So, I’ve searched through the threads to find out, but can’t find anything. I’m pretty new to the 3D world, so forgive me if this question is basic. I’ve made a scene with mirrors and lots of glass for an interior shot. I know that cycles lighting bounces quite a bit (set to 128 max bounces), so I made a much bigger room than what’s actually in the final shot. Full lighting scheme all the way back. My question is this: when is it too much? Where should I cut the background so cycles isn’t rendering a bunch of objects that won’t matter in the final shot anyways?
I’ll post the final shot and .blend file to better explain myself when rendering is complete. Thanks in advance!
You’re going to need one or more tricks to render something like that in the Cycles engine.
Even Luxrender tends to need a very long time to render scenes like that and that is while using bidirectional path tracing with metropolis sampling.
The only engines that can get conceivable results out of scenes like that in a reasonable period (less than a day) are those using biased methods such as photonmapping instead of pure path tracing (though like mentioned before, you can do some tricks in Cycles to speed things up)
Cycles main goal is opposite, it trying to calculate every object contribution in scene to pixel color, in your case 128 inter-reflection bounces between all objects (i use 256 on some scene BTW, in theory that number must be infinity). I not understand what you going to achieve, if you have all materials with color ~ 1.0 you in real life get very bright white all over place. Change material to more absorption, more dark, even mirrors to 0.95 color or less.
