So far my goal was to make a glass gradually crack and shatter. I managed to do that by animating a group controlling a voronoi fracture and by splitting the interior details and the outer cracks and merge them back in the end.
( I am including the file with the cracks - not animated as the animation is irrelevant at the moment)
I end up with a piece of geometry which is fairly complicated and almost impossible to render in normal times. My final animation is about 200 frames long. ( my definition of “normal times” is anything less than an hour per frame )
So far I am using area lights and ray tracing but have also experimented with pbr. I am also using the built in glass shader…
do you have any suggestions that could make this render faster? I am yet to understand how glass works and find it incredibly annoying and difficult… please help me render this evil thing
with pure reflective/refractive surfaces you can get a speedup by excluding lights from shading. if you replace the lights with the equivalent geometry, you can still have pretty accurate renders. mantra tries to do something similar to this via multiple importance sampling, but brute-forcing geometry-style reflections for lights is still more efficient. the drawbacks are having to do some clever light/geometry masking on the geometries, and somewhat less accurate renderings (especially indirect effects).
Mmmm amazing. So you transferred the parameters of the lights to geometry.. Used Ray traycing with a pixel sampling of 4x4 , increased the reflection and refraction limit to 6… Am I missing something ? Also you masked the light so they are not affecting any more the geometry .. the result is amazing and you really dropped my rendering times. Also almost no noise at all !! How come ray tracing ? I still have a lot of learning to do . Thank you so much !
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