Scene optimizing

[romullus]

What render limit you're using to estimate rendering time? Is it noise level? Maybe it's set too low? I would suggest to do small region render tests in most problematic places to see what noise level is acceptable for you. Also do you consider to use denoising? It could significantly reduce render time at the cost of barely noticeable quality loss.

[Hadi]

Hi Romullus.
I set it up to 3%. Is it too low? What would you recommend?
Never experienced with denoise, but I assume that in this case I won't have any other option. Since I'm working with vegetation quite often, it's still frustrating to see how much render times goes up whenever vegetation is used.

[romullus]

There's no universal noise limit. It can vary from scene to scene and from user to user. Also in Corona 1.7 noise level can be set to slightly higher values due to changes in sampling alghoritm. Since your scene doesn't have smooth featurless surfaces, i'd try 4-5% without denoising and 7-8% with it. Also you may want to increase GIvsAA to 32 or so, since you don't need so much antialiasing samples here.

[Hadi]

Also you may want to increase GIvsAA to 32 or so, since you don't need so much antialiasing samples here.

Even If I have in-camera DOF?

EDIT: I tried it on a small 800px test and it doubled render times.
EDIT 2: Sorry for the multiple edits, but I tested with GIvsAA set to 8 and it cut the render times in a half! Is it because I'm using DOF and vegetation probably needs more AA?

[romullus]

Noise level isn't ultimate tool to tell you how clean your image will be. Even if noise level will tell you otherwise, you may still find image rendered with increased GIvsAA cleaner than rendered with default settings in the same amount of time. Humans perceive noise differently than machine code does. I'm not saying that higher GIvsAA will definitelly gives better render time for the same quality in your scene, it may be the other way round, but DOF in that shot isn't sshallow enough and usually noise in out of focus area isn't perceived as much as in focused area. By human brain that is.

[Hadi]

I know what you mean, I definitely had to test it though.
Setting it GI vs AA to 4, decreased render times drastically, more than a half.
I'll test it in small regions and post the results.

[Hadi]

So I test it with Gi vs AA set to 4 (left) and to 8 (right).
I let them render 100 passes and the left one has way more noise, but it render 30% faster.
So what do you advice? Render it with a value of 8 or go back to 16? 32 was slowing it down too much unfortunately.
Also, as you mentioned before, Corona estimated the left image and the right image in the screenshot having the same amount of noise?

[Hadi]

Romullus, I tried as you suggested with a noise limit of 7% and denoise of 0.4 and I'm quite amazed with the result achieved in not even 2 hours for a 6k.
That's definitely the way I will work for this set. Thanks for your help.