Hello There,
I’m a novice. I have a 650k polycount, I have a large number of glossy materials, a fair number of glass materials, and around 50 lights. Some high poly materials have been “mr_proxied” like blinds, and I’ve used mostly off-the-shelf images with A&D. I

Right now It’s taking taking and hour to render a frame. I’ve followed this link for starters but I feel I’m doing something wrong but I’m too clueless right now to figure it out.

Work
3d Studio Max In Design 2009, 64bit
4G Ram
Intel Core 2 Quad 2.5GHz
VC-INNO3D 9800GTX 512M
Windows Home Premium Vista
Worker
Pentium D 2.5GHz; 4G Ram
Inno3d 9600 GT 512
Windows Home Basic 64bit

Justin Aquino 04 December 2008 03:11 AM

Hello There,
I’m a novice. I have a 650k polycount, I have a large number of glossy materials, a fair number of glass materials, and around 50 lights. Some high poly materials have been “mr_proxied” like blinds, and I’ve used mostly off-the-shelf images with A&D. I

Right now It’s taking taking and hour to render a frame. I’ve followed this link for starters but I feel I’m doing something wrong but I’m too clueless right now to figure it out.

I’ve followed this link for starters but I feel I’m doing something wrong but I’m too clueless right now to figure it out.

That is all about reducing memory usage, to avoid running out of memory and getting errors or crashes.
It’s not about rendering faster, that’s a different subject. In fact using a memory saving method may well be slower.
The speed of rendering depends on many factors, not just poly count and materials, but a lot of render settings and lighting, such as FG and GI settings, pixel sampling and trace depth etc… Frames taking over an hour are not unusual in some scenes.

Just guessing by the size of your scene and discription, it seems like mabe a fairly small room and 50 lights seems like a lot! If you are using physical scale, would you really have 50 lights in this room? It takes a lot of time to calculate each light and the bounces. I would suggest turning off half of the lights, check you are using automatic exposure control set to an interior preset, turn off GI and adjust the bounces for your FG. With glossy materials the light will bounce around to give teh lighting so that many actual lights is not required.

Again, this is all assumptions about your scene.

Greecee Berger
Max 2011, 32 bit

As stated, I would guess that the lights are causing the slowness. Not sure if you have shadows turned on for all of them. A&D can slow things down depending on what you are doing.

Here is what I normally do if I have a performance issue and it is not because of memory…

A) I render with a single light - no shadows light.  This is normally a standard omni or spot light.

If that is dramatically faster, then I start looking at my lights. For example, I always have a major slowdown with hair and shadows.

If that does not solve the problem,

B) I use the render material override and set it to a default material with no reflection or refraction.

If that dramatically speeds things up, then I start going through all the materials to find the problem. I have found tweaking advanced rendering options in A&D to really help.

If A and B are still slow, then I have problems....

Guy Galer
http://www.twist-edgames.com

Thank you guys, I’ve looked closer at my file and I do have a lot of lights. The scene I’m working on is a concept office with all the frills and flourishes. There are under lightings, lines of small little spot lights, and a few main lights.

I followed your advice and have broken up the scenes into many sub scenes for each camera view (which is a pretty standard operation) and cut out many of the other light sources and objects that get in the way. Tackling the lights, I just simply reduced their number, but I can’t seem to reduce it without changing much of what was requested in the design. So I guess I’m breaking up the scenes to even smaller pieces to reduce the lighting even further.

Thanks Again, I’ll post what I’ve learned in order for future references.

Work
3d Studio Max In Design 2009, 64bit
4G Ram
Intel Core 2 Quad 2.5GHz
VC-INNO3D 9800GTX 512M
Windows Home Premium Vista
Worker
Pentium D 2.5GHz; 4G Ram
Inno3d 9600 GT 512
Windows Home Basic 64bit

Tackling the lights, I just simply reduced their number, but I can’t seem to reduce it without changing much of what was requested in the design

Could some possibly be replaced by self illuminating objects?
For glossy reflections, you could try Fast Interpolate and or max distance and reducing trace depth for the materials. Use FG and Highlights Only for subtle reflections.

Samab 05 December 2008 07:47 AM

Tackling the lights, I just simply reduced their number, but I can’t seem to reduce it without changing much of what was requested in the design

Could some possibly be replaced by self illuminating objects?
For glossy reflections, you could try Fast Interpolate and or max distance and reducing trace depth for the materials. Use FG and Highlights Only for subtle reflections.

Does Self illuminating Objects add less complexities than Photometric light? You mean i could just have one light and all the lights in the room are Self-Illuminating objects? Wow, I didn’t of that!

Thanks Samab!

edit: I realized that I could have used MR samples as a guage for basic System Rendering Speed. I figure it would have been useful to get the basic processing time of a given system to compare against more complicated projects. Noting the difference in lights, amount of reflective/refractive materials and of course default render settings.

i guess if I compared my scenes complexity with the MR living room sample I could say that i had X more lights, X more complex materials, X more etc. etc.

Work
3d Studio Max In Design 2009, 64bit
4G Ram
Intel Core 2 Quad 2.5GHz
VC-INNO3D 9800GTX 512M
Windows Home Premium Vista
Worker
Pentium D 2.5GHz; 4G Ram
Inno3d 9600 GT 512
Windows Home Basic 64bit