Today we’ll look at lighting related settings. Since it’s a larger subject, we’ll have only the first part this week.
It is one of the 3d realm laws that rendering times will usually go up as our lighting scheme becomes more realistic and subtle and diffuse. We’ll take a look at a couple of settings that increase render quality in subtle ways and render time in a big way.
With the Blender Internal engine, Ambient Occlusion is the way to go to make it look good. The samples setting in the Gather panel of the World tab will make the AO shadow areas smoother with less noise but there is a really big time increase between 5 and 8 passes. Some well lit scenes or textured objects don’t show much of the AO noise so check first with a low setting and see if you can live with that and get a faster render.
With Cycles we come back to the issue of noise versus time, only here the noise is more tricky to fix and it’s up to you to decide how much render time does a scene need by setting a certain number of passes. Some noise seems never to go away even after thousand of passes and this points to something being amiss in the lighting scheme, like indirect light coming from outside the scene through small openings. Replacing this with an emission mesh placed in the opening can improve render times without ruining the scene.
Cycles is marvelously “real” but sometimes a bit too much so. The “caustics” settings can sometimes generate a lot of noise while most scenes won’t really miss this real world effect.
Do you have any other tips? Share them in the comments below.
