Mental Ray and Shave and a Haircut Help!

[solbester]

Okay this has been driving me crazy.. I have been everywhere and i can’t find out how to make my renders faster. In most of my scenes especially the one I’m working on now I use about 8 thousand hairs and the globals are set to hair primitives. The character is the only thing in the scene and its pretty much a nude female body with a 2k texture map. The render settings are set to HD 720p, Production, and I’m using Final Gather. Ive tried the BSP, and have upped the RAM. I don’t know what else to do my renders are taking 30 minutes per frame sometimes longer. If anyone knows a way to fix this issue please help! Thank you!

Computer Specs:

Nvidia Quadro 3700
Core i7 6 gigs of RAM
Windows Vista Pro 1TB hard drive

[Freespace-3DT]

What Final Gather quality do you have?

Also, render times are most influenced by shaders and lights. So what shader do you have on the body and what illumination do you have in the scene?

By the way, just so you know, for 720p renders ( at 1-16 render quality ), 30 minutes isn't really that much.

[liquidbear]

i agree with freespace that render time seems decent enough..... you might save a few minutes by doing something a friend a college told me but im not entirely convinced it works


change your screen resolution to the lowest possible before you render ... dont ask me how this would work

[solbester]

Originally Posted by Freespace-3DT

What Final Gather quality do you have?

Also, render times are most influenced by shaders and lights. So what shader do you have on the body and what illumination do you have in the scene?

By the way, just so you know, for 720p renders ( at 1-16 render quality ), 30 minutes isn't really that much.

Hey, first of all thanks for the reply, the final gather is set to 100. The shader is a regular blinn nothing special added except a amb occ node to the ambient of the shader. And i have 3 point lighting one with mental ray shadows the other 2 spot lights with regular shadows. And one area light at the bottom to light the character underneath. If 30 minutes isn't that much that's great but its taking 4 days to finish the render of 160 frames. And its all because of the shave and a haircut.

[solbester]

I dunno about that screen resolution thing ill give it a try but that sounds weird.

[Crispy4004]

First off, Hair + FG is asking for huge render times. Hair is just one of those things you have to composite separately and tweak carefully in post.

Also, don't let shave or Maya control the look of the hair, use the Puppet Shader's hair. Looks much better, renders faster, and from my experimentation works fast and beautifully with both Raytracing and rasterizer. If you're experiencing problems though, switch to rasterizer. Also use detail map shadows if you're not doing so already. I can usually render out hair at an HD resolution anywhere between 2 to 5 minutes +. All depends on the quality and how much hair is in the frame.

Hair rendering really is a major pain, especially if you have lots of lights and FG in your scene. It's super easy to over expose the hair render in a scene. Good luck. I'm still trying to figure out the best approach to rendering hair myself.

[liquidbear]

i agree with it sounding weird
but when i tried it i got my college project render down from 3 hours to 1.7 hours

[NinthJake]

Well I found a program that might be suitable for you if you hate long render times.
http://www.studiogpu.com/machstudio

It renders the scene using the GPU so it only takes about 1/10 the usual render time.

[solbester]

Originally Posted by Crispy4004

First off, Hair + FG is asking for huge render times. Hair is just one of those things you have to composite separately and tweak carefully in post.

Also, don't let shave or Maya control the look of the hair, use the Puppet Shader's hair. Looks much better, renders faster, and from my experimentation works fast and beautifully with both Raytracing and rasterizer. If you're experiencing problems though, switch to rasterizer. Also use detail map shadows if you're not doing so already. I can usually render out hair at an HD resolution anywhere between 2 to 5 minutes +. All depends on the quality and how much hair is in the frame.

Hair rendering really is a major pain, especially if you have lots of lights and FG in your scene. It's super easy to over expose the hair render in a scene. Good luck. I'm still trying to figure out the best approach to rendering hair myself.

Thanks for the reply! I don't know what puppet hair is never used it. Also i forgot about shadow maps... I usually don't make shadow maps either. I'll do some research but i've never gotten my hair to render out with just a character in the scene at not even 4 minutes. At that's when i don't use final gather. I usually dont work with more than 12000 hairs.