A Faster Render

“A few general comments to start with: First of all, rendering a three-minute HD short on a single workstation, however powerful, is not how such things should be done. Anyone with any sense will do this on a render farm, at least a small one. But if, like me, you insist on doing things by hand, you’ll have to make compromises. Painful ones. Lighter geometry, smaller, filtered textures, post-pro DOF and clamped renders will help speed up your render at the expense of quality. Where I really hate compromising though, is on materials and noise. Noise may be artistic in stills, but it’s just distracting in animations, especially the static kind of noise V-Ray produces. The settings below take this into account. One thing you won’t see here is my material and light settings. Basically, I use high reflection subdivs on my materials (anywhere between 32 and 96 for glossy materials) and high V-Ray-light subdivs (between 64 and 120).

The settings below are those I used for the hallway sequence pictured above. They may not work in all situations. First of all, most of the illumination here is direct (invisible V-Ray Plane Lights just below the fluorescent tubes), with GI playing only a secondary role. This means the GI doesn’t have to be very precise. Also, while the scene is reasonably complex, there aren’t that many nooks and crannies. Classic interiors with complex cornice moldings, for instance, won’t work well with such settings and will require much higher-quality GI. Note that I pre-calculated the GI here, because there are no moving objects. Sequences with animated geometry, such as the elevator scene, use the same settings but with a higher-quality GI using the animation preset. In all cases, I render my scenes slightly underexposed to limit the amount of rays in the scene. You can always tweak the exposure in post (within reason).” – Bertrand Benoit | BBB3viz 

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