@valerostudio said:

You cant depend on solely exterior light to render an interior. You need to add lights, the same way you would need to light a space in real life. Sometimes I add a couple of planes just inside the windows to fake in some more light, but you definitely need more lights in your scene or you are going to get splotchy renders.

I have to disagree with you here. I use HDRI + VraySky most of the time which gives me more than enough lighting for any interior scene (considering that an interior has a right amount of openings). I guess your statement is more valid when doing night/evening renders.

@valerostudio said:

I stopped using light portals. The render times were isane and I did not find that added to the quality of the image, just use regular rectangular lights if you must.

It did increase render time indeed, although I was able to produce those sharp shadows on the ground. I guess it really depends on the quality of renders you're looking for. For this project, we are working on a high-end interior so producing qualitative renders is a must.

Going back to topic, I was able to reduce noise levels dramatically by checking Sub-pixel mapping option under Colour mapping menu. It's still a little bit noisy but not as much. Changing subdiv count under Vray Rectangle light options did not do too much (went from 8 to 64 and could barely notice a difference in noise levels but shadows got a little bit smoother).

I'm trying to render an interior scene and testing a few settings with Vray rectangle light set as light portal. I got those nice shadows where objects meet ground, however it got way too noisy now. Does this noise come from low subdivs of rectangle light? Or any other settings?

Using i7-4785t 32GB of RAM. It's ok until you start rendering something like this.

Thanks! I never actually studied BRDF materials so it's a new area for me. I've checked your material and it seems to be doing a little bit better, however not by much. I'm now thinking it might have to do with hardware that I use (pc is getting old).

On the other hand, I was able to produce some renders (took about 10hours on very low settings). Not sure if anyone cares but I'm attaching one of them (I might have photoshoped it a bit too much as I always do...).

Also, looking forward to see your updated scene settings.

Link to a file via Filedropper

I did some more research on it and found out that Vray takes longer to render with very high as well as very low render settings. I'm now thinking it might be the latter. Everything is optimized to a bare minimum, it has to be something with render settings.

P.S. Tried to render the scene on a monster computer which usually renders 5x faster than mine. In 3 hours was able to render 15%...

For some reason when I pack it, it gets to 129MB. I'm not sure I can attach such huge model onto this forum. Can I upload it elsewhere and post a link?

@cuttingedge said:

35 MB should be easy to handle. It must be some problem on the file. Try inserting it onto a new file.

What I also do is purge materials in vray. For downloaded blocks (not my own), I remove materials using material tools and reapply materials.

That's exatcly what I did. I do not have any unused materials. Every material was checked and reduced in quality/size just in order for this to render. I'm now thinking that it's because of light. I have a lot of it and it reflects everywhere. I'll try to reduce the number of Vray planes.

@cuttingedge said:

Yes glass it is. And i bet if its shopping mall, you'll have lots of glass everywhere. All materials with reflection and refraction (specially refraction) will definitely slow it down.

Other times, there could be one model or texture that could be the culprit. Keep all textures less than 1mb if possible. I suggest you insert everything to a new file and see.

How big is the file?

A file was 35MB only. I do not have any refractions nor displacements in my model. I do have however some reflections on floor material, and do have a lot of glass. On the other hand, as I have mentioned previously, I worked on much heavier models in the past with materials having all kinds of settings and did not have too many issues with it.

I also have some glossiness maps on textures that are important - floor materials, metal, and I believe marble. That's it. The rest of materials have only diffuse or simple fresnel reflection.

So I'm working on a shopping centre model which I'm trying to render in Vray. Now, due to a lot of geometry, many texture files and vast amount of lighting I quickly faced long render times.

Last night, I started optimizing model and brought it down to about 160k polygons (from over 2m), 35 textures (from 155, not looking for too much detail atm), put everything what's possible into components, brought render settings to the bare minimum, and still it takes half a day to render 1000px image.

I've checked all materials, reduced reflection subdivs, got I believe only 1 bump map for floor texture, the rest of materials only have diffuse and reflections (where needed).

I've worked with much heavier models, having over 2m polygons and rendering fine at 8000px resolution in like 10hours. Have no idea what could be happening right now. Any suggestions?

P.S. A render seems to stop dramatically when rendering glass. I'm guessing it's because of many reflections it has to calculate but I'm not sure. Attaching all my settings.

Wow, I'm pretty lucky indeed. I knew I'm not using SU to it's full potential but I never even thought of such workflow and will definetely follow this way. I did actually had terrible clipping issues which were unknwown for me and just had to be ignored to due short terms.

The way I came up with this design is just ridiculous when I think of it. I did it with Rotate and Scale, then used some soapskin to create lots of bugged faces which I then replaced with more unnecessary lines.

I'm thanking you for your rich insight not only on my problem but my general skills and ways of improving it. I never used this forum before and I already learned what seemed such a huge thing to do at first. Thank you guys for sharing your knowledge!

