Optimizing Cycles Renders

Hey Ian, I'm a little Tardy to the Party but congrats on your first episode release! I just want to say that I am going to be trying my hand at making short films that are VFX heavy and I am really grateful for all of your videos. I'm 10 minutes in and I'm already finding a lot of useful information. To have all your knowledge compressed down into one spot is invaluable for me so thank you!

That idea of using area lights and adjusting render settings really helped a lot. My first day on your Patreon and so far lots of great data for improving my skills in Blender, Thank you, Ian!

Just got around to watching this one! You mentioned about having trouble with metal glossiness / roughness, have you seen Andrew Price's guides to Physical Based Rendering in Blender? This helped me tons! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1PkSViBi-M

Very cool guide! TY bro

Peter Brennan

I just checked the caustics out since I am totally in the same boat in terms of superstitious avoidance - they are a little more noisy than other sampling but do clear up pretty quickly, and are absolutely required to get a realistic response from metallic surfaces in my opinion. I say it's time to keep it on by default and perhaps turn it off if it ever does act up, but so far it seems perfectly fine and adds a lot!

Chromfell

I find that SID (super image denoiser) works a little better and it's free on Gumroad.

Godzookie

Have you heard of turbo render? Seems to work wonders on some of this stuff from the discussion about it on blenderartists. https://3dillusions.gumroad.com/l/turbo_tools https://blenderartists.org/t/turbo-render-cycles-renders-960x-faster/1365583/173

John Cliff

The actor is on an image plane inside the 3D scene, allowing him to interact with lights and shadows like any other object (well, nearly—he's still a flat card. There may also be some cheating in that scene with extra invisible shadow casters, or it's just very judicious light placement.) Check out Ian's "Wild Tricks for Greenscreen" video https://youtu.be/RxD6H3ri8RI for the short version, or any number of posts on here from the past few years if you want to see him figuring out the workflow in real time. https://www.patreon.com/posts/ae-to-blender-3d-34871595 https://www.patreon.com/posts/working-on-green-35698025 https://www.patreon.com/posts/making-shot-in-37501621 https://www.patreon.com/posts/re-animating-in-36909454

Carter Burr-Kirven

Great video! How did you get the shadow to pass over the various cockpit instruments in the phaeton at 12:58? Looks fantastic! I'd have no idea how to do that myself ( I'm not a luddite I promise... just grossly incompetent!)

Chris Alldridge

This is quite a helpful video for these kind of weird situations where you will have intensive path tracing to calculate. Although, I usually just put a denoiser over my renders, which gives it a unique, painterly feeling that i usually prefer in my renders, although this could be required when doing nice and clean renders for VFX and such.

Cheat bounce by adding area lamps... sounds very Blender Internal to me 🤣 Everything old is new again with regard to optimising renders, i do the same in Eevee. I wonder if you can do a material LOD by distance and aperture for cleaner bokeh?

David McSween

Do you overclock your 3090 or have you changed any of the settings in the Nvidia Control panel to "Performance" setting?

This is super useful info. Thank you so much. You just sped up my render that I've been pulling my hair out over for the last few days.