Scene optimizing

[romullus]

@James Vella, you keep telling that filtering bluring is significantly affecting performance. Do you have evidence for that? I didn't do any tests on that recently, but i know, that back in the Alpha days it was very true and i know that this was fixed long time ago. Curious to know if that problem has surfaced again. Should be reported as a bug if so.

Bitmap 0.1 filtering blur is great for things like floorboards where you want to see the texture on grazing angles perfectly, however on leaf maps its generally a bit over kill unless its a hero tree right next to the camera.

AFAIK, filter bluring has little to do with grazing angle, instead it controls how much texture will be filtered (blurred) depending on its relative size in the view, so for something as small as leaves, it might make sense to keep bluring on the lower side.

[James Vella]

@James Vella, you keep telling that filtering bluring is significantly affecting performance

Yes, it has a major affect on speed - Ive been doing this with vegetation textures for quite some time to speed up the render time (quite a lot in in some scenes). You can test for yourself when you get time. I am not referring to the Filtering method on opacity maps as this was clarified by you earlier which I have acknowledged and thanked you for.

AFAIK, filter bluring has little to do with grazing angle, instead it controls how much texture will be filtered (blurred) depending on its relative size in the view, so for something as small as leaves, it might make sense to keep bluring on the lower side.

I have no doubts you are correct. I use this specifically for sharpening textures when I need to - especially those close to camera.

[romullus]

@James Vella, you keep telling that filtering bluring is significantly affecting performance

Yes, it has a major affect on speed - Ive been doing this with vegetation textures for quite some time to speed up the render time (quite a lot in in some scenes). You can test for yourself when you get time. I am not referring to the Filtering method on opacity maps as this was clarified by you earlier which I have acknowledged and thanked you for.

Ok, i'll try to test this out when i'll have free time. Thanks for letting to know about the isue!

[James Vella]

I had a spare 20 minutes so I thought id share.

Model I made of a plant recently with Blur of 1.0:


Nothing changed except Blur to 0.1:


Time saved 5 seconds per plant, I was expecting a little more. Im guessing on average if you had 100 plants on that wall your only saving yourself 8minutes or so. Probably not enough to warrant changing workflows over - which is a relief to be honest, less buttons to click :) You may be correct in saying this has been addressed in some way, I would be curious to see the result over the wall of plants. I would also suspect the Alpha Clipping to help dramatically as this shaved time off this Plant render as well - cant remember how much but I tested this while making it to ensure speed.
 

[LorenzoS]

Another thing that popped in my mind is that I have a glass with glossy refraction behind the camera, set up like you can see in the screenshot.
Can that be one of the problems?

On my opinion yes, because of the volumetric scattering.

[Hadi]

Hi. I would definitely make a test with the forest edge mode turned OFF. I believe I read somewhere that this could slow things down considerably. But can't find it ATM and not sure if it's still so. But anyway... I would make a test without it, to see if this is the "killer" or not.

Nice one! Removing it killed the render times in half. I still get an estimate of 8 hours which is 5 hours more than the same render without the green wall.
Any other suggestion on how to speed it up?

[iancamarillo]

whats the estimate when the greenwall is material override to basic corona material (geometry only). then diffuse only, then opacity, etc?

[Hadi]

Disabling the opacity maps bring it down to 6 hours and 40 minutes. If I just leave the diffuse, removing the translucency map, I get half an hour more, 7 hours, which is crazy.

[sprayer]

real approximate time will be showed after 5 passes then adaptivity will calculated, so it can reduced much

[Hadi]

That's the time taken after 5 passes, and it was keep increasing and increasing.

[arqrenderz]

Check your greenery materials, some will have refraction turned on, always avoid such material setups!

[Hadi]

There's no refraction, already shown in the screenshots.
It's definitely frustrating, I'm gonna try with other models with no opacity tonight.

[Hadi]

So I've been able to set up another green wall, with new models and shaders completely redone by me from scratches, without using any opacity map and without the Forest Edge mode.
They all have a front/back corona map in the diffuse, front/back corona map in the glossiness and a bump map. PBR mode on, no reflection map and thin (no refraction) tick on for all the leaves.
I was quite ok with the estimated time after 5 passes, which was 5 hours and a half, but as you can see from the screen-shot, it went up quite quickly to almost 9 hours for a target of 3% noise., and it was still going up.
How could it be that the estimated time get almost doubled after 20 minutes?
And, in any case, is it possible that all the time that I will have to deal with vegetation with Corona, I'm gonna end up with such big render times?

[PROH]

Hi. I'm a bit confused about your material description. As Maru said in an ealier post, you should not use refraction, but use translucency instead. But still you talk about refraction set to "thin". So are your refraction level value set to 0 as well, or are you still using refraction instead of translucency?

[Hadi]

Hey Proh, sorry for being unclear. All the materials have refraction set to 0. I was just pointing out that I ticked thin refraction just in case, not knowing if it would have made a difference even if the refractions are set to 0