Day 25

Days back I was rendering light instances with PBR which took between 5-15mins depending on the settings. Now i want to experiment how PBR engine fair when rendering simple scene.

Used a sphere (chrome material + skylight + motion blur).

Disabled 'Sun Light' parm unlike when rendering the terrain scene.

I was only increasing Sky Light's Sampling Quality gradually instead of Pixel Samples in Mantra.

The change of quality in the renders can be seen and the difference in rendering time wasn't big as shown in the screen capture.












Slightly heavier scene with spheres copy stamped.

Everything else remained unchanged and same tests were done on this scene.

The time taken to render these were all under 15secs.






















-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fluid simulation is part of the project, thought i should take a look into rendering caustics even though there's a possibility it won't come into play because they are rapid and high-speed fluids with motion blur etc. No harm knowing more. ._.

Peter Quint introduced the process of rendering caustics in Houdini11 via shelf tool Caustic Light.
Followed him through it and end result is below.

Haven't looked at 'Render Manager' until i was told about it by danBode from CGTalk.

No Caustics took 10secs.
Caustics enabled took 19secs.
Mmm...





You have to use it if you want to start optimizing your settings and minimize your render time. Big part of rendering phrase!

Do remember to untick 'Clear Completed Jobs' else you'll think it's broken for always being an empty list.


One other place to see render information. (Via Mantra ROP)

Slightly messy with all the text & numbers, occasionally the Console doesn't appear despite having Verbose checked. /shrug







This was a problem with MPR and indirect photon map, supposingly i should have indirect lights just like using PBR. I might had missed something, don't know what though.