Ray Tracing For Dummies :)

[Paramount]

Or Newbies     ...I been reading alot of threads and watching videos trying to learn this.

 

1. Kirk suggest deleting everything in the model below as a first step I did not find in any videos...what is fast way to do this assuming he means everything outside the camera view and do ppl agree this is worth the time or only matter if you have alot of surrounding items or a large model? 

 

2. How does one determine the number of faces in a image before running raytrace? 

 

 

 

[Dennis_Gavin]

A lot depends on your equipment and the size of the model.  Before deleting things I would first turn off lights not in the scene.

Another thing you can do is use a couple 3D lights in the scene and turn off all other lights.  IF you want lights to appear

to be on you can set the recessed light lens to be highly emissive.  IF doing these things still results in a long ray trace time then you could

make a copy of the plan and delete things in the copied plan outside of the room/area you want to ray trace.

Sunlight coming in through windows is also helpful and provides a nice effect.

[Barton_Brown]

It has been quite a while since I watched the training videos and read the documentation so I may be repeating what you already know...

 

If you prefer to not be making multiple copies of your plan and deleting portions of it, another approach which I believe is still valid and produces similar results is to use the layer sets to selectively hide portions of the plan or items in the plan. When doing this in the past, I typically used the approach to turn off things like fixtures, furniture, or items with high face counts that would not be displayed. In one case I had a porch that wrapped almost completely around the second floor of the house. the porch railings had detailed balusters (high face count) so I created multiple layers for the railings/balusters. In the desired 'camera view' set I could then easily turn these items on/off to improve ray trace performance. I found this approach less confusing than keeping track of multiple partial plans, especially if the design wasn't finalized (is it ever?).

[TheKitchenAbode]

There should be no need to delete plan items. As Dennis suggests, the first approach should be to turn off all lights that are not in the scene. Keep in mind that point lights will really slow things down; so if they are not needed then turn them off or change them to a spot light. You can also turn off photon mapping & compute caustics if you do not need it. Raytrace, as it's name implies, calculates a scene based on light rays emitting from a source and it's effect when striking another material, no light rays, then there really is nothing to compute.

 

Graham