With the awesome "Mecabricks to Blender" template which is becoming more and more fancy the way of rendering a Mecabrick model is farely easy now. But when it comes to models with a high amount of parts - let´s say 1500 - render time increases. But not only that, if you´re familar with rendering then you know that every GPU or CPU has a limited amount of memory, while CPUs generally have more memory than GPUs (because you commonly have more RAM than VRAM, except super fancy gaming PCs 😛 ). Rendering a model with Stud logos and a nice looking background can easily make a GPU running out of memory.
I personally like rendering with GPU, because it is a loooooot faster, but when you look at this rendering I made (sorry for the advertising! 😅 http://mecabricks.com/en/models/xGejegraKXl#b9nAAV) you will see nothing more than a ~90 parts model with a bit of snow in the background and a HDRi - but it took 350 MB VRAM and about 6 hours on GPU! 😮
And the fun part is - you don´t even see half of the stud logos.
When exporting models WITHOUT stud logos, the rendering runs faster, but the image will look fake every time.
You could export a model two times - with and without logos - and then manually remove the parts you won´t see the logos on, but... think of a model with 1500 parts again... no. You won´t do it.
So I suggest something like the color selection for the workshop - a "export with/without stud logo" option PER PART. So you could get rid of extra geometry WHILE BUILDING and get a faster and less memory intensive rendering. I mean, that would be great! 😄
I know that I´m suggesting something that would need a reorganisation of the workshop, but I think this idea is worth mentioning. 😉
Hello, Yes this is something that could be kept in mind for an update.
For now the issue with GPU rendering is that it doesn't support OSL which is used to round the edges - You can see that this is not happening on your picture.
Render time doesn't really depend on number of parts actually (on the contrary of memory). I don't have a crazy computer (iMac 2 year old) and I recently rendered a scene of 10000 pieces - Just took a couple of hours.
So it is a bit weird that it took 6 hours for your image on GPU. You might need to optimise rendering parameters (e.g. tile size shall be increased to 256x256, etc)
@Scrubs
My tile size was already at 256², so I do think it´s the sample setting (1500 samples) and the fact that the snow had some geometry too and it´s material some volume scattering as well. 😅
And this round edges thing is just a bump map, right? I looked through the material node tree and did not found any actual geometry changes, I did two renderings of one brick actually seeing no difference, so I wondered if there is a HUGE difference. 😕
I just wanted to mention this option suggestion, because I exported a model without stud logos (VRAM: ~300 M😎 and with Logos (VRAM: ~900 M😎 and noticed that it´s a big difference. I have to say that my GPU runs as an antique nowadays (NVidia GTX 750 StormX OC, that´s 5% more VRAM than the normal 750 :D), so increased render times are no magic.
1500 samples is way too much. I generally go with 500 or 600.
I think that Volume scattering will also slow down the render.
Regarding the round edge shader, this is not a geometry modification. This fakes bevels at rendering time. You can find the OSL script in the nodes.
For low(-ish) poly, this is the difference between a realistic-ish render and a realist render. This is normally very visible if you use it correctly. That is why you shall not scale the model after applying my script (scale dependent). This is visible on edges where it adds this little white line.
@Scrubs
I rendered it once with 1000 Samples and it was noisy although I used a despeckle node afterwards. 😕
I guess I will render my next renderings with CPU if it´s more realistic... when will an update of the upcoming changes for the MB2B template come out? I can´t await it! 😃
You might have changed my default render settings or used a different lighting system because I don't really need to despeckle it generally.
I will update the transparent material soon if I am fully happy after my trials, but everything else I worked on (that I posted on twitter) is not planned to be added to this script for now.
@Scrubs
Not? 😦 Oh, okay. 😭
I used Pro-Lighting: Skies from blenderguru.com for the sky, maybe it´s because of that? 😛
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