Faster Rendering

[Alex Abarca]

Hello Corona Team,

Can you make your render engine faster by making a global scene Rayswitch checkbox under render settings> scene tab? Let will let the user decide?

[Aram Avetisyan]

Hi,

What is the purpose of it? Corona is as fast as it can possible be, without compromising the quality and accuracy of physical phenomenons.
If there was a way to make it faster through invisible ray-switch setup, it would have already been there.

If you want to make rendering faster, for a specific scene, it is better to understand what are the problematic parts in the scene, causing the slowdown.
From what you are saying, I think you can try RaySwitch in material override slot, can't you?

[maru]

I am also curious what exactly you mean by "global rayswitch". If you mean making GI black = effectively removing it, you can do the same thing by setting both the primary and the secondary light solver to "None" in Render Setup > Performance.

[Alex Abarca]

Hi Maru, I am referring to removing all physical properties from the RS material and make everything a neutral color, lets say 160,160,160. This will alter the physical appearance and GI, that's why I said let the user decide. Its like the material override just rayswitch everything.

[davetwo]

This already exists as material override or whatever its called

[davemahi]

Here you go for reference.

[TomG]

Do you mean that you would like all materials to retain their direct visibility, reflection, and refraction values, but apply a Rayswitch to all materials in the scene so that to GI they all appear to be neutral clay? To be honest I don't think this will increase render speed as you are still bouncing GI light (even if it is a neutral gray clay for all objects now), and all complex stuff with reflections and refractions and calculation of surface color based on diffuse, IOR, metalness, roughness, etc. are still happening.

[Alex Abarca]

Close enough Tom, keep material appearance in directly visibility and trick the system by rendering a flat (no reflection) 160, 160, 160 color only for GI bounce. Assuming that ultra white is still causing longer than normal render times.

Give it a try, people are using this to reduce noise and render times.

[maru]

Another idea would be to lower the Max Sample Intensity value. It clamps the "brightness" of GI bounces, so if you set it to a very low value like 5 or less, you will basically darken the GI component of all materials (with some minor exceptions).

[pokoy]

This is something that would probably be a nightmare to solve w.r.t. UI/UX but it's actually a useful thing to have. Let's say Corona would have a dedicated material for this where you can override any slot/value with a single one across all materials, but keep other material properties.
Brazil r/s had something like this. The concept was you would use a special material and everything you'd want to stay would get a special pass-through map (meaning it wouldn't be changed und using the object's material properties in that place > it would pass through and not be replaced) but everything you assign a map to would use that map instead. Hard to explain but it was designed to work well with minimal setup work/time.

[Alex Abarca]

Hi Maru, it is possible to do it various ways, like you said and/or simply find a script that takes all materials in scene and adds a rayswitch to the node. In the switch the GI material could be completely flat with no reflections etc. It can also render the scene with an easier color to calculate GI, lets 160, 160, 160. I don't know if there is one, or which is the best one, but something I have to look into. 

This can be included as part of the material override.

But now that I think about I'll just wait and use Chaos Vantage for faster rendering.