TheKitchenAbode

Bretb808 - Some good points there. Just a bit of clarification. Hyper-threading is available on many of Intel series chips besides the I7 series. I would not say that the Xeons are bad per say, it just depends on how much money you can afford to spend. There are many Xeons that will clock up in the high 3GHz range and with dual processing capabilities you can have a lot of cores. The AMD Ryzen series are certainly worth consideration, especially given their attractive cost and high core count. From the test reviews I have seen so far they are not up to par with Intel when it comes to single thread performance. The challenge unfortunately is finding that critical balance between frequency and core count. So far from what I can determine, other than Ray Tracing, many of CAs operations are not fully optimized to take advantage of those cores and as such one needs to look closely at the CPUs single thread performance stats. For Ray Tracing cores are very important, but also the frequency that those cores run at. Another very important consideration with Ray Tracing is the fact that ones lighting strategy has a huge impact on Ray Trace times and quality. If your current Ray Traces on your current system don't look reasonably good after 30 or 50 passes they after not really going to look any better on a faster machine after 200 passes, you will be very disappointed. If I were considering an upgrade today I would wait a few months for Intel's and AMDs newer chips. Preliminary indicators are that these offerings will provide some interesting choices across a wide range of costs, frequencies and core count. Even if one chooses a former series chip, the new chips will likely drive prices down on these former chips so you really can't lose one way or the other.

A CPU like the Skylak I7 7700K has 4 physical core but with hyperthreading this equates to 8 logical cores. You could also consider the I7 5960X, it has 8 physical cores and with hyperthreading you have 16 logical cores. It does not clock as high as the 7700K and costs about 3 times the price. It all depends on how much Ray Tracing you plan to do in justifying the cost to get more cores. Your other option is to wait a few months for Intels new lineup and AMD's new ThreadRipper series. They are going to be expensive but they will represent the very best you can get. On the other hand, with your current system being 5 years old you will notice a huge difference moving to say the I7 7700K.

Concerning the graphics card, your main consideration is more about how many monitors you intend to run and at what resolution. The more monitors at higher resolutions will require better cards. Also, you need to consider the demands placed on your graphics card by other programs that you may be using at the same time as CA. They all have to be managed by the graphics card so that when you switch back and forth everything is fast and smooth.

Here's an example of a Ray Trace work flow. This scene uses only 5 recessed lights and 2 3D lights. The only Ray Trace settings are Ambient Occlusion 0 min, 1.5 max, Direct Sun 7 with Photon Mapping on. The image properties are set to default. This ran a 100 passes in about 17 minutes. The output above has a strong color cast and is under lit. using the Ray Trace Image Properties I adjusted the Color Correction and Saturation to eliminate the color cast. Then adjusted the Intensity, Brightness and Contrast to brighten things up. The scene is looking reasonable but seems a bit flat. Using Photoshop I increased the light intensity within the window area and added a lighting effect around the table lamp. Made a few other minor contrast and toning adjustments. The Photoshop techniques I used were very basic and took maybe 5 - 10 minutes, much faster than going back into CA and playing with the lights. This process is the similar to what a professional photographer does with every pic they take. Just a note for Craboulas, this should look familiar, I just dressed up your plan a bit.

The issue with the Xeon processor you are considering is its low frequency 2GHz. What you want is the highest frequency plus the most cores. You need the high frequency as many of CA's functions are single threaded, it does not take advantage of all available cores. Ray Tracing is the exception, it is specifically written to use all available cores. The current top Skylak I7 7700K is likely the best bang for the $, it can be easily clocked up to 4.2GHz and has 8 logical cores. Intel is just launching some new chips under the I9 series. These will offer similar clock rates with many more cores, they are going to be very expensive. Concerning the graphics cards, CA will run fine on a Quadro card but you will be paying a premium for functions that CA does not take advantage of. A good Nvidia gamming card will do just fine and save you some money.

Good Point. The recessed panel situation can also be dealt with using the method I just described.

