I have a scene of a room, it does has some complex lights. When I went to render it even using 1000 samples I got horrible noise and fireflies. I finally had to render it at 20,000 samples to get a smooth image but that took about 5 hours… Is it normal to have to go that high in sampling to get a good image?? Am I doing something wrong?
Small light sources in a large room are kind of a nightmare scenario for any unoptimized pathtracer like Cyles. In a nutshell: Cycles fires rays from the camera into the scene and lets them bounce until a light source is hit. With miniscule, bright light sources this can take forever to resolve, because the chance to hit a light emitter is so small…
Other than that is render optimization always heavily scene dependent. So, without seeing the scene it’s a bit hard to comment on this. For example might there be issues with the way you created those lights (Light passing through glass surfaces?) or with your material settings. Tell us more about the scene (Screen shots! Render results! Scene file?) and we might be able to help you better.
Here is a Pic:
Im rendering to UV textures. The render of the wall is at 20,000 samples and the lamp shade is 1000 samples. Anything under 5000 samples for the wall was super noisy. I’m using a spot light inside the lamp shades for both lamps, the lamps shade have a modifier of solidify applied. Its shading is translucent at default. The spot light is at strength: 1000.