Testing studio setups in 0.41

[CGMe]

Inspired by this thread by Nehale, I decided to test some simple studio setups. Since the site hosting the tutorial linked in the original thread was dead, I decided to base my studios on some of the setups found in c4d's VRay Studio Tools PRO by Josef Bsharah.

I've downloaded the original Ajax 3D scan, located here and scaled it to a height of 68 cm, based on the dimensions I found for a similar buste to make it real-world scale. Max passes are set to 24, primary GI is set to Pathtracing, secondary to UHD cache. The model has a basic CoronaSurface material with a little bit of translucency.

Specs:
Intel Core i7 3930K 3.2GHz, 32GB RAM
Maya 2015 Extension 1 + SP6

[snakebox]

These are not bad! would have liked to see them with a bit more than 24 passes, but looks pretty solid.

[CGMe]

Thanks Snakebox.

As per your request I redid the renders with max passes set to 256, which in turn might be overkill :). Rendertimes are still pretty decent though; around 20-25 minutes for a 1k tile.

[Hamburger]

Nice and noise free, would like to see more "contrast" with the shadows and light but it is very clean.

[snakebox]

Looks nice!

And no 256 passes is not overkill at all.  Sometimes interior scenes can need 2000-3000 passes to really get that final 5% , yes most jobs will be fine if you stop it after 500-600 passes, but it's like magic happens when you get several 1000 passes.. pixel size light bouncing etc.. its just stunning results, if you have the time and the computing power!

biggest hurdle for Corona so far in max at least, is the memory consumption.. rendering 2 - 2.5 K images is easy, but doing 5-6K renders is quite painful on 32GB (even 64gb sometimes) ram machines.

anyway, slightly off topic :)  keep it up!  looking forward to a new maya release with a bit more interface, as im fairly new in maya.