I’ve finally got my PC set up rendering on the graphics card by installing Windows, which means this is my first real foray into cycles.
It’s for a video of a proposed moving sculpture - the panel in the wall (left) opens and shuts, letting light in to the room.
It really needs a lot of cycles features - volumetric lighting, and reflected light.
The thing is my render times are insanely long! My first attempt was over an hour long per 720p frame! We will be using a renderfarm for the final render, but I want to reduce the rendertimes a bit.
I’ve included two images of super-high-quality (panel open and shut)…
This type of scene (volumes, light source mostly hidden) is VERY difficult for path tracers to render. So difficult, in fact, that it’s a common example of “difficult test scene” in research papers! Short of “fake it” or “use a different renderer” there isn’t a really effective solution for it. You can try using branched path tracing and increasing volume samples and samples for the light source. That will at least concentrate your brute force sampling into the problem types of samples, but that’s about all you can do.
You can also try the Blender branch with light portals. Portal forces sample rays to pass the portal plane. This makes sampling more effective because rays are not “wasted” on directions and areas where they are not needed. Usually the portal directs rays from outside into an indoor scene, your scene is exactly the case. Portals make it possuble for example to render the camera obscura effect in reasonable time.
