TheKitchenAbode

Hi KB - I have just been using the Grandview plan here because it is very complex and as such it would be a good way to demonstrate how impactful some minor changes could have. From a learning perspective this plan is way too complex and due to some other issues, such as the 3D model rebuilding, it is frustrating to work in. I will take a look through the CA sample gallery to find a much simpler plan that we could work with. I do need to say that just looking at my lights may be of limited value, what's most important is to understand why they are set the way they are and how do you change them to get the look you wish to achieve. Really the best way to work through this is to create a very simple room, do not add a lot of complexity as it will just add too many variable. Place a light that you wish to explore, say a recessed spot light and work through how it effects things as you make adjustments to the light and adjustments to the Ray Trace settings. For the recessed light, focus on the intensity, drop rate, cone angle and shadows on & off, leave the other settings alone. In the Ray Trace settings focus on the Ambient Occlusion min/max and the effect of having Photon Mapping on or off. I would not play with the material properties at this time and have found that most of the materials render reasonable well given the proper light settings. You need to do this in a systematic way, otherwise you will loose track of what settings do what. A very important item to study is the effect of turning Photon Mapping on or off. if for example you have set your light to look good when you render with Photon Mapping off then when you turn it on you will likely be disappointed with the result. Activating Photon Mapping is not a simple one click to a better rendering. From my experience you will need to adjust your lights intensity to get the best result from having Photon Mapping on, this usually means reducing the lights intensity. When I Photon Map it would be rare that a lights intensity would be more than 30% and many of my lights would be below 10%. Take note of the time it takes to render and how many passes are needed to obtain a decent result. Also, make sure you have a roof on your room and a foundation with a floor, otherwise you are going to encounter some sever light bleed issues which mess up your results.

Rene - Some excellent points that one needs to seriously consider concerning rendering and whether or not to pursue Ray Trace or move to another rendering engine such as Thea. I completely agree that CA should really take a hard look this and improve it's rendering capabilities and ease of use to provide more consistent results. When it comes to the Ray Trace engine I see two core issues, one is definitely the default light settings, maybe I'm missing something but they do not seem to be conducive to getting something half decent right out of the box. The other one is the quality of the 3 models, they seem to be improving but so many of them are too basic which obviously undermines realism. What is significant in all of this is deciding on what level of realism does one need. From a personal perspective I obviously want the best however, from a business perspective it's more complicated, do my clients expect or need this and is the time or effort worth it, which of course will vary for every user. For myself, the answer to this is no. They need a reasonable 3D visualization but it does not need to be ready for the cover of Architectural Digest. As I do not make money as a direct result of rendering it is important to minimize the time spent on this. On a typical kitchen project I would normally render 4-5 scenes and over the course of design there could be as many as 10 iterations, this equates to potentially having to render between 40 - 50 scenes, If each scene were to take an hour then 1 week of time would be consumed just to render. As this is totally unacceptable my focus has been to get this time down to the minimum. I believe that through my postings I have been able to demonstrate that is very achievable using the Ray Trace engine given that one is willing to take the time to better understand and work within this engines strengths and weaknesses. Even if CA is not willing to expend the effort to revamp the Ray Trace engine, I really think they do a disservice by the way they have things setup. If I was evaluating CA through the sample gallery plans and attempted to render something I would not be impressed at all by the time and the quality achieved for that time. If I have to wait 2 or 3 hours then the output better blow me away. If that is not achievable then it needs to render something of reasonable quality really fast. In the rendering game it's one or the other there just no place in the middle. We all know that the Ray Trace engine as it exist is unlikely to ever produce the quality of say Thea, but I have clearly demonstrated that it can produce some reasonable(subjective) scenes very fast. Why CA does not focus on this is beyond my comprehension. Some minor adjustments to make my scene closer to yours. Obviously there will be some differences as this is a night scene, just forgot to turn off the direct sun.

Last one, have to head out. I cropped in further, dropped it into Photoshop and simulated some depth of field.

Now that my Ray Trace time is around 30 seconds I can now run high resolution scenes and be able to crop the image for more drama and improved detail. This was cropped from a 4800 X 2338 px scene that ran in 9 minutes.

