Long time rendering easy scene

[Anonymous]

I am newie in archicad. Its my first scene rendering. IT is a very small scene of an stair case with 4 fluorescent lights. I choose the indoor final preset for a 2000 pixels quality and it goes through GI rather quick but it is going very slowing rendering, almost stuck on 1%. The issue has to do with the interiors lights, biz if I disable them it works.

Any suggestions of a set up to modify to have a 2000 pixels render of a small scene in about 45 minutes. It is only for a previous presentation.

[Erwin Edel]

The 'final' presets are horribly taxing.

Light settings do also impact render times. It can be very tempting to turn on all the settings for visible light, smoke, beams, etc effects.

A quick way to light a scene is to use the General light, put it at infinite strenght and put it behind the camera. Think of it as one of those fancy 'umbrella' lights a photographer would bring to light out the scene.

Now chose a 'fast' render scene to begin with: Indoor Daylight Fast (Physical).

Go into detailed settings.

Turn on the lamps under Light Adjustments.

Under Global Illumination go for Preset Interior Preview.

Under Physical Renderer > Physical Camera pick F-stop, ISO and shutter speed more fitting for interior photography. Something like 5.6, 400, 1/8. But play with these settings depending on how much light you want the lens to capture.

Go in Options > General Options. Put Ray Threshold to 0 for best reflections, Ray depth and Reflection Depth up to something like 12.

This should give you some lower settings to start with. Play with the camera settings (iso etc) and turn the GI preset to Interior Final if you notice too many spots on surfaces.

[mikas]

Thank You Very Much Erwin.

I still get the spots at times more than enough, but with your help and very thorough explanations of those settings I have managed to find some reproducible procedures to reduce them (the spots) a lot. Cinerender is almost flawless with outside renderings, with sun only, but with a mixture of inside lights it gets a little bit nightmarish to handle nicely.

Sometimes I tend to use hundreds of lighting sources inside the building. I tend to model every single light source as it is meant to be built. It's a tedious task to adjust them so they do not produce these fields of lighted spots. And you all allready know it takes quite a time to render this much of lighting and illumination information.

[Anonymous]

mikas wrote:
accidental double post, sorry..

IT almost impossible to me to render a simple scene with only 4 lights and final presets quality. I can see in your scene many lights. My question is can you use the final presets quality? I am using a Mac computer.

[Anonymous]

Erwin wrote:
The 'final' presets are horribly taxing.

Light settings do also impact render times. It can be very tempting to turn on all the settings for visible light, smoke, beams, etc effects.

A quick way to light a scene is to use the General light, put it at infinite strenght and put it behind the camera. Think of it as one of those fancy 'umbrella' lights a photographer would bring to light out the scene.

Now chose a 'fast' render scene to begin with: Indoor Daylight Fast (Physical).

Go into detailed settings.

Turn on the lamps under Light Adjustments.

Under Global Illumination go for Preset Interior Preview.

Under Physical Renderer > Physical Camera pick F-stop, ISO and shutter speed more fitting for interior photography. Something like 5.6, 400, 1/8. But play with these settings depending on how much light you want the lens to capture.

Go in Options > General Options. Put Ray Threshold to 0 for best reflections, Ray depth and Reflection Depth up to something like 12.

This should give you some lower settings to start with. Play with the camera settings (iso etc) and turn the GI preset to Interior Final if you notice too many spots on surfaces.

Thank you Erwin
I have some doubts.

Where can I find the camera. I am an 3ds max user and in 3ds you can select the camera, but in Archicad I just select the view with the navigation tools, like orbit,...,

Which is the purpose of using a general light, nevertheless you are using the scene lights afterwards.

Thank you
Xosé

[Anonymous]

Erwin wrote:
The 'final' presets are horribly taxing.

Light settings do also impact render times. It can be very tempting to turn on all the settings for visible light, smoke, beams, etc effects.

A quick way to light a scene is to use the General light, put it at infinite strenght and put it behind the camera. Think of it as one of those fancy 'umbrella' lights a photographer would bring to light out the scene.

Now chose a 'fast' render scene to begin with: Indoor Daylight Fast (Physical).

Go into detailed settings.

Turn on the lamps under Light Adjustments.

Under Global Illumination go for Preset Interior Preview.

Under Physical Renderer > Physical Camera pick F-stop, ISO and shutter speed more fitting for interior photography. Something like 5.6, 400, 1/8. But play with these settings depending on how much light you want the lens to capture.

Go in Options > General Options. Put Ray Threshold to 0 for best reflections, Ray depth and Reflection Depth up to something like 12.

