Nifty trick to speed up render times?....

not sure who is aware of this or not but Anita from Sketchup Hub recently put on her instagram story that if you lower the exposure/gamma whilst rendering, the time it takes to render speeds up quite significantly! Was everyone aware of this except me!?

I'd never heard that before, so I just tried it. Lowering the exposure and gamma had no effect at all.

Tested on v21, HD highest x8

7:55 leaving exposure and gamma where they start off.

7:56 dropping expose and gamma right to the bottom.

When I have a chance to play with it I'll give it a proper go and do a proper comparison. I'm sure the render i'm working on just completed than it has before though. Worth a go anyways!

I don't think RedSDK works the same as the render engine Anita is using in Sketchup as it is rendering in HDR format behind the "Layers" for exposure and gamma on top. A bit like playing around with Photoshop to compress the HDR down into a lower bit depth so we can see it on our screens and printers between 0 and 255 RGB...

What render engine is Anita using??

I'm sure she uses Maxwell Rendering software? I thought it was worth a mention just in case. My renders take over an hour on your settings Daz.... and im on an i7 computer, when I see Michaels takes under 8 minutes (although not as high settings as yours) it makes me think my computer isn't performing efficiently as it should be?

It was only a small utility I was rendering, no bells and whistles in it, that's why it took so little time. I just wanted to do a quick comparison to see if it worked.

Usual render times are between 20-30 minutes for larger kitchens when more effort has been put into them. I haven't used Daz's settings since I switched to v21 as I'm seeing how good the renders can be "out of the box" to save time...I always have at least two ArtiCAD's open; one rendering whilst working on a different design in the other. Rendering is a bottleneck for us! I have a tray full of new enquiries, going back to the 11th Sept. that still need doing 

It is very scene/lighting dependent. I think Michael is using lit appearance at the windows but he is using an image that does not have much colour/contrast so this helps reducing noise so the standard renders are enough to clean it up... Maybe Michael can confirm?
Turning the sun off also helps for the standard render settings as the looser GI settings which nearly always lead to sun light leaks are really diminished as on the lit appearance and sky rays are kinder to the render engine.... The sun can really be a PITA.

See i cant even work on another plan whilst one is rendering - it just kills my PC and everything freezes and crashes. This one took just under an hour..... lots of detail and bump maps which i appreciate means it takes longer but still, i wonder if this is normal!?

Jaynehiddleston wrote:See i cant even work on another plan whilst one is rendering - it just kills my PC and everything freezes and crashes. This one took just under an hour..... lots of detail and bump maps which i appreciate means it takes longer but still, i wonder if this is normal!?

Super Render Jayne....

Re: Your Computer it does sound like you should get either yourself/ArtiCAD or an IT guru to check that your system is setup correctly using a Good GPU and not the Basic motherboard one for optimum performance...

You should be able to have more than one ArtiCAD EXE running as I can have three or four running on my old laptop...

Spot on Daz, I've got rid of any window/door images that were slowing down render times too much, I've played around with the saturation, brightness and contrast so they are quicker to render. Oh and I never use the sun!!!

you said you have an i7 processor Jayne, but whihc one is it exactly? And how much RAM do you have?

Also Re: Performance.... comparing the resolution Pixels Height and Width to what Michael renders as this has a massive impact on render times...

I render at 1664 x 1000 which is enough nearly all my work.

Jayne, are you running 64bit? 
32bit will struggle to run more than one session if you're rendering.

yep, this is my spec. can anyone shed anymore light?!

Check that the Articad version you're running is 64bit. 
Go to help/about and you should see the version that's running.

it is Pete, just checked! How long would the render like the one i posted above take you roughly on daz highest? (if you use that?) no way can i work on multiple plans though, my comp just crashes and freezes.

Well, you've got plenty of RAM, so it must be the processor that's the bottleneck? Although I wouldn't expect that much of a performance drop from a 4 year old processor. What windows version are you running?

Jayne do you render inside the ArtiCAD GUI or render to file?

If you render to the screen what are your display properties re: resolution in pixel dimensions?

Screen resolution, texture image sizes and daz settings can all determine render speeds. Basically why articad kept the old textures for so long was to not slow down renders speeds. Then we all found Daz and wanted better renders and it all went to shit!! 

Also found v21 to be better with no lit appearance in window views. I use a cubic box with a view texture outside window with no lit appearance in v21 

Seem to get decent light coming in without the need for lit appearance in v21. Never been a fan of lighting anyway in articad. Some users go over the top with downlights!! Try some daylight shots to see if your renders speed up. Renders will look more realistic.

Joe wrote:Screen resolution, texture image sizes and daz settings can all determine render speeds. Basically why articad kept the old textures for so long was to not slow down renders speeds. Then we all found Daz and wanted better renders and it all went to shit!! 

Also found v21 to be better with no lit appearance in window views. I use a cubic box with a view texture outside window with no lit appearance in v21 

Seem to get decent light coming in without the need for lit appearance in v21. Never been a fan of lighting anyway in articad. Some users go over the top with downlights!! Try some daylight shots to see if your renders speed up. Renders will look more realistic.

Still on v20 build 70 but they've changed the lighting on sun scale now to 1-20. With the old Daz lit appearance calc this needs to be set to .75 for the same effect or the window view is just overpowered. I don't know what they are thinking.

Michael: I use Windows 7 - does this mean anything? and yes, i'm sure our IT provider actually added additional RAM onto my computer to help speed up render times..... 

Daz: render using "Daz highest" named after the man himself  I don't really understand therefore haven't used RTF much, is this the highest possible setting and if so, what should my resolution be set at? I can then run a comparison test out of interest.

That makes sense Joe - and yes, we're all looking for the highest render possible in the shortest amount of time! I'll try some daylight shots. Interesting to hear about the changes to lit appearance in V21. Going to take the plunge after my holidays....

Can you not upgrade to Windows 10? No version of Windows is perfect, but Win7 certainly isn't the best, especially for anything resource hungry. This might explain why you're having problems when trying to open two ArtiCADs. RAM doesn't have that much of a bearing when it comes to rendering, it's more about the processor.

Jayne
Can you tell us what your Screen Resolution is by doing the following:

I am using Windows 7 Professional by the way...

Professional is a lot more rounded than the Home edition though, they actually put some time and effort into developing it properly 

Not being able to support more than 16Gb RAM and no support for RAID configs. was just lazy!

Hi Daz, 

screenshot attached

Exactly the same resolution as mine Jayne!