The more I work on my hospital image for Bekah, the longer the render times are becoming. She recently had me change the angle of the scene (new composition shown below), and as a result a lot of the detail from the original shot isn’t even seen by the camera. This isn’t a bad thing – it just means I should go through and get rid of everything I don’t need.
I started with the ceiling and removed all of the light fixtures, leaving just the Area lights used to light the room. Because we won’t see the ceiling anymore, I disabled Environment Lighting (a global illumination fake) that was primarily used to illuminate the ceiling spaces in between the light fixtures, which will help reduce render times because that won’t have to be calculated anymore. I’ve also been having trouble with the metal and glass materials on the cribs, so I scrapped those to redo them as well.
With preview quality settings enabled for raytracing calculations, and without the crib materials, I managed to get the render time for a frame 40% the size of the final from ~45+ minutes down to 6 minutes for 60% of the original size. As far as optimization goes, I’m well on my way. To keep this down, I’m going to try to use Spot lights to light each character separately (Area lights were used before).
That’s pretty much it for now. I’ll post more updates as they come along. My goal is to have a test print ready for Friday – wish me luck!
I had a feeling she’d make you do that angle/put all the objects in the carriers. I don’t quite care for it as much myself but it makes a lot more sense to place them that way.
Aaron – if you are experiencing long render times you should consider breaking this up into layers. I’m not certain of the Blender workflow for that, but if all else fails I KNOW you can do it manually.
Your “lips” image is very reminiscent of the annoying Orange – are you familiar? I’m sure you are.
Tex: Yeah, I feel the same way. She likes it so I’m going to make it work!
David: Of course I’m familiar with the annoying orange. Haha. Blender let’s me break everything up but I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll begin to see troubles with reflections and refractions. Blender has these things called “Render Layers” that I can use with the compositor – I might just set it up to work with that.