This should give you some lower settings to start with. Play with the camera settings (iso etc) and turn the GI preset to Interior Final if you notice too many spots on surfaces.

Need help again.
I speak Spanish and English and currently working on Sweden so I am using a Swedish menu on archicad, I can t find the option for infinite strength, please could you tell me where it is.
Regards

[mikas]

darwinland wrote:

mikas wrote:
accidental double post, sorry..

IT almost impossible to me to render a simple scene with only 4 lights and final presets quality. I can see in your scene many lights. My question is can you use the final presets quality? I am using a Mac computer.

This time I had 65 light sources total. A FullHD 1920x1080 render took several hours, depending on settings. I did adjust the settings quite a lot this time trying to find a good combination, so I can't tell exactly what those are/were. It's too tedious to write them down here, sorry. The settings were towards the upper quality of everything, though.

And these renders almost ate up all of my memory. I have a bunch of older Macs here, and 32GB was barely enough, 48GB was sufficient, but my poor PC (pleas see signature) did not make it with 24GB of RAM. It just quit with "not enough memory".

The picture attached probably had at least very close to one hundred light sources (done with ArchiCAD 18 couple of years ago). You can't see all lights/lamps at once, they are in the pool room back there, they might have their impact on GI and intensity of overall lighting, I don't remember exactly what settings I put in there. These and a few similar renders took something like overnight to finish at FullHD and WQHD, and at 5K it was a matter of hole day or a day and a half to finish. They used RAM a lot too, 16-32GB became very handy.

I believe that you can't have too much working RAM with higher end rendering settings.

[Anonymous]

mikas wrote:

darwinland wrote:

mikas wrote:
accidental double post, sorry..

IT almost impossible to me to render a simple scene with only 4 lights and final presets quality. I can see in your scene many lights. My question is can you use the final presets quality? I am using a Mac computer.

This time I had 65 light sources total. A FullHD 1920x1080 render took several hours, depending on settings. I did adjust the settings quite a lot this time trying to find a good combination, so I can't tell exactly what those are/were. It's too tedious to write them down here, sorry. The settings were towards the upper quality of everything, though.

And these renders almost ate up all of my memory. I have a bunch of older Macs here, and 32GB was barely enough, 48GB was sufficient, but my poor PC (pleas see signature) did not make it with 24GB of RAM. It just quit with "not enough memory".

The picture attached probably had at least very close to one hundred light sources (done with ArchiCAD 18 couple of years ago). You can't see all lights/lamps at once, they are in the pool room back there, they might have their impact on GI and intensity of overall lighting, I don't remember exactly what settings I put in there. These and a few similar renders took something like overnight to finish at FullHD and WQHD, and at 5K it was a matter of hole day or a day and a half to finish. They used RAM a lot too, 16-32GB became very handy.

I believe that you can't have too much working RAM with higher end rendering settings.

I appreciate the help of our colleague that make me possible to run this render with lights on. But I still have some questions.
1 In order to reduce the brightness of the lights on the ceiling should I lower the intensity in the render setup and increase the value of the general light or can I modify the values of the lights itself like an object.

2 I am happy with the reflex on the glass and the stair below, but to avoid the reflex in the lift on the left, it looks like the material was mirror inestead of plastic. IS there any option in render window without affecting the glass or should I act on the building material as well.

By the was what is infinite strength of a general light?

thank you

[Barry Kelly]

Yes you should be able to adjust the light intensity of each light object individually rather than adjusting the global render settings.

For the reflection on the lift you need to modify the material used or change to another material that isn't so reflective.

Barry.

[Erwin Edel]

The General Light is the one that looks like a sphere in the little preview picture.

On the first tab of settings there should be a field where you can fill out a light strength parameter, but also an option to set it to infinite strength.

Turn off shadows and just use this to flood the scene with a bit more light, allowing you to tone down the lamps. Place the light behind your camera, so you do not see the (very slight) sphere in your render.

The light fixtures from ArchiCAD have very limited settings and lower quality light as well. I would turn off their light and place IES lights (would be great if you know the actual fixture you would be using and can download the IES file) or use the general spotlights and such. These have a lot higher quality lighting than the fixtures and more parameters to control what you see as visible light. Just use the fixtures for the 3D model. You can also make the glass of fixtures glow (remember to turn on glow effect in detailed settings). This is a post production effect, where the glass will appear to emit light. It does not actually light up the room, but means you can 'fake' the light shining look and just use some quick general lights to light out the room, instead of using many fixtures.

Also play with shutterspeed, ISO and F-stop to make things a bit brighter, allowing you to dial down the light strength. Settings that work for outdoor renders, will leave you with very dark interior renders, same as with photography.