the oren nayar shader that is applied to it.

Wow! Much better with the rim! This looks great Mark!