Yes that can happen, I believe the hardware in cabinet hardware in CA is set based on a 3/4" thick door/drawer. If your custom door/drawer differs from this then the hardware will not be properly positioned. The solution is to save the hardware to your user library and open up the symbol DBX and change the offset to suit your particular door/drawer thickness and then assign this in the cabinet DBX as the hardware to use.

I have only encountered this type of problem on monitors with certain aspect ratios. Some times the display height of the monitor at its default setting is not enough to accommodate the height of the pop/drop down menu and as such some of it is hidden below the bottom of the screen. You may need to change the resolution of the offending monitor or the scaling.

There is no doubt that these programs have the capacity to produce some stunning results. However, one should not be naïve about the expertise and skill required to obtain such results. These programs are not one-click to a beautiful rendering. They are very complex with endless settings and adjustments for lighting and materials. Free programs such as Blender may appear attractive due to the fact that they are free but the draw back is a real lack of documentation. If you struggle with getting a handle on Ray Trace settings then I doubt if Blender will be a viable solution. Another important consideration is whether or not your business model really requires this level of rendering and can you justify the effort/time. I fully understand the need for those who are involved in producing content to be incorporated into sales and promotional literature, brochures and the likes or if you are involved in high end conceptual design work and presentations. For the likes of myself, dealing directly with individual home owners and some contractors the renderings via Ray Tracing are more than adequate and to date they have always been significantly superior to what my competitors produce. Yes it has taken considerable time and effort to get a reasonable handle on Ray Tracing but having done this I am now able to generate a consistent quality of rendering with little effort and within 10-20 minutes and all within one package.

No, the model I have is the HP Spectre x360 13". It is available in a number of configurations and also in a 15" version. This is not my primary system, I use it for client presentations, light weight, great battery life, very well built. These are currently ranked as either the #1 or 2nd best convertible laptops currently available. Extremely pleased and have not been able to find any faults in it.

I was truly surprised by the results, was expecting to see a much greater spread of results from the differing systems. But after contemplating the results I believe what it was demonstrating was that the CPU based operations were where we ran into a wall. As such our GPU's were not being unleashed to show what they could really do. From what I can recall, though are systems varied, we all had reasonably good CPU's and more importantly most of our CPU's had very similar single threaded performance specs. I'm reasonably convinced that this is why there was so little difference between our results. What was actually being tested was CA's 3D model rebuild operation which is a CPU operation not a GPU one.

That's the challenge, getting ones system properly balanced so you don't have some bottleneck that deprives you from obtaining the potential performance you are paying for. Many of those tests, especially on gamming graphics cards, are demonstrating performance functions that CA does not utilize and as such they don't hold much relevance as to how CA will actually perform or what degree of benefit you may realize when considering an upgrade. I believe that the Chandelier stress test I submitted a short while ago demonstrated this fact. All users who ran this encountered similar results regardless of their graphics cards performance specs. The bottleneck appears to be that CA does a lot of CPU calculations, especially for a rebuild, before handing things over to the GPU, as such the GPU just sits idle while it waits for something to do.

I concur with Mark & Larry. Either save the money or use it on other upgrades. These new gaming cards are designed to deliver high frame rates at high resolution. I have not been able to find a direct relationship with this and CA. Any testing I have done indicates that many of CA graphics operations are CPU based and that the GPU is often sitting idle while it waits for the CPU to update it. With the current crop of GPU's I am certain that the CPU is the bottleneck in respect to CA, and to be more specific it's the CPU's single thread performance that is most impactful.

I really think you need to post the plan. I have run a number of test scenes using a vary wide range of direct sun & environment levels without any problem. This one has the direct sun at 50 and the environment at 50, everything is fine. Shadows are good and no light bleeding. Please post the plan!!!

