Cinerender rendering painfully slow...what am I doing wrong?

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

I'm struggling with rendering times with Cinerender. I'm trying to produce a single rendered image for print, the image has taken 3.5 hours to render 1.5% of the image.

I'm using lights, textures, and furniture with hight polygon counts, and my image resolution is 300dpi, but in order to achieve high quality prints this seems to be necessary. My settings are attached.

Any suggestions? Am I being unrealistic to expect faster rendering times? What is the point of having an excellent rendering program, because at this rate, one image would take 233 hours...

Can someone recommend some good out of the box settings that I can try instead? I feel like I've worked my way down a rendering settings rabbit hole, and I don't know which tunnel to walk through next!

[Barry Kelly]

There are many post about rendering speed here, so have a browse around and see what you can find.

Here is one that is happening right now.


https://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=66304


As you alluded to yourself it depends on what lights, textures and there many settings, adn object with many polygons you are using.

It is very hard for us to know what you have going on without having the actual file.

Try some of the pre-set rendering scenes - outdoor daylight fast, outdoor daylight medium, etc.
You can then compare their settings and this may give you some clues as to why times slow down.
If you find a scene that is almost as you like, then you can tweak it and save it as your own scene.

Barry.

[Lingwisyer]

Also, if your computer is actually what you have got listed in your signature, you are woefully short on RAM to do any sort of decent rendering. I would suggest you look into acquiring more RAM.



Ling.

[Erwin Edel]

Even with a massive amount of RAM that 600x300 mm at 300 dpi will allways yield long render times.

If you are trying to fill something like an A1 sheet with a 3D perspective view in a hurry, you might want to place a 3D document vectorial view on a layout A1 instead.

We have a large format printer at full colour, but the quality is rather poor compared to our colour laser printer that goes up to A3 sheets.

Also the print quality of that large format printer doesn't warrant setting something at 300 dpi, as you just won't see that in the printed result.

We render the bulk of our stuff at 195x135 mm at 300 dpi and when this is printed on a full A4 you end up with something like 180-200 dpi probably and it still looks crisp on our Xerox C70 using quality paper.

[Anonymous]

Lingwisyer wrote:
Also, if your computer is actually what you have got listed in your signature, you are woefully short on RAM to do any sort of decent rendering. I would suggest you look into acquiring more RAM.



Ling.

Thanks Ling,
How much RAM would you recommend?
The frustrating thing is that I purchased this computer yesterday, and apple assured me that it would be suitable for my purposes
I was concerned about the amount of ram, but was advised that 8 would be sufficient! I had a feeling...

[Erwin Edel]

If we're nitpicking, that i5 processor is not something I would've recommended either. I think the iMacs come stock with i5 and 8GB, they probably didn't have the upgraded model on the shelf and figured you wouldn't notice

16 GB is your bare minimum, it's what I get by with on my HP workstation, but I also know the limitations of that 16 GB (and my billable hours!), so I don't try to render full size A4 or A3 or even bigger images at 300 dpi.

[Lingwisyer]

I am not actually sure how much you would need for something along the lines of what you are trying to render. I at most do simple daylight renders at like 150 dpi... Anything more goes to a visual artist. I do commit at least 10gb to Photoshop though and I would figure that if you are trying to render photoreal you would need more than that when using CineRender...

Take into account your viewing distance as that will affect what resolution you will need for a given size. Do you actually viewing at a distance where you can tell the difference between 300dpi and 200dpi?



Ling.

[Carstenem]

I can see your image size on the bottom left is over 7000 Pixels, which is quite large. Even faster render engines like vray etc. can take 1 - 2 hours for this size depending on the quality settings and size of project/3D model.

I suggest to swap to pixels from mm @ 72 dpi, then render an image at around 3000 pixels and see how long this takes as a test. Also make sure you have no 3D grass that is really slow.

If you would need A1, think how close people will actually stand to the A1. So sometimes people go over board with resolution and dpi because looking at an full image at A1 you would stand at least 2 meter back, the further back the less resolution you need

[Anonymous]

As stated already, If you are rendering only using Archicad, and i5 and 8gb of RAM will give painfully slow renders using Cinerender in Archicad.

Apple wrongfully told you the machine would be great for this type of thing when its actually quite under-specced truthfully.

Since Archicad uses Cinerender as its rendering engine, it really benefits from better CPU's rather than GPU's (which your iMac has a semi decent one). More cores with faster clock speeds will help with faster renders.

You could try using the Corona add-on for archicad which will help utilise your GPU more if you'd like to try that but again Corona is still not perfect working in Archicad and you will have to learn how to use that plug in and then change your textures/surface settings according with using Corona too.

[Steve Jepson]

This might help to see how efficient your computer is at rendering with CineRender ?

https://www.maxon.net/en/products/cinebench-r20-overview/

Even without using any of my GPU cuda cores I can get a reasonable result using only CPU with the NVIDIA P5000. It's a good value I think for use with ArchiCAD and my other rendering progams that use GPU also.