Thank you!

For the organisation of the file, I have to agree that it was pretty messy and mostly it's because of lack of time. It was done very quickly and I wasn't hoping to do anything else with it so I just left the way it was. I do have to agree that organised file makes your workflow much easier.

Thanks again, not only for giving the solution but also explaining the process and giving some tips. Didn't know you have such great community here

EDIT: One quick question: how did you turn that messy structure into solid mass?

@box said:

Is this the type of thing you are trying to achieve?
[attachment=1:3ahf283s]<!-- ia1 -->Rails.JPG<!-- ia1 -->[/attachment:3ahf283s]
[attachment=0:3ahf283s]<!-- ia0 -->Latt.JPG<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:3ahf283s]

Cant open file since it's saved in 2015 but from screenshots looks exactly what I was trying to achieve in the first place. Maybe I would just change the number of segments/lines going across but overall I like the result. Could you explain how you did it?

@driven said:

that looks like a small enough file to post...

did you try tubes2lines plugin on of the wireframe model?

john

Sketchup would just crash. I assume the previous curviloft plugin uses a lot of lines to create a face and sketchup runs out of memory to draw a cylinder around every one of them. I tried welding the lines, it didn't work either.

So I redrew one of the walls using curviloft and created this grid with more or less correct amount of segments. The question is, what is the quickest way of changing all those line into components? It will not let me turn it into components for some reason, and drawing pipes for each one of those will take forever. Any suggestions?

@jeff hammond said:

@martynaaas said:

Continueing topic about components, I kind of like your first try and was wondering did you draw that from scratch or can the same pattern (curved white lines) can be applied to any surface?

from scratch.. with surfaces which are a lot more receptive to having an array applied to them..
if you look at your surfaces, there are lines going every which way when in reality, those lines should be your underlying 'grid' to accept the components.

@unknownuser said:

I'm not looking to improve this in anyway, all I want is to somehow find an easy way of drawing double-curved elements that would follow surfaces of my building. Basically, turn the mass into steel structure.

hmm. yeah, i know i'm not going to be able to explain it properly but the easiest way is to start over with better surfaces.. subsequent operations on those surfaces will then be easy instead of how they are now, you're going to be fighting/hacking it the rest of the way through.

idk.. search the extension depositories for 'lines2tubes' or similar.. then just draw some lines using your surfaces as some sort of guide then tube the lines.
?

Well, I'll try changing soap skin into those interactive surfaces tomorrow, see how it goes. Thanks for your effor anyways guys.

Thanks for the effort but in terms of design, I'm not changing anything. As I mentioned in my original post, this was a small project (2 weeks) and now we're asked to draw a technical section of it. I know it could be improved a lot and there's pretty much no design in this structure but that's what I've got.

Continueing topic about components, I kind of like your first try and was wondering did you draw that from scratch or can the same pattern (curved white lines) can be applied to any surface?

I'm not looking to improve this in anyway, all I want is to somehow find an easy way of drawing double-curved elements that would follow surfaces of my building. Basically, turn the mass into steel structure.

@box said:

You have several versions in your reference images and I'm not going to download a dropbox of 45mg, to top it off I'm on my phone so wouldn't be able to open it anyway, a screenshot of your actual structure and the file makes it very easy for many different people to answer questions.

Having said that, draw one line from top to bottom, either as a curve or various straight lines as shown in your images. Curve the line or taper it in various ways until it is what you want, then use follow me to produce one 'rib' make that a component and array it around the circle to create your stucture.

This would work if my structure was circular. However, it's this triangular shape extruded up and then twisted and scaling down upwards. I still tried your method and didn't work.

@box said:

There are two plugins can help for you
http://www.1001bit.com/pro/index.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcpGwlfu3vU

Same goes for this. These are pretty much for standard regular building. Mine's more conceptual and therefore I need to use some other ways to do it.

P.S. Due to large file size, I'm attaching screenshots of my structure. As mentioned earlier, it's a triangular shape extruded up, twisted, and scaling down upwards. It was created using Rotate and Scale plugin, hopefully that helps.

Hello guys,

I am an architecture student and I've been using sketchup a lot since it's very quick and easy software to work with. I still consider myself a rookie in this software and I need your help.

I'm doing a technical section of my tower design and was thinking of doing double-curvature lattice grid (it's basically a steel frame going in curved line). Not only that, I'm also doing my section in perspective, which makes me model it first and then draw the details on CAD.

When designing, I just made a mass for a tower and didn't really think of a structure as it was a small project at first and turned into a bigger later. What I really want from you guys is to help me turn the mass of the tower into structure of double-curved pipes. I would assume this can be done by drawing curves, making them components and then just turning those lines into pipes (which will stand for steel beams).

I'm also attaching my sketchup file and some photos for reference.

If there's anyone knowing a way to do this, I would be more than thankful to hear it.

SketchUp file (45MB)