Page 81 - 3D World - October 2017

ARTIST Q&A
your CG problems solved

sOFTWarE: v-ray

Is tHere a Way to speeD up

renDerIng my arC vIs In v-ray?

Derrick Chase, Wales

Paul Hatton replies
exPeRt tiP
As of version 3.5 of V-Ray, one
of the best ways to speed up PRobAbiliStiC liGHtS
your rendering is to use Adaptive Lights.
This is particularly true if you have a lot of Don’t write Probabilistic Lights off. There will be some situations where this will
lights in your scene. We’ve all been there outperform Adaptive Lights. It’s worth testing both to see which one performs better.
where we’ve had to fill our scene with a
huge number of lights, most of which are This will vary depending on how many lights you have and how your scene is set up.
the same light type with the same settings.
It can take what feels like forever for them additional noise in the image and therefore results in a quicker render as well as a less
to render. Adaptive Lights helps us avoid the Anti-Aliaser could end up working noisy solution. Perfect!
this problem. harder than before! So you’re probably wondering how you
So what exactly are they? Well, with In comes Adaptive Lights. This is a use them. Firstly head over to the Global
Adaptive Lights, V-Ray determines which similar solution to the Probabilistic version, Switches rollout under the V-Ray tab in
light sources are most important, so ray but it is more sophisticated about the the Render Setup window. With it set to
tracing calculations are focused and more lights that it selects to contribute to the Advanced, make sure that Adaptive Lights
precise. V-Ray had previously introduced solution. It does this by using the data that is set in the drop-down. Next to it you
an improved solution called ‘Probabilistic is gathered during the light cache pass. have the opportunity to set the number
Lights’, which for every ray hit would So rather than picking lights randomly for of lights that you want V-Ray to include in
randomly pick a small fixed number of each ray hit, with Adaptive Lights V-Ray will the calculation for each ray hit. This is 16 by
lights for the solution. This was a massive pick the desired number of lights that are default but you will want to adjust this for
improvement but it was prone to introduce most likely to affect the shaded point. This each of your scenes.

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