Is running renders to 100% really necessary?

johnbuckeridge

Hey there, folks.  While watching one of Dreamlight's excellent lighting tutorials recently, I noticed that he quite frequently cancels a render once he's satisfied with the image quality and saves it as-is.  Ever since, I've followed suit, sometimes cancelling after just 12%, because to me it looks perfectly fine, high-res and all.  Now - he knows what he's doing, whereas I'm still a bit of a newbie.  Am I making some sort of serious error here?  Surely, if it looks fine, it's fine.

So, is running renders to 100% really necessary?  Or is the graphics card just being a finicky premadonna?

 

Gordig

I don't know if Iray renders ever really reach 100%; they just reach whatever parameters you've set for the render to finish. There are definitely diminishing returns with convergence, so stop the render whenever it's sufficiently finished for your purposes.

margrave

Using completion percentages at all is unnecessary. Just disable render quality and set Max Time and Max Samples to -1, and you can let the render run forever.

Richard Haseltine

The progress bar in Iray shows how close it is to the target convergence, 95% by default, not how "complete" the overall render process is - as Gordig says the render doesn't have a finally done state.

Expozures

It depends on what you're trying to achieve.  Sometimes 95% is good enough, sometimes 25% is good enough.  Just keep an eye on your render, and kill it when you think it's close enough.