Mega Challange Dog

[BadOpinions]

So this mega challenge would end up being really interesting to do. I spent a lot of time over the weekend working on this as I had more trouble than I originally intended.

All the texturing went off without a hitch, but as you can see from picture one, the dog wound up really wonky looking, and the room felt empty, so I went back, adjusted the dog’s shoulder, and redid all the fur, added a light switch and a picture in the corner, aaaaand my render turned out really bad. Keep in mind that with my 3080, these renders are taking 5-10 hours each. so, I went back edited it further, added MORE render cycles (I’m at 8000 at this point) and I just still didn’t like it.

So at this point I’m at a loss, I sleep on it overnight, and return this morning, I decide to switch to eevee, and see what I can do from there.

First problem: Lost the sun beam. No problem I just remove the windows, and give merely the illusion they are there.
second problem: The lampshade is giving off a really pixelated light up near the ceiling. Solution 1: Up the shadow resolutions, Result: Failure, less pixelated, but really bad still. Solution 2: Add a face to the top of the lampshade, and put a point light up top at 5 watts, Result: What you see.
Third Problem: Dogs Hair turns super this and black, Solution: Really easy, changed from a hair bsdf, to a Principled bsdf, and in the render setting changed hair from strands to strips.

The result is what you see on bottom. I’m very happy with it, and I think until I can afford a small render farm I’m going to continue to target Eevee for most of my projects. I had hoped a 3080 would be enough, but it seems as though it’s still not quite there.

[NP5]

Nice scene, it is always the way, one thinks of a dog on a chair in a room, then when it starts to get done, realise a room is full of ‘stuff’ otherwise it looks empty and odd! lol.

Not sure why the render is taking so long. Samples are very high. Are you using any of the denoising options?

[BadOpinions]

Yeah, I’m actually 50/50 on the denoiser being the problem. The main issue I was having wasn’t fireflies, but the dog being crushed into a blur. I think at that distance the dog’s fur was read as noise, and the fur was crushed into a smeary mess. Not certain on that though.

Honestly I was surprised how well I was able to get Eevee to work for this scene though. I originally wrote off Eevee as unable to handle a scene like this.

[ChrisSGCP]

Cute dog.!!The room looks cool too!!

[NP5]

Try the dog on its own, See if there is a problem with hairs, they are troublesome to get to look good.

I still think other than close ups, fur rather than longer hair may as well be a surface texture. it is all we actually see, imo. So on things like a horse particle hair for the mane and tail, texture for the body.

[BadOpinions]

yeah I was putting in my lesson notes that if it weren’t for the challenge i would probably just use a texture, as it would probably look better, and be significantly faster both in the creation and rendering processes.

Also I did do a render of the dog on it’s own to find out if I was correct, and I’m now 100% the denoiser was causing my problems, close up the render picked up detail fine, but at a distance the dog turned super smooth and blurry like it the final renders.

This is good to know for the future, I know there are setting for the denoiser, so I might look into tweaking those if I ever do something with lots of hair like this again, but I am likely not as I’m learning all of this for the purposes of making a video game.