Best "still" photo quality

sebastiankarpathia

What's the very best render settings for highest quality render?

fastbike1

The default Iray settings will be fine if you do your job with model details and lighting. For Iray you need to think like a photographer.

larsmidnatt

There is no such thing as best anything in this space. it all depends on what you are trying to do. There is no magic setting that works for all scenes and subjects.

Kitti

Whether you're using 3Delight, Iray, LuxRender (Reality) FireFly (Poser) or Octane they each read scenes, lighting, and textures differently depending on the settings. All these settings are available so you can create "optimal" scenes, which of course is entirely open to your artistic temperment and interpretation. 

Each engine will have its own different parameters, so the best way to optimize your settings are to understand what each of them do, how they work, and how they interact together.

Iray may be the new black, I will forever love & support 3Delight, so here's a few tips to get started with it:

• Keep it small, set your max render dimensions (pixel size) to 500px until you get it right then you can increase the size and let it render for several hours. You can get fantastic results by sticking around 1k as your longest dimension, going any larger isn't necessary unless you need it for printed media.
• Turn off progressive rendering, once you get more familiar with the process you might find it handy, but to start with it will only bog down your resources or freeze up your computer.
• Bucket size - the lower the better.
• Max Ray Trace Depth - this is essentially reflections. 0 is no reflective surfaces (which isn't just for mirrors, it can affect metals, liquids, hair, eyes & tears, etc) Setting it to 1 is a good place to start, increasing it to 2 or 3 is how many times you want reflections to "bounce" For example if you had a figure in front of a mirror setting this to 1 will cause the mirror to reflect the figure. If your figure was wearing sunglasses setting this to 2 will show a reflection in the mirror of the sunglasses reflecting the mirror reflecting the figure; and so on and so forth.
• Pixel Samples - 8-16 is a good place to be. I have left it at 16 for just about everything.
• Pixel Filter Width - this is another one I don't ever bother with, I leave it on 6
• Shadow Samples - 30-60 will give you good smooth shadows without consuming resources; going lower will render faster but give you grainier results. It also affects Depth of Field in the camera (commonly referred to as DOF)
• Shading Rate - this is probably the number one dