So I assembled a scene that was supposed to be simple to apply a three light rig for testing. I don’t do simple well. Anyway, I simply built up a ladder and built a scene around it.
The key light is located on the right to direct the shadow of the ladder into a nice location with a fill light off the left side that fills in with a cool light. While I started with a background light, I ended up creating the candle as the third light for some highlighting (especially on the bolts).
I’m not really happy with the material on the ladder as it feel incompatible with the high contrast floor material (which I really like). The current render is in Eevee as my laptop keeps failing with Cycles on this particular scene. I ma give rendering it another try with my desktop just to see how it turns out.
And I finally got my “even less simple” scene (which I started before the ladder) rendered. This one was a real pain, to be honest. It’s rendered in Cycles and this final render took nearly six hours - which was a massive improvement over other attempts. I am going to need to figure out how to speed it up even more if I am going to continue with images of this size. Getting rid of noise in the render is proving to be very difficult.
I’m convinced that there must be ways to speed it up quite a bit. There are, for instance, places that things could be pretty easily simplified and get the same results. For instance, at the moment, there is a particle system for the grass in the valley… It’s night time, all you can see are little hints of green. Also, the stars are still acting as an environment map and the entire temple is completely constructed - six columns across the front and back and thirteen columns back. All of that is making it take longer. The real problem though is the mottled granite like pattern in the structure. If I use any fewer samples (this was 3000), it ends up being a noisy mess. Again, I’m convinced that there is a way to improve the render time while keeping the quality the same (or even improving it).
On the other hand. There is the major advantage of the fact that knowing you have six hours to wait for a render to finish makes it lots easier to convince yourself to go to sleep!
I agree there is quite a bit of work to be done. To be honest, the particles are unnecessary - it’s generating grass. Lighting it for day, the grass looks fantastic. It’s useless at night. There’s just enough light to make a single color material look weird though, so I’m going to need to figure out a good replacement material.
I actually do most of my test renders on this scene at 64 or 128 samples with denoising. The issue is that, while the denoising does indeed cut out most of the noise, it also destroys the texture on the temple in the process. I end up with artifacts and all kinds of weirdness.
I think a good first step is to rethink the ground material. If nothing else, that will decrease the render load. After that, maybe I can find some other ways to speed up rendering. I’m quite happy with how the temple itself is lit. I would actually like a bit more of the background to show though, so I’m not there yet anyhow.
