Reduce Noise on Maxwell Fire

Fierre1227

Hi , everyone

I am new on using maxwell for sketchup plugin for my interior work
However , I found that the fire speed very slow and still many white noise after render ,
does anyone can help here....

My setting
SL---20
Thread---2

Res 1455x1051

Rendering Time : about 18hrs....

Machine : Macbook Pro late 2011 ....

jason_maranto

Two things:

Maxwell needs as many cores (threads) as you can give it -- the more cores, the faster it will render.
Fire is a decent rendering option for exterior shots, however I have rarely seen great results when doing interiors -- this is especially true if you are rendering with mixed emitters in the scene (rather than lighting your scene only with the Physical Sun/Sky or IBL).

Fire was created solely with the intention of being a preview rendering option for the Maxwell production engine -- therefore it is only designed to handle simple lighting scenarios well. Complex lighting is much better rendered using the Maxwell production engine -- with interiors being one of the more complex things you can render in Maxwell.

So to sum it up, I would say adding cores (threads) to the job (minimum of 8 for reasonable speed) and switching to the production engine would be very likely to give you much better and faster results when rendering interiors.

Best,
Jason.

Fierre1227

Hi Jason

How about SL??

jason_maranto

That will be dependent on what you have in the scene -- as long as you use AGS for all of your windows and don't use any SSS materials (other than thin SSS), you should expect your renders to be clear somewhere between SL 15-20 (depending on how picky you are).

The other main things that can cause issues with noise is:

using materials with a reflectance color higher than RGB 225 -- which is roughly the reflectance of white paper, so there is rarely a need to go higher in realistic scenes anyway (and never over RGB 247).
unrealistically reflective surfaces, especially near emitters -- the worst cases of this involve users modeling light fixtures using emitters and perfect mirror type materials (roughness 0, which doesn't exist outside of laboratory conditions) as reflectors. That is definitely a bad idea -- it is much faster to use IES lights instead if you need a particular falloff. The only reason to fully model a lighting fixture is if you are going to be looking directly at it (and even then you can fake it pretty well with some workarounds -- check the Maxwell forum for hints).

Leaving an opening into "space" somewhere (off camera) in your scene can help speed things up because that gives a place for the light bounces to escape -- which will reduce noise (this is part of the reason exteriors render so much faster -- light can only bounce a few times there before it shoots off into space).

Best,
Jason.

Fierre1227

That means I set the Threads to Max then the render speed will fastest?

jason_maranto

Yes, that will use whatever is available on your system.

What is actually available will depend on what other software you have running and how many cores they are using at the time.

Best,
Jason.