I’m new to the forum and a newish blender user. I made a few projects folowing tutorials so far, but am now working on my first ‘free’ project.
I am attempting te recreate a painting by Vermeer. ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Jan_Vermeer_van_Delft_-The_Glass_of_Wine-_Google_Art_Project.jpg )
I have made the simple models, but don’t trust my skills enough yet ruin my work with the more challenging things (humans/lionheads).
My questions are these:
How can I improve my render time with a good quality? At 500 samples my time was just under four hours, yet the image is still a bit grainy. 24 samples took about 10 minutes. I used GPU rendering with my GTX 760.
Any other tips, techincal or otherwise?
Blend and the two renders included. I did not manage to upload my blend with textures attached, so the blend is without textures.
Im not really sure what settings you have changed. but i took your blend file. opened a new scene and imported all of your objects/materials and matched some render settings. i was able to render the first tile in about 30 seconds compared to about 45 seconds with your unmodified file with comparable render quality(not having textures makes this hard to judge). tried finding any other settings you may have enabled but i didn’t see anything that stood out.
a lot of the time rendering in cycles gets eaten up by processing advanced materials and geometry. if you can get away with using only a diffuse shader then do it (your walls have a glossy node). your floor for instance has a lot of faces. and a lot of faces that point towards each other. cycles is going to cast a ray and bounce around in those crevices trying to calculate light a lot of the light is not going to escape the crevices which slows down your render times.
the quicker a ray is able to get from the camera to the light(yes cycles casts backwards). the faster your render will go. in theory using a texture with a normal and spec map should be faster than actually modeling the tiles by hand which will also be less taxing on your viewport when setting up the scene…not that you have enough geometry to be bogging blender down but with larger scenes that will come in to play a lot more.
you should look at trying to balance your detail with what the viewer will actually be looking at.
the cloth on the table is very detailed. but the top of it is almost entirely flat. all those faces are not helping any. same with the chairs.
just for a quick test i selected all the faces on top and merged them(select a middle face and hit ctrl+shift+alt+f) and the first tile speed up by about 1 second. not a lot but it will add up the more you clean them up.
all in all though it looks good.
hopefully that helps. i have more to say but at this point i feel like im going on too long lol
It’s a really nice start. In comparing it to the van Delft picture, my first impression is the table cloth should be less neatly arranged, the surface textures of the walls and floor could show more variation, the framed picture is close to square (the original is rectangular), and the truncated tops of the chairs make them look modern. You might also tilt the picture outward at the top just a little bit to make it seem less artificial.
Thanks for the tips! And thanks for looking at my blend file. Yes, removing redundant faces worked a lot, I had not thought about the repeated flat faces in the cloth. I replaced my tiles with a texture real quick, saved me a lot of time too. I just learned to make my own normal maps, so i will do that when I get back to this project. I also noticed it went a lot faster with my windows off. Using a transparent instead of the cycles glass.
Thanks too for the more artistic tips. I will recalculate the cloth with other settings and let it simulate a while longer. (this one is a best pick from a still moving cloth) I will also increase the strength of the noise on the wall a bit. Tilting the picture is a good idea, I will however take the freedom to keep this picture in, as I think it’s funny to have the orrigional picicture in the reproduction. Thanks!
