Very slow render time

[DapperDan]

I'm finally starting to get some decent images. Render times were quick.

Then I applied two different siding textures to the exterior walls, and a couple of plants in the foreground, my render times have gone through the roof.

This one took about 12 hours and I stopped it with 8 hours to go.
It was rendered on Easy .04.
All my lights are turned off. I have some dome lights inside that are light emitters.
Sun and environment at defaults using physical sky.

Entry.jpg (3.08 MiB) Viewed 40991 times

This one only took a few minutes, before I added the textures:

RenderAerial2.jpg (1.6 MiB) Viewed 40991 times

[Fletch]

I have some dome lights inside that are light emitters.

this is the likely culprit - I'm not sure what you mean by "dome lights" but light emitting surfaces increase render times.

applied two different siding textures to the exterior walls,

hi resolution textures can increase render times

I would not add emitter fill lights to "help" the sun/sky, but rather I would use Filmic post process in the Lower Right corner of the Render Dialog.
Subject: ACES vs Filmic : When do I use Filmic versus ACES when Tonemapping?

Verify that you have not accidentally applied a Light Emitter template to any materials in your scene.
Use Extensions>Twilight V2>Diagnostic and run that on the entire scene - read about your textures and lights in your scene in the diagnostic results it should tell you where you may have accidentally applied light emitter to a material or have high resolution textures where they may not be necessary.

[DapperDan]

I have some dome lights inside that are light emitters.

this is the likely culprit - I'm not sure what you mean by "dome lights" but light emitting surfaces increase render times.

applied two different siding textures to the exterior walls,

hi resolution textures can increase render times

I would not add emitter fill lights to "help" the sun/sky, but rather I would use Filmic post process in the Lower Right corner of the Render Dialog.
Subject: ACES vs Filmic : When do I use Filmic versus ACES when Tonemapping?

Verify that you have not accidentally applied a Light Emitter template to any materials in your scene.
Use Extensions>Twilight V2>Diagnostic and run that on the entire scene - read about your textures and lights in your scene in the diagnostic results it should tell you where you may have accidentally applied light emitter to a material or have high resolution textures where they may not be necessary.

Hi Fletch,
Thanks for your help.
I'm currently using the hobby version, and evaluating if it will work out for me. There is no "Extensions>Twilight V2>Diagnostic" available in the hobby version.

The materials I used are from images about 50KB in size. I believe that is typical of SketchUp materials. I have attached one of them below.

I applied a light emitter to the blue material you see in the image below, in order to create an LED strip light effect. Is there a way to create a linear light source like this?

If emitters shouldn't be used, why does the program have them?

I deleted all of the emitters from the model, purged unused, and ran the fix errors routine. Saved and reloaded the program. Render times are still extremely long, even for a small test image.

LED emitter. I have reset the material to SU default.

LED strip.jpg (4 MiB) Viewed 40945 times

Typical material. 51KB

charming-vertical-cedar-siding-texture-image-inspirations-500x250.jpg (50.73 KiB) Viewed 40945 times

[Fletch]

Hi Fletch,
Thanks for your help.
I'm currently using the hobby version, and evaluating if it will work out for me. There is no "Extensions>Twilight V2>Diagnostic" available in the hobby version.

The materials I used are from images about 50KB in size. I believe that is typical of SketchUp materials. I have attached one of them below.

I applied a light emitter to the blue material you see in the image below, in order to create an LED strip light effect. Is there a way to create a linear light source like this?

If emitters shouldn't be used, why does the program have them?

I deleted all of the emitters from the model, purged unused, and ran the fix errors routine. Saved and reloaded the program. Render times are still extremely long, even for a small test image.

LED emitter. I have reset the material to SU default.
LED strip.jpg


Typical material. 51KB
charming-vertical-cedar-siding-texture-image-inspirations-500x250.jpg

Sorry for your troubles, that's strange.

No one said that light emitters shouldn't be used. I just said they can increase render times (with Easy 1-7 render settings) With Easy 09 they are negligible on render times, but are much more realistic than point or spot lights. When you combine Fastforward Denoise with Easy 09 render setting, the quality and speed are very good and cannot be beaten by other settings in Twilight IMHO.

Obviously there's something strange happening with your file, please upload to file share service, and share link to the file here, or upload file directly if it's small enough, or you can send link to file via PM.

The LED strip light with long emitter is exactly what I do, it will increase render times a bit, but not like "extreme" you are describing. Here's a render time comparison between a point light and a light emitting surface...

Subject: Lighting and Render Speed
Subject: Solutions for quick renderings with Twilight

[DapperDan]

Hi Fletch,
I DM'd you a couple days ago, and just checked my sent messages. Nothing appears sent.
I will try again, but it seems odd.
Are your DM's open?

[DapperDan]

Hi Fletch,
Thanks for your help.
I'm currently using the hobby version, and evaluating if it will work out for me. There is no "Extensions>Twilight V2>Diagnostic" available in the hobby version.

The materials I used are from images about 50KB in size. I believe that is typical of SketchUp materials. I have attached one of them below.

I applied a light emitter to the blue material you see in the image below, in order to create an LED strip light effect. Is there a way to create a linear light source like this?

