I’m working on a little night time Arctic lake scene anim at the moment. For added realism, I added a smoke simulation with a bit of wind which creates thin white smoke over the water to simulate the typical winter mist over Arctic water.
Problem is, my test frame renders at 50% with 1024 samples in 01m29s without the mist (totally acceptable) but in 10m28s with the mist. I didn’t dare try rendering full res with mist yet but it’s clear that the render time for the whole anim at full res would be way over the top with mist.
I already tried the noise reduction but that just makes everything super ugly. It totally ruins the mist effect…
What could I do to get the render times down without losing the mist effect? And without spending $10k+ on a badass rendering machine ;).