Here are some newly completed renderings for a motorcycle retail space. Rendered with Cycles to 8000 samples with denoising.
Beautiful stuff.
Did you really need 8000 samples? That seems like overkill.
Thank you! Yes, indeed. If not for Denoising, it would have had to be much higher. It was only not clearing in the unlit portions of the walls near the ceiling. Everything else where well lit, was fine. I could have just rendered the walls on separate render layer with more samples with Denoising and everything with less samples, but I did not.
Also, if you look close at the darker areas of the walls up towards the ceiling, on the second and third renderings, it does not look that great after the Denoising. Really could have used more samples on the walls to make that look better.
In 2.79 there is a “simplify” rollout. Try to play with AO bounces values, usually 3 or 4 is enough for interior and play with AO color and distance, usually value 0.6 and distance 0.1 is enough. Than you’ll need to fake glass with nodes to avoid artefacts. Don’t use glass and pricipal shaders for glass. Finally you’ll need no more than 2000 samples on image and it will look good without denoising. Also don’t use caustics. Hope this will help you to render faster.
Thanks…I have a simple node set up already for the glass. I do not want to use AO in my renderings with Cycles. Although, I would like to use Denoising less for sure. Not everything need to be Denoised. I need to focus on setting up Render layers to only denoise where necessary. When I use Maxwell Render, I render out custom alpha mask for areas that I want to denoise. Alpha Masks render faster than re-rendering render layers.