Mac Studio M2 Ultra

[zoomer]

2 minutes ago, Mark Aceto said:

I think the main thing is to uncheck Denoising. Also, if it's acceptable, reduce the number of bounces.

 

I still prefer old school RW Renderer (C4D physical CPU Renderer),

as it is more predictable to me.

(Have not seen any better quality or any render time reduction in my poor tests.

 

But I think Denoising is not bad.

It allows to render at lower samples (faster) and cleaning the noise instead.

 

Also for interiors, I would not reduce light bounces.

From the C4D side, there are settings that are not that very render time consuming

for bounces, but I am not sure what settings/engine VW defaults to of C4D engine.

Maybe that has changed.

 

I usually start my RW Renders with medium settings overall but increase Indirect Lighting 

quality. Antialias I keep in medium or high as this may be time consuming.

 

Another thing for GI is that you should not use Materials with a pure white color in large

areas, as it makes indirect light calculation bounce forever as there is no absorption.

A perfect white painted Wall may reflect 85% of light at best, so I set my white paint

to either 80% brightness or choose a 80% white/20% black diffuse color.

 

But from the screenshot that doesn't look to be the case.

And I usually go down to 150 DPI for rendered SL's - as I can't wait that long.

[Mark Aceto]

I don't know if anything has changed since VW 2022 but enabling Denoising doubled the render time. I'm assuming that's why it's still off by default. So if you're trying to shave time on renders, start there.

 

Redshift is known for having fantastic volumetric lighting but I haven't noticed a difference in VW (on a Mac), so maybe someone could... shed some light on that.

 

For all practical purposes that I've noticed in VW, the choice between RS and RW depends on your hardware. If you have a 4090, go with RS. If you have a 64core Threadripper, go with RW. If you have a Mac, make a pot of coffee, walk the dog, take a shower...

 

Maybe with VP Styles, we can render every other sheet with RW and RS for better thermals, alternating between GPU and CPU.

 

I can't keep up with the competition using Rhino, Blender, Unreal and Twinmotion, so it's all purely academic to me until there's RT RT (real time ray tracing) in VW.

[Mark Aceto]

On 10/3/2023 at 12:45 PM, zoomer said:

Another thing for GI is that you should not use Materials with a pure white color in large

areas, as it makes indirect light calculation bounce forever as there is no absorption.

 

We should add "Global Illumination" to that other thread about streamlining language. "Ambient Light" drives me crazy.

 

Edited October 8, 2023 by Mark Aceto

[Dave Donley]

I agree I would turn off denoising.  But Luis here and I disagree on use of denoising.  I think the result is not noticeable enough to justify the 2x slower rendering.  I don't mind the look of grain in the image.

 

Redshift really doesn't like lights that are set to not cast shadows.  So avoid that, lights should be set to cast shadows.

 

Might turn down sampling quality to medium if you are trying to save time, but denoising will be the biggest speed improvement.

 

To really see what the various light contributions are, set ambient to zero and turn off indirect lighting and render that.  I often see models where almost nothing is coming from the lights and ambient is patching up the scene making it look flat.

[zoomer]

11 hours ago, Mark Aceto said:

 

We should add "Global Illumination" to that other thread about streamlining language. "Ambient Light" drives me crazy.

 

Not sure if you meant it that way ....

 

Global Illumination is the calculation of indirect light bouncing between objects.

Ambient light is an ancient tool to try to fake indirect light, from times when there

was only direct light calculation in rendering.

I just brightens everything equally, no matter what face orientation or else.

It makes everything looking flat.

 

And Materials had a Specular Channel to try to mimic highlights from light sources

on objects (today in PBR times part of Reflection)

 

So if already spending the render time cost of GI calculation, you may go the PBR way.

Ambient light is neither needed nor helps so it should be always off.

AFAIR in VW you need Ambient activated just to be able to reach Ambient Occlusion

but set the slider to zero.

(Ambient Occlusion is also a fake and not PBR. But OK for me as you can safe some

render time by reducing GI sample quality and cheap AO will do the nuances in little

details which the reduced GI setting leaves out.

 

 

So Redshift Denoising may be something else than I am used to.

Usually Denoising is a reasonable fast algorithm, similar to photo editing where you

reduce the digital camera grain in low light shots.

(usually Denoisers are optimized by camera profiles with their typical kind of noise)

Its meaning is to save render time by stopping the render process at an earlier state,

when it has already good GI quality but is still grainy but letting faster Denoising getting

rid of the grain.

If the denoising takes longer than the time you save by lower sampling quality,

it doesn't really make any sense. Not sure what Redshift's denoiser does or is.

 

Another approach in real time games is rendering only half the resolution and

scale it by AI help. Usually that is much faster and the result looks nearly exactly

like a full res render, sometimes it looks even better.

 

Especially Nvidia GPUs offer hardware acceleration for all these tasks.

Raytracing, Denoising, AI Upscaling, .....

 

[Dave Donley]

Yes the new ways are to use AI for upsampling/denoising.  And some GPU-accelerated ones are very fast. 

 

AI image generation has a direct relationship to denoising.  AI image generation is trained by running from a supplied image and adding noise to it to go to a noisy image, the evaluation of the trained model runs this in reverse to go from noise to something like a real image.  Neat stuff.  https://learnopencv.com/denoising-diffusion-probabilistic-models/

 

 

[Mark Aceto]

@Dave Donley what's the recommendation for denoising on Mac vs PC? Is denoising disabled by default for both? Does VW Redshift take advantage of any hardware acceleration on a NVIDIA or AMD GPU? I'm assuming that even though VW Redshift uses the GPU on a Mac, there's no hardware acceleration for it to take advantage of... yet.

[Dave Donley]

We are using the Altus denoising, which works on all hardware.  We will look into detecting that an NVIDIA card is being used and set to Optix on that.  More info about Redshift's denoising here:

https://help.maxon.net/r3d/katana/en-us/Content/html/Denoising.html

 

[Sky]

On 10/3/2023 at 12:31 PM, Mark Aceto said:

I think the main thing is to uncheck Denoising. Also, if it's acceptable, reduce the number of bounces.

 

@Dave Donley is the man, and can really help you dial in Redshift.

 

I unchecked Denoising, but if I try to render all four at the same time, they all turn up white. I still need to manually render them one by one.