TheKitchenAbode

I also run most scenes with Photon Mapping on and agree that once 30 passes has been reached another 20 is not likely going to make a big difference. If the scene is still very grainy then It's likely a material and/or lighting condition that needs to be corrected. Too many polished materials seem to be the best place to look, especially if you have both vertical and horizontal polished surfaces. You can often see when using a polished stainless steel material on a fridge and the floor is also a polished material. The polished stainless fridge finish can show a lot of grain and can take a large number of passes to clean-up. I posted in the past some examples of this grain issue using the Fire-Ice-Kitchen sample. Here they are. 5 passes 50 passes 100 passes 2700 passes

That's a tough one to provide a definitive answer to. I've found it seems to be finding the right combination depending upon pic size and passes. Having said that, I generally find that increasing the pic size tends to produce a sharper/crisper output while increasing the passes refines the more subtle lighting and grain reduction. Grain reduction is most important if you have photon mapping turned on. For any given pic size I will often use the magnifier and double the image size while Ray Tracing and then check around to see when surfaces are devoid or graininess, once this is gone then I consider this to be the limit on the number of passes. As for pic size the big issue is that doubling your width and height will quadruple your Ray Trace time per pass, it's a huge time penalty. However, some of this time can be recovered as it is not always necessary to run as many passes on these larger pixel pics. My overall guiding light in this is to not have my per pass time any greater than 30 sec and my total passes no more than 50. This means I need to get a reasonably clean scene in 25 minutes or less. I also want within 2-3 passes sufficient quality in order to know if something needs to be changed, it's just not efficient to have to wait an hour only to realize that a light is too bright and then have to go through the whole process again. The other consideration is, what does the client need. As we are doing this all the time it's easy for us to see the differences, keep in mind that we often have something to compare to as we flip back and forth between the same scene run at different settings. Clients only see a single version and only have this to make their judgment upon. It's highly unlikely that a client is going to appreciate or really care whether the counter top reflection is at 10% or 20%, especially if it takes 2 hours of tweaking around in pursuit of perfection.

If I'm understanding this correctly I believe that to solve the issue you must set the height & width pixel setting in Ray Trace to be at the same height & width ratio as your window is (bottom/right corner). If my window is say 1200 X 600 then to get the same in a Ray Trace but higher resolution The Ray Trace must be say 2400 X 1200 or 3600 X 1800, the width is always twice the height. This way the scene seen in the camera view will always be the same in a Ray Trace.

I'm surprised at the time differentials you are experiencing. I have in the past looked at the priority settings and have found very little difference in Ray Trace times. I could understand that changing the affinity setting or core assignment in CA Preferences could result in such differences as Ray Trace times are directly related to the number of available cores. Possibly there is something else going on or for some reason your AMD Ryzen reacts to this setting differently than an Intel CPU.

This seems to be happening as a result of changes CA has made to the lighting, sun and materials for the new Physically Based Camera. Seems like they did not check-out the effect on Ray Tracing.

CA's method of handling DWG's is way too basic for what you were hoping to do. You will have to draw that from scratch. The basic structure seems straightforward if it is only the units that are required. However, the real work in this case will be in the details. From an interior design/decorating perspective I can fairly confidently say that they will have very high expectations given what I can see in the layout. I would also anticipate that the renderings will also need to be top notch.

Some may find this to be of interest. Both the Ray Trace and PBR have their pro's and con's. I have done this a few time which is to blend the two together. In this sample the PBR version is placed overtop of the Ray Trace version with it's opacity 25%. Ray Trace PBR Blend

Just out of interest I took the same scene and ran it through the PBR. Nothing was changed other than the Camera Exposure and Brightness in the PBR DBX. Interesting to note that the PBR interpreted the lights and shadows differently as well as many of the materials. You may also notice that the PBR did not render the under-cabinet lighting at all. Also note the differences in the glass elements, especially the glass flower vases. What's likely most important here is that when setting your lights and materials you will probably need to decide at the very beginning as to which rendering method you are going to use. For myself this is a bit disconcerting as I was hoping that the PBR could be used in support of Ray Trace by providing one with a better insight as to how lights and materials would look prior to Ray Tracing. At this time that does not appear to be the case, it's one or the other. PBR Version Ray Trace Version

Here are the Ray Trace settings for the Grandview scene I posted(#709) this morning. The sun was set very low for this at 100 Lux in the Sun Angle Specification DBX.

