Redmumba

This was actually something I was wondering about, since I did notice that sometimes it would add depth to the tile, but not always. I've been playing with the floor material regions, but didn't realize that this was possible for walls as well. Thanks for the tip!

Wow, I feel pretty honored to have @Renerabbitt commenting on my render--and making it look fricken amazing. This looks awesome! I'm going to have to go through your description and reverse engineer all of it, haha... but I'm sure it'll only be a fraction as good looking even if I got it all right. For real!

Ah, that should've been obvious.

Ah, I was looking under Rendering, did not see the separate Ray Trace section. I'm binging them right now! Honestly, I'm not a professional like all of you folks--just a home owner who likes getting his hands dirty, so I'm not sure if I would even be able to fill an hour of questions. As such, I'm mostly looking for "good enough" so I think these learning videos (and both yours and Rob's help!) has been phenomenal!

So here's what's confusing; I took the exact plan you sent me, opened up the camera you used to take the picture above with, and I still see some weird artifacts (plus, the shadows from the sun have also changed, even though it's hard coded in the camera config to be a specific angle). I also observed that it generated 9 sub-images (and 2000 samples each) which took about 5 minutes to render on export. I also don't see this behavior when just exporting from my active viewport which is only marginally smaller than your resolution of 3000x2005. Do you have any idea why this would yield different results?

Actually, I think I accidentally deleted the cameras when I was cleaning things up, but I did have a few saved. I've manually adjusted the sunlight and things like that, including reducing the intensity et al. The backdrop is definitely something I need to work on, unfortunately. Also, thank you so much for sending me the link to the modified plan! Just out of curiosity, what materials did you change? Yeah, I've looked at the training videos, but it looks like this is an actual training session--at least, I couldn't find one from Kayla. At least according to these videos, I've done what they've suggested (i.e., adjusting sun luminosity, etc.), but there are still the issues that I see above.

Even more obvious when looking directly at lights. Barely any difference between 50: And 1500 samples:

I've read all the posts about ray tracing on here, and I'm not even seeing anybody post similar images. I'm seeing EXTREMELY grainy images on a relatively simple plan. Granted, there are a fair amount of reflective surfaces (i.e., glass, tile, etc.), but this is still way worse than I'd expect. I have it set to 1500 samples. You can see graininess throughout the image. Honestly, I'd use more samples if it helped (the 3080 RTX is beefy enough) but while the first few samples definitely remove most of the super obvious graininess, the light-specific stuff is extremely noticeable. What am I doing wrong? Full image (w/ materials and unused purged) is here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wi8trxphczvr6lc/Post Plan.zip?dl=0 (it's about 17mb)