Hi Everyone


I have a simple question:
How many samples do you have in a production render?
If you answer with your render stats, please let me know if you have optimized "Minimum Samples"/"Variance Threshold" or just use the default.

I have divided the "Primary Rays" information by the resolution and got 1000 samples per pixel.
Which I think is way too much (render time 4-7 hours on a 128 core machine).



Background:
This is not this newbee question "How many samples SHOULD I use"?
I am familiar with Arnold and there I know that 15x15=225 samples is already high.

Right now I have seen some log files on the farm of some other artist using Karma.
He used a start sampling of 50 with a contrast threshold of 0.01 (Houdini default. In my eyes too low, I used 0.05 with any renderer).
It is not some complex "city birdeye to the horizont with complex volumes and tiny windows everywhere" scene.
Living room, character with curly hair.


And before I slap the other artist (just kidding. Or not? ;-) )
that he wastes huge render times, I would like to know what you have in production.



I will already complain to him because he used progressive rendering insted of bucket which is 20% slower.
(Tested it by overriding it via commandline in Husk, but there is no samples commandline setting I can test, so he has to do it in Houdini)

schoenberger
but there is no samples commandline setting I can test, so he has to do it in Houdini)

I believe you can use
-p for pixel samples

And for anything more custom you can use
--prerender-script

Which will allow you to modify stage in memory before gets rendered so you can experiment with overriding various render setting etc.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/utils/husk.html [www.sidefx.com]

Hi

Thanks.

>-p for pixel samples
Afaik these are the starting samples.


But my main question was what are your samples per pixel in one of your renderings on the farm?

Primary Rays / Resolution