DV220-3 Join the Revolution: Rendering with iRay

Notes, came in a bit late from the general session and trying to figure out where to go. Forgot to write down class locations.

Used to make photo realization without having to do a lot of set up.

Tries to mimic real life for the rendering. A whole lot of bounces of natural light that happens at the same time, iRay tries to mimic that process.

iRay takes some of the guess work out of the rendering process and makes less sight specific setup required. GPUs have provided better floating point precision to get a better rendering engine to make easier to use.

Lights and materials need to be physically possible, energy conservation is used to make sure the energy goes some where.

Built for people who don’t have a whole lot of experience rendering, people like me.

Hardware requirements: CUDA capable GPUs,

• Use the latest Driver!!!!
• SLI should be off for multi-GPU systems (will slow down the processing)
• ECC should be off for Quadro and Tesla GPUs based on “Fermi” (3ds Max may not open)

Memory Usage

• Entire scene must fit into GPU graphics memory, larger more complicated scenes needs more GPU power.
• Each card needs enough room since the cards don’t add together for the room, use the largest one.
• About 1GB memory per 8 million triangles.

Motherboards

• Gaming may not work well since they aren’t built for continuous computations, may cause early computer failure.

Supported Materials

• mental ray Arch & Design
• Autodesk Materials (except metallic paint)
• Autodesk Material Library
• Some settings are ignored, ambient occlusion, round corners and final gather.
• No programmable shaders, means some of the shipped materials don’t render. Avoid Autodesk wall paint and Autodesk Hardwood (takes up more processing, takes longer)

Use photometric lights (Target Light, Free Light, mr Sky Portal, IES)

Set up materials, setup the lights and then render.

Render Settings

• Four simple settings
• Camera Depth of Field
• Exposure, tone mapping
• Output Resolution
• Render Duration (longer time, better results) Infinite and come back and stop it or a set time like 30 minutes to get to a meeting on time.

I need to beef up on remembering my high school photography class terminology of F-Stop and aperture.

MAXScript Options http://dimensao3.com/al/ (Need to research this some more)

90% transparent window glass, may want to just turn off the glass to increase performance.

Process should get better with manufactures coming out with better GPU with Kepler and Maxwell (16x better) CUDA GPU Roadmap

GPU processing should make things better.

Link to class: http://au.autodesk.com/?nd=event_class&session_id=8919&jid=625417