Just heading out the door but will post my settings later this afternoon. However, there is nothing special in here, they are just standard pot (spot) lights. Everything in this scene is CA, it's the Grandview sample plan, just happen to be playing with it for some other things.

Just a note concerning your Ray Trace time. Here is an example of a Ray Trace I just ran, it has about 30 active lights and the size is 3000 X 1565. 15 passes took 11 minutes. I believe there must be something about your lighting or Ray Trace settings that is resulting in such long Ray Trace times. Here is the same scene Ray Traced at my usual 1200 X 626. It took only 2 minutes for 15 passes.

Very nicely done! Please keep posting your PBR results so we can see the potential of this new feature. I've been on the fence about this feature but your example will most likely encourage me to revisit the PBR camera and explore it more. One thing about PBRing I'm not so pleased about is how it handles objects with Glass such as in light fixtures, the glass comes out flat looking and lackluster. Hopefully CA will address this or someone will find another material property setting that will do a better job. Thanks for sharing.

Just one additional note concerning the Spectra 360: Once the camera view has opened there is no problem moving the camera around even though it only has an integrated graphics chip. Seems to perform just as well as my desktop GTX 745.

There must be something in the settings. I've been using the Grandview plan and it seems to be ok, a bit slower for a camera to open and also for a DBX to open but not terrible. I sort of expect this as it's CPU is a lower frequency than my 6700K and it has half the cores.

I suspect you are correct about them just using the standard item's DBX. But this is an example where taking a programming shortcut can lead to confusion. They should at least "Grey-Out" the settings that are not applicable.

We should be similar as our CPU's are the same. Have you tried panning and zooming the floor plan. It's terrible for me if I use the All On Display Layer Set.

The question I have is what are they there for, they are certainly not settable defaults. If you set it then close the DBX and then open it up again it is back to the setting as defined under Preferences.

Edit, Default Settings, or click the little wrench Icon. Open up the window one and it allows you to assign a render style.

It's likely one of those odd things, why have a setting in a default DBX that won't be recognized as a default?

Mick - Just tried it through the Preferences as per you suggestion, works fine. Just wondering why it does not seem to work in the default settings.

Never tried that one. I was trying to change the DBX preview type via the default settings DBX. In there you are given 4 choices, Standard, Vector View, Glass House and Plan View. They do not seem to filter through.

Mark - On the Grandview plan, if I do a standard camera view and stretch out a roof plan it takes about 3 seconds and if I undo it, it takes about 4 seconds. If I double click on say a window the DBX it opens instantly, when I close it it takes about 3 seconds before I can click something else. This is with about 1.4 million surfaces. If I turn off enough display layers to get the surfaces down to say half a million then everything is more than fast enough.

You're absolutely right about wasting the morning!!! I have also been using the Grandview plan for most of my testing. I think I've almost flogged this horse to death. All I can conclude at this time is that the lag is directly related to some CPU based computations that CA is doing before it gets handed over to the GPU. The amount of computation appears to be directly related to the amount of model that is being displayed according to the Display Layer Options. This seems to hold true for all camera view types. In plan view this also affects the speed at which one can pan and zoom. Other than turning off display layers I can't seem to find any other remedy. At this time if one already has a reasonable hardware configuration I would not recommend spending a bunch of money on new hardware if you are attempting to overcome this issue. It seems to be a CPU based operation so if your CPU is half decent then a newer CPU is not likely going to provide much improvement, if any at all.

It certainly seems that way. When I monitor the CPU and GPU usage there are many times when the CPU is running high and the GPU is low in instances when I would expect the opposite. I can only think of two reasons for this, there are extensive CPU based operations that need done before things can be sent to the GPU or there is a glitch that is preventing the GPU from being fully recognized.

Fixed the overall vector performance view issue, in preferences render there is an option for Horizon Lines, unchecking this solved my issue. By default this is checked. Still have not found a way to change the default view type in a DBX, always shows in vector view.