The last thing left to speed up the Ray Trace is to turn off Photon Mapping. In doing so I needed to adjust my lights and some material properties such as the stainless steel to compensate for the lack of photon mapping. The benefit after doing this was that my Ray Trace time for 20 passes is now down to 4 minutes. To recap, I started with a scene that originally took 1 hour and 24 minutes to render 20 passes, by just changing light types, a few materials and some Ray Trace parameters the time has dropped to 4 minutes. Though not photorealistic it's still pretty good and more so if one considers that this output was attained in only 4 minutes, and if I take full advantage of having Photon Mapping turned off I get my scene in 39 seconds. Photon Mapping Off, 20 passes, 4 minutes Now one of the big advantages of turning off Photon Mapping is that your scene will clean up very fast. So do I really need to run 20 passes, not likely. After 5 passes, 1 minute After 3 passes, 39 seconds

The Ray Trace settings are straight forward, I only used Ambient Occlusion min=0, max=1, Direct Sunlight 5 and Photon Mapping On. Made some adjustments to the Image Properties such as the Intensity & Contrast. Certainly the key is dealing with those point lights. Just turning them off, though significantly speeding up your Ray Trace, will of course have a significant negative impact on the scenes appearance. This plan also uses a number of invisible 3D point lights and these must also be compensated for. It is unlikely that this compensation can be done by only using the existing visible spot lights such as the recessed ceiling cans. Certain materials such as polished surfaces and predefined metals rely heavily on highly scattered light for them to render properly and point lights are very good at providing this type of light. One needs to think about how the type of light a point light provides could be simulated with spotlights and made invisible so it can be used as a replacement for a 3D point light. The next challenge is dealing with visible point light fixtures. Obviously if one just turns them off the result is going to be unacceptable, again one needs to think about how they can replace the existing point light with a spot light and adjust it to simulate the effect of a point light. Keep in mind that with light fixtures you can assign more than one light source to it so you may need to assign more than one spotlight, each with different settings/positions to get the right effect. It takes some experimentation to get a handle on it but once understood the benefits are significant. For example, if you have a lamp fixture with a shade that is open at the top and bottom you can assign one spot for the downward light and one for the upward light, each can be adjusted independent of the other to get the desired downward/upward look. As I have tried to demonstrate, the really big benefit is a missive reduction in Ray Trace time. How many cores would one need to obtain the same time reduction I was able to achieve by just changing some lights?

Last example for today. I loaded up the Grandview model from CA. This model is very complex with over 1.4 million surfaces. This Ray Trace is as per their settings and lighting, just changed the size to 1200 X 582. It took 1 hour 24 minutes to run 20 passes. This is the same scene same size using my lighting technique and settings. It took 6 minutes 44 seconds to run 20 passes. I was able to reduce the Ray Trace time by 99% and in my opinion generate a better looking scene.

That's one of the reasons your traces take so long. I normally run at 1200 X 582, would maybe only run at a higher resolution on a final.

It will be in the Ray Trace DBX under General and it will be displayed on your Ray Trace Image window, bottom right corner.

What is the pixel width & height of this? If you double the width & height the Trace will take 4 times longer.

I personally did not really find a lot of benefit from the tutorials, just spent a lot of time trying to identify(understand) the impact that different Ray Trace settings have and the different types of lights. The amount of structure does not really effect your Ray Trace times, it is dependent upon the type and number of lights you use, certain materials, Photon Mapping, Environment Lighting and Caustics. I am not using any tricks, the scene I posted has 17 active lights, they are not faked. The materials are essentially as per their library settings, just some minor reflection adjustments. If I were to identify the most impactful thing it would have to be the lights, point versus spot, and their default library settings. I never use point lights and in almost all cases I significantly reduce the lights intensity.

Yes, I think that would be a win win situation. A dual approach would truly maximize your gains and just might save you some money. Just another example, this ran in 1 minute and only needed 7 passes. I realize it is not magazine quality but for 1 minute of Ray Trace time I really find it hard to fault.

Your missing my point. I'm not disputing the fact that a faster system won't run the same number of passes faster. The point I'm try to emphasize is that by getting a handle on lighting there is no need to run a Ray Trace for 6 hours. On that sample output you posted in the other thread you could run that for 20 days and the stainless steel would still be black. The quality of a Ray Trace is not directly related to the number of passes.

That seems to be in line with what one would expect when projecting on the time benefit based on the specs of those two processors. What would be interesting is to see how the times would be if you turned off those point lights.

You could likely make it happen by using a different lighting technique. The biggest culprit is those point lights, then environmental lighting and caustics. If you could find ways to eliminate having to use those items you would likely reduce those times by a factor of 3 or 4. I never use those items, all of my lighting is done with spot lights.

If that scene took 6 hours then there is no way you can reduce the time to 30 minutes by increasing the horsepower. Even trying to reduce the time from 2-4 hours to 15 minutes is not really going to be possible. You can do the calculation based on your current processor. It has 8 logical cores, to go from 4 hours to two hours will require 16 logical cores, to get that two hours to one hour will require 32 cores, to get that one hour to 30 minutes will require 64 cores. And to get that 30 minutes to 15 minutes will require 128 cores. Also, the scene I posted does not have anything turned off. There are 64 active lights turned on when it was run.

