Too many lights to render (instancing)
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Hi all, I wished to do a render of a High Tech environment. So I built the model with lots of Led's (about 2200+ of them) all was going OK until I tried to render
I started to render and was getting one frame about every 5 hours!! Due to the 2200 Led "lamps" which would require about 300 Passes (frames) which equates to about 62.2 days! Well that was not going o happen. so I spent about 10 hours trying/failing to come up with a solution. Then I thought, INSTANCING! something I had tried hard to avoid learning. Anyway there is 16 data cabinets so I kept 2 and instanced the rest. The attached render (without any post processing, still took 2 days but that was do-able. Anyway instancing got me out of a jam. Just thought I would share. I am relatively new to rendering and am sure my idea is not new to the more well healed renderers among us.
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The smart way would be using a shit of light emitter material instead of a thousand LEDs... this is the trick mostly used to simulate lighting facades such as shopping or facades...
Based on your render engine there are different tips and tricks.
to have an overview of the technique please search :"apartment night texture"
Also this may give you some ideas: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2954 -
@majid said:
The smart way would be using a shit of light emitter material instead of a thousand LEDs... this is the trick mostly used to simulate lighting facades such as shopping or facades...
Based on your render engine there are different tips and tricks.
to have an overview of the technique please search :"apartment night texture"
Also this may give you some ideas: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2954Hi Majid that,s what I did, the LED's are octagons (red) which were made into light emitters. I am interested in what you thought the Led's were?
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I did something similar in THEA, I used emitters instead of actual lights and it did not turn out too bad. I think he meant actual directional lights that you had inserted, you can do this in many rendering engines.
I could render these scenes in a reasonable time, these images also rendered at oversize, around 10,000 by 6000 px.
- 8 hours:
-13 hours
The larger scene used much more dumbed down server models but there are probably still over 1000+ light sources.
I would not be able to do this without GPU render support, what are your hardware limitations, that could be the issue?
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Hi Liam thanks for the insight. Your render inspired me to try again
Anyway it seems the server modules had a photo texture on them that was somhow interacting with the emitters causing the problem. I am rendering with ease once I removed them. -
@majid said:
@l i am said:
@majid said:
The smart way would be using a shit of light emitter material instead of a thousand LEDs... this is the trick mostly used to simulate lighting facades such as shopping or facades...
Based on your render engine there are different tips and tricks.
to have an overview of the technique please search :"apartment night texture"
Also this may give you some ideas: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2954Hi Majid that,s what I did, the LED's are octagons (red) which were made into light emitters. I am interested in what you thought the Led's were?
I totally understood you, you modeled ll the lights and then replaced them with instances that does not produced remarkable saved time.
I mean a totally different approach, or sort of trick. the same trick that is used to simulate a fire: an image from fire flame ( that is also emitter) + an opacity mask..
You can mimic all the lights you have in a single texture like that and using the appropriate opacity mask, eliminate unnecessary parts and this way reduce emitter faces as much as possible... a bit tricky but time saving.Hi Majid I misunderstood, I will revisit as soon as I can give it the proper attention and thanks for the heads up
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@l i am said:
@majid said:
The smart way would be using a shit of light emitter material instead of a thousand LEDs... this is the trick mostly used to simulate lighting facades such as shopping or facades...
Based on your render engine there are different tips and tricks.
to have an overview of the technique please search :"apartment night texture"
Also this may give you some ideas: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2954Hi Majid that,s what I did, the LED's are octagons (red) which were made into light emitters. I am interested in what you thought the Led's were?
I completely understood you, you modeled all the lights and then replaced them with instances that does not produced remarkable saved time... am I right?
I mean a totally different approach, or sort of trick. the same trick that is used to simulate a fire: an image from fire flame ( that is also emitter) + an opacity mask..
You can mimic all the lights you have in a single texture like that and using the appropriate opacity mask, eliminate unnecessary parts and this way reduce emitter faces as much as possible... a bit tricky but time saving.
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