I bet this issue was around like a hundred times, but still I can’t get over it…
I’ve heard so much about Cycles, I wanted to try it. Didn’t want anything special, so haven’t set any textures nor transparency to the objects in scene - most complicated thing there are multiple lights. Just wanted to see how it works.
And it seems to work terrible (or “not work at all”):
The amount of noise in the picture is awful and rendering these several tiles on GPU (GF GTX 660 Ti) took longer than rendering the whole image with Blender own renderer on CPU (4 cores) with the latter having no noise at all. It took so long, because I gave it very high settings (50^2 samples, full global illumination) hoping it will make things better - it didn’t.
What did I miss? Is there anything else to possibly improve raytracing than increasing the samples and bounces numbers?
What did I miss?
What we all miss is any scrap of information regarding what render settings or materials you are using and what your scene contains
Supply a .blend file so there is something to actually work on for anyone who may want to help you
50 samples squared set both for Render and Preview in Sampling, Full Global Illumination set in Light Paths. Using GPU for computing. All not specified settings default.
Do materials (having only diffuse colour set - no textures, shine nor transparency set for Cycles, as I said before as well) matter so much? Well, I use various ones: 5A2F04, FFE489, 7E170F, DDB945, E1E1E1, FFFEFE, 907F24. I think those are mostly visible in the piece I tried to render, there’s much more around.
Scene contains whole bunch of things since it’s my new home visualisation, so there are both box-shaped things (like cupboards, picture frame) and those much more complicated - power point, lustres, sofa, table, chairs…
Can u at least tell me what difference can any of the above (apart form settings) make? I know the scene is quite complex, but I though 2500 samples and high light bounce settings would do with it. I’ve seen some stuff done with Cycles and they were much, much more complex. Unless ppl making them left their comps for a week to render single image or they have their machines several tens of times better than mine, I don’t understand why suddenly this one won’t render properly…
Are u sure u want a 75MB file? Well, here u go: https://www.dropbox.com/s/amvhf998fqh1v1c/home.blend?dl=0
From a quick glance at that scene it seems to me that nothing in there is set up to work with Cycles?
No material is set up correctly, the environment is plain grey, you have a hemi lamp in the middle of the room (which Cycles doesn’t support anyway - it “translates” those to sun lamps, but since it points upwards I’m not sure how it is supposed to light the room) and the whole illumination in that room consists mostly of two tiny point lights, which are also behind an impenetrable (cause no materials are set up) lamp shade.
Large room, small hidden light sources, no light from the outside - that’s basically a nightmare scenario for a pathtracer. You can’t just switch Blender from BI to Cycles and expect that everything will work out of the box. You need to set up all materials anew and have to plan your scene lighting in a totally different way…
Yup, seems so.
I thought that materials keep at least their hue when transferred to Cycles (seems for me they did - as u can see in the part-image in the first post).
It was supposed to lighten the ceiling. Didn’t know it doesn’t work in Cycles.
There’s also an area light right from the camera and one more point next to it, but now that u pointed it - if none of the materials has any transparency set, the light won’t come through. How genius of me xD
That explains why it turned its back on me.
Hoped it would be at least a bit similar… Ok, so I think I’ll finish the whole model first and then play with Cycles since I know nothing of it (or even less, as I’ve just proven). Thanks a lot 
If anyone feels like deleting this silly topic, u’re welcome