Craboulas - I believe I have found the solution to you environment light issue. You not only need to have a foundation under your room but the foundation must have a floor in it. That should prevent the light from bleeding through from below. Seems to be the same as having to have a roof over your room to prevent that exterior sun light bleeding. Give it a try to see if it resolves your problem.

Maybe this technique may help you. Dark Exterior Bright Exterior If you flip between the two pics you will see that the exterior brightness changes significantly but the interior light and shadows remain the same. All light settings, including the direct sun are the same for both. To obtain this look I took the 3D Backdrop used in the dark exterior shot and overexposed it in a photo editor and then imported it back into CA and used it as the 3D backdrop. Took about 15 seconds and I did not have to play with any light settings.

I don't have enough information about the environment light to say whether it is functioning properly or not. However, as one increases the exterior light level then it would be natural for the interior ambient light level to also increase and as such any interior shadows created by the interior lights would diminish. Any time that I have delved deeper into the principles the Ray Trace function is based upon it always seems to attempt replicate how light reacts in the real world. This of course may not be conducive to the look you are attempting to create. Photographers are faced with this issue all of the time which is why they use a variety of techniques to adjust and alter their pics. In a true professional photoshoot they would set up additional lights to compliment or compensate for natural lighting deficiencies and then use post production software to perform additional alterations and corrections in order to obtain the look they desire. You have the ability to do this in CA by adding additional lights, that is precisely what those 3D lights are intended for. I'm not saying this is the best approach, just saying it is how this program currently works.

Should clarify, when I say 2D I mean the vector view camera, not plan view.

The settings under Pattern effects the 2D view and the settings under Texture effect the 3D view. You need to change the direction in both Pattern and Texture for it to show correctly in both views. I believe you will find that the direction setting under Pattern is the opposite to the Texture one, for example if the texture direction you want is 90 then the Pattern direction will be 0.

Suggest you post the plan. There are a number of factors that can effect how a particular lighting effect functions. Lights are not necessarily independent of each other and as such adjusting one light can effect how another light appears. I do not use the environment light very often but it might somehow be related to the direct sunlight intensity. The upper ambient occlusion setting will certainly effect it. I would also not be too concerned about the actual setting level, if 10 is too much then set it at 8 or whatever gives you the effect you are looking for. I really do not give much credence to those intensity levels, better to consider them more from a relative perspective. A 100% light will be twice the intensity of a 50% light and as such a 10% light will be twice the intensity of a 5% light. In the example below all of the interior lights are at 10% intensity or lower, some are as low as 2%. Keep in mind that you can over light your scene with too many high intensity lights, it's not much different than taking a way over exposed pic with a digital camera.

Made some lighting adjustments to improve the effect of light coming in from the exterior. This is a Ray Trace from CA with some minor adjustments for saturation and sharpness. All lighting is done with spot lights. The sun was turned off as well as the environmental lighting and spot lights were used to create the exterior lighting effect.

Those links indicate that most laptops are not designed to provide upgradable GPUs after purchase. Yes there may be some methods to do it but not likely worth it and certainly not for the average user.

For most laptops the discrete graphics is built into the motherboard, it is not a swappable card like a desktop. With a laptop you should buy it already configured to your needs, very few laptops are designed to be easily upgradable if upgradable at all.

Those a great renderings but it should be understood that those are not just a product of Vray. They have been extensively post processed in Photoshop and other image editors to obtain that look. They have also been produced by highly specialized/skilled graphics professionals. Your looking at the best of the best. it would be interesting to know how much time went into creating that, not only rendering time but the time it took to model such a complex scene.

Nothing like putting on the pressure. Here is an example, not quite as refined but you can see the potential. This took 30 minutes to Ray trace and then about 5 minutes in a photo editor to fine tune the exposure, shadows & highlights and a bit of sharpening. I believe one of the major differences between Ray Trace and many of the other specialized rendering programs is that Ray Trace lacks in built-in photo adjustment/enhancement algorithms and as such this must be done separately. It's more like a Ray Trace is the equivalent of shooting RAW format with a digital camera.