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Out of curiosity, what is your usual value for Max Samples/Max Time for your final renders?
Generally speaking, for a let's say 4000 pixel square picture, I tend to go for a 12k samples, with a maximum of 17000 seconds (5 hours).
All with a Rendering Converged Ratio of 98% and Render Quality at 2 or 3.
Running on an "old" 3090.
I’ve a 3090 too. Nowadays I enjoy using FillaToon so 6-10 seconds per render. A couple of hours in Iray.
leave it at default 5000 but with pixel filter set to 1 / mitchell
I only tend to do single subjects though, and no renders over an hour generally.
Most of my renders range from ~2 minutes to maybe 20 minutes or so max (I do stills, not animation. Also, toons don't require any real LOD or intensive skin shading, so it's easier on me that way.)
To answer your question, though: - it depends. Let me explain why.
Before I begin, I have an official Ancient Chinese Secret: You don't have to render to 100% - oftentimes the quality is perfect at far lower percentages, saving you a ton of otherwise wasted time and energy. The trick is to do a test run and figure out what you yourself are satisfied with, and use that (time, sample count, or a combo of both) as your benchmarks for the following..
- If I know that any render in a series averages 5 minutes per image and I'll have my characters in the same scene for awhile, I'll set the max time to 150%, or in this case 450 seconds (7-1/2 minutes), so that if I get distracted or go do something else, the render ends at the same quality level as the other images, but still leaves a bit of time in case it takes a bit longer than the others to complete.
- Now - if I'm using image filtering and the scene isn't going to change much (again, I do mostly toons, so I almost always use it...) I'll limit exclusively by max samples - If I set filtering to kick in at 500 samples, then there's usually no point in letting it run to 1500+ samples, so in that particular case, the max samples would be something like 750-1000, depending on the test run.
Note that these are not 'set-and-forget': The scene or its contents can change in meaningful ways from image to image, or your camera's distance/focus changes. However, you can set a certain amount of 'slop' in timing or count and be fine for most scenes in a series - just keep an eye on them and change them to accommodate any abrupt shifts in scenery, lighting, or camera usage.
On timing, a simple indoor scene might take only 5 minutes to render, but you'll have to remember to adjust settings if you swap to a more complex scene for your characters (ex: You were in an elevator with your characters, but now you're in a busy outdoor urban scene with complex lighting that's crammed with figures and props), or if you go from complex to simple - the amount of time it takes to reach the same quality level between the two will necessarily change, because the contents of your scene did.
Same with max samples - some scenes may only take 800-900 samples to come out perfect, but a change in contents may mean the new scene may take 1600 samples to reach the same consistency, or it may take on 400.
PS: I use an RTX 4060, but it's on a laptop and only has 8GB onboard. This means I still have to have some sense of economizing settings 😀
That’s quite insightful. I started with Poser a long time ago, and before that I used Maya. Rendering settings and similar technical details have always puzzled me a little.
I usually run a few test renders before starting the final one, mainly increasing the resolution (before applying filters) to check for errors, poke-through issues that can’t be fixed in post-processing, and similar problems.
Back in the day, I did all my renders on my trusty 1080. Moving to the 3090, with its huge amount of VRAM, opened up the possibility of working with much larger scenes, multiple characters, and more complex geometry.
I’ll run some tests and gradually reduce the sampling and adjust the render times to find the sweet spot for my style and what my machine can comfortably handle.
Thanks again for the tips!
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