If emitters shouldn't be used, why does the program have them?

I deleted all of the emitters from the model, purged unused, and ran the fix errors routine. Saved and reloaded the program. Render times are still extremely long, even for a small test image.

LED emitter. I have reset the material to SU default.
LED strip.jpg


Typical material. 51KB
charming-vertical-cedar-siding-texture-image-inspirations-500x250.jpg

Sorry for your troubles, that's strange.

No one said that light emitters shouldn't be used. I just said they can increase render times (with Easy 1-7 render settings) With Easy 09 they are negligible on render times, but are much more realistic than point or spot lights. When you combine Fastforward Denoise with Easy 09 render setting, the quality and speed are very good and cannot be beaten by other settings in Twilight IMHO.

Obviously there's something strange happening with your file, please upload to file share service, and share link to the file here, or upload file directly if it's small enough, or you can send link to file via PM.

The LED strip light with long emitter is exactly what I do, it will increase render times a bit, but not like "extreme" you are describing. Here's a render time comparison between a point light and a light emitting surface...

Subject: Lighting and Render Speed
Subject: Solutions for quick renderings with Twilight

Hi Fletch,
I have sent you a link to my model in a DM twice now.
They sit in my outbox. Perhaps you have your messages blocked or something like that?

[Fletch]

Message received.

[Fletch]

First impression:

1: You have Emitter light strips on the bookshelves that jump up render times drastically.
The light emitter material is called "Color B01"

2: for items that are not in the view or effecting the veiw - hide those items or put all items on different tags and turn off tags

3: Blurry Metals increase render times with Easy 01-07 render settings.
You have a blurry metal "Metal Seamed" on the fireplace and behind the book shelves - that jumps up render times. Same for any materials that are blurry or specular reflection like satin paint or satin finish on wood.

I would avoid any blurry reflections if using Easy 1-7. Replace blurry materials with "Perfect Reflection" template, and choose low med or high to choose different brightness of reflections.

4: Lower brightness of any white surface from 96% to as close to 70% as possible, then lower the brightness of all adjacent materials by a relative similar amount. This will make all colors more accurate, light bounces more accurate, and generally speed up render times. LOWER SATURATION of all colors and materials by about 12% as well. (especially for bright colors and for wood materials)

5: adjust your tone mapping to increase brightness that you lost when you dropped the brightness of the materials. Use ACES for no-fuss very good tonemapping and increase exposure until you are happy with results. See below.

6. Place your Twilight Light objects inside of the light fixtures - do not float them below as they will look unrealistic and cast strange shadows in the space. make the radius for the lights very small like .5 cm or .1 inches


IMPORTANT: Again, Easy 09 along with Fastforward denoise addon for Twilight will give you very high quality results very quickly compared to Easy 1-7 -

It will do it much more quickly and with no worrying about types of lights or materials.

Look at Easy 09 below with all lights and furniture - no changes nearly ready after less than 2 minutes and looks great.
Easy 03 Low after 12 minutes without even putting furniture and lights in hasn't even come close to completing the rendering because of the issues above.

[Fletch]

additional changes I've made: improved geometry of couch model, added carpet texture to rug under living room furn, adjust any whites to be darker at around 70% adjust brightness of other materials in the scene to be lower relative to the drop in the white's brightness.
enable edge lines for cabinetry materials and enable weld and set weld angle to 30 degrees. - in Pro I would make it a deep material and add bevel to edges.
set floor to perfect reflection, set woods to be high gloss. adjust brightness of most materials lower, and boost exposure in post-process tab. set white translucent light material to be Template>Lamp Glass>matte

suggestion: if rendering on Easy 09: disable sunshine as direct sunlight conflicts with interior lighting. replace exterior lighting with a vertical rectangular face in front of each window and apply a light emitting material - set light emit material to invisible. Adjust power of those window light emitters to look like natural soft glow light from outside.

ACES is used by the film industry for their color management. It often automatically results in a great exposure if your whites and colors are not too bright or over saturated before you start rendering.
Filmic is made to replicate color management of film photography. It has extra settings to adjust if you wish to boost the darks or mids.

[Fletch]

You can clear all materials in the scene go to Extensions>Twilight V2 > Clean > Clean Materials

This will allow you to quickly apply new templates if you wish to get a "do over" on a scene and you can't find where a problem exists.

I did this with your scene, and with Pro, the Glass and other SketchUp default textures all render with Twilight properties automatically. So I applied a few perfect reflection materials to the floor and wood cabinets, added the "render edges" to the cabinets as mentioned above, and set the translucent lamp shade materials in the scene to "Lamp Glass> Matte".
It renders much faster now on Low3 : 1h4m31s

Low3-1hr4m31s.jpg (465.28 KiB) Viewed 40801 times

but is of course still much slower than with Easy 09 and Fastforward Denoise. where you have an excellent preview in 1 minute.

I'm rendering these examples on a laptop, you can get much faster on a good render rig with 64 threads.
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.59 GHz
16.0 GB (15.8 GB usable)
NVIDIA RTX 2060

See this lighting tutorial: 13:24 and 17:30 are very important regarding Light Emitting Surfaces and What to do to fake the effect of a light emitting surface with Easy 1-7 render settings.