Twilight Renders - they all look very 'noisy'?!

[AlexanderBell]

Hello!

My apologies if this question has been asked before, I have searched through this forum but couldn't find anything that answered my question...

I am a current user of Podium for my sketchup renders but am considering using TR having played with the demo version and read about it (mainly on this forum!).

However, my concern is that a lot of the renders I am seeing people produce (even though they are superb renders, very realistic!!) they seem to have a lot of 'noise' speckles when it comes to the clarity of the visuals. I have attached 2 examples and highlighted the areas which I am referring too. It seems a shame because these renders are so life like but the 'noise' (I think this is the correct technical term?) seems to spoil the quality of the final visual (no offense meant to the people who produced them.. they are both amazing renders!!!).

There are visuals which do seem to be spot on in terms of clarity (in my opinion... again no offense to the designers of the previous 2 visuals!), however, I am seeing comments that refer to these renders being left to 'pass' until their hearts content... over 24 hours in some cases... (albeit by accident..)

First is the final image; 89 hours baking, 538 passes...only that length because I left it running when I headed out for a 3 day weekend. Did some level lightening in PS.

http://twilightrender.com/phpBB3/viewto ... f=16&t=711

Is this mostly down to the time allowed to render? As I am really looking for speed when it comes to my renders... the ones I have been producing in Podium (although nothing amazing in terms of reflective surfaces or lighting) are usually between 30 mins and 1 hour at around 2048 * 1536 resolution. I am running on windows xp, 8gb ram, 8x intel Xeon 1.86ghz.

I know that this is a difficult question to ask regarding whether or not my renders will likely take longer in TR than podium... but hopefully clarifying the noisyness issue will give me a clue.

Thanks in advance!!

AlexanderB

[Ecuadorian]

I understand perfectly your question.

Actually, both Podium and Twilight use the same render engine, called "Kerkytha Echo 2008", so you should be able to obtain similar results in similar render times with both render plugins, when using the same settings, or "preset" file.

I recommend you to download and install Kerkythea Rendering System, an excellent freeware render studio by the same author of the engine, Ioannis Pantazopoulos. Once you have done so, copy a Kerkythea setting file (called a "preset" file) to both Podium's and Twilight's presets folders, and try it with both. You should obtain similar results and similar render times.

The reason for the long times you see here is that most of us prefer to use "progressive" render settings, that refine the image pass after pass and give you amazing results, but as you have noticed, the results are "noisy".

Podium has a noisy setting, too, that is called exactly that, "noisy setting". Podium's "noisy setting" uses a render method called Progressive Path Tracing, which is good for exterior scenes. Podium's main presets use a render method called Photon Mapping.

In Twilight, there's a folder full of settings called "Easy". Among these, 01-07 are "not noisy", that is, use Photon Mapping. "Easy 08 - Exterior" uses Progressive Path Tracing, similarly to Podium's "noisy setting", and it is perfect for exteriors. "Easy 09 - Interior" uses a render method called Metropolis Light Transport (MLT), which gives the amazing results you've seen in this forum. "Easy 10 - Interior +" uses Bidirectional MLT, which allows for amazing effects such as decomposing a beam of white light into a rainbow when it passes through a prism. So you see, the beauty of Twilight is in its versatility: You can choose the best render method for the task at hand. There are more methods available, but these are the most used ones.

Sorry if I confused you here. If you want to know more about Twilight's render settings and the render methods I mentioned, we'll be glad to help.

[Fletch]

Welcome AlexanderBell!

the all look very sounds like a gross exaggeration to me.

1. these are compressed .jpgs from the original so difficult to judge.
2. these are both unbiased renders and will take longer than an hour on some machines. If you have a machine like this, it will take about an hour to render even an unbiased rendering... maybe 2hrs depending on literally a thousand factors. A quad core, is quite nice for unbiased, but 8 or 16 is of course even better.
3. 8Gb for SketchUp and Twilight(or any other 32bit app.) means nothing because these are 32bit apps currently... so will not use more than 3Gb, and that's only if you've enable the /3Gb switch in your startup sequence... so actually I doubt you've done this (most people have not), so really it will use less than 2Gb of RAM... as any 32bit app. will.
4. Some people use noise reduction with unbiased render results to 'clean them up'... but the two images you show do not, I know for sure one of them was mine, so I guarantee, that it does not.
5. If you think these are noisy, and if you don't like "noisy" renderings, then please try "easy 01-07" methods and it's not an issue.
6. At any rate, please use the material templates to set up properly physically accurate materials, in any method, as they help speed up/clear renderings.

Please watch the video tutorials, as an experienced SketchUp user will learn to use Twilight in about 30-40mins.

[AlexanderBell]

Thank you for your swift responses Fletch and Ecuadorian.

Fletch: I really did not mean any offense by my comments on either renders. As I said, they are both superb! And yes you are right, it wasn't the best of choices for the topic subject. Sorry! Thank you for your information on this matter.

Ecuadorian: Thank you for your comments, very helpful. I think my best bet is to simply play around with the settings as you have suggested with my models. Now that I understand that both Podium and TR use the same engine I think I will definitely look into TR further as the features it enables are simply brilliant. I think I will also give Kerkytha a shot as you suggested!

Thanks again for your help guys! I look forward to posting my renders in the near future.

AlexanderB