It's fairly easy to estimate the performance one could expect when comparing frequency and cores, the relationship is fairly linear. If one system runs at twice the frequency as another it can have half the cores and be about equal to the lower frequency system with twice the core count. That 14 core Xeon 2695 v3 has a lot of cores so even though a 4 core (8 thread) system might run at a higher frequency that shear number of cores would likely result in at least a 50% improvement in Ray Trace through put time over say my I7 6700K. I know I'm a bit repetitive on this issue but there are other ways to seed up your Ray Traces without having to spend a ton of money on your CPU. This scene ran in 3 minutes, 1200 X 600 px. Just can't justify spending another $1,000 to save maybe 90 seconds.

Sorry about that, I don't have X8 active anymore. Maybe this will be your incentive to upgrade, hopefully you have the SSA program.

Many thanks to everyone. Never done a video but here is the plan. I added some comments and placed each stair case component on its own layer so you can see what I did. This could be simplified if one were to make a molding profile that included the hand rail, top panel rail, back wall panel and bottom panel rail. You would then just need a separate staircase to control the vertical stiles(Balusters). Abode_Stair Case_Wainscoting.plan This technique could also be used to create wall moldings to follow curved walls. The only extra thing is that you would need to set the stair tread, riser and stringer material to 100% transparency so they would not display. Your molding would use the railing option. Thanks Again!!!

One important factor that must be considered in all of this are the other programs one has active while working with CA. These will place additional demands on available system resources. What can be difficult is determining the cumulative impact of this and what is the best hardware combination one needs to ensure everything functions fast and smooth. This becomes even more challenging when one has budgetary limitations and one needs to set their expectations accordingly. Future proofing is not really so much about hardware, it's more related to how your software needs change over time. If your current system runs your current software fine then it will continue to do so for ever. Purchasing more than you actually need for today really depends on trying to anticipate what other future things you might require. For example, if Virtual Reality is in your near future or you see a need for 4K or 5K monitors down the road then you need to take this into account when configuring your new system. If your desire is to have a laptop as your primary system then one needs to keep in mind that they are very limited in upgradeability and in most cases not upgradeable at all. Desktop systems on the other hand provide greater flexibility and can undergo a round or two of upgrading to accommodate future needs.

This is what I came up with. I drew the main staircase, turned off railings on right(wall) side. Used the copy/paste to duplicate the existing staircase in it's current position. Minimized it's width so it was tight to the wall. The main wainscoting back panel was created by increasing the stringer height, added a top hand rail and used the balusters to create the vertical stiles, I then duplicated this one and lowered the height a bit, replaced the top hand rail to get the panel rail just below the actual hand rail. As it is using the staircase tool all of the curvatures are taken care of automatically.

Thanks Scott. I checked out a few more of those exterior lights in the plan which were originally turned off. They also need to be adjusted. They are the exterior point light fixtures on the back of the house. Existing settings, 10 passes. After adjusting the Offset, 10 passes. As you can see, it doesn't take much for things to get really screwed up. This plan has 65 lights and if only one of them is not right then everything can be a mess. I have always found this to be those point lights and I really never use them very much, usually convert them to spot lights. Less problems and Ray Traces will run faster.

The problem is the 4 exterior point lights on the garage. For some reason the position of the light within the fixture is incorrect. Open up the light fixture DBX, select Light Data tab, under Offset change the Y Position to -4. Here is a Ray Trace as per the original plan setting. 5 passes. Here is the same scene with the Offset changed. 5 passes. Whenever you get speckles it will be related to a light fixture and in most cases it will be a point light. The position of the light source within a fixture is critical, it can't be such that it is occupying the same region as a material. If you resize a light fixture the offset does not adjust to the new sizing and as such you may need to manually make this adjustment. This was not the case here as the fixture is as per the original library model, must have just been an oversight when this model was originally created.

it's definitely a light problem. Suspect it is one or all of the point lights. Turn them off and run a quick Ray Trace, you will know in about 3 passes. If it's much cleaner start turning them back on one at a time. You may need to reduce their intensity. If you post the plan I can take a look at it.

Just to emphasize my comments above concerning Ray Tracing and what to expect by throwing more CPU horsepower at it. This is after 5 passes in 1 minute. This is after 100 passes in 17 minutes. The only change is a cleaner image, less graininess. Running more passes does not substantially change the overall scene, it just cleans things up. If your scene looks like this after 5 passes. Then it's going to look essentially the same after 100 passes. You can spend all of your money on cores, but you are not going to get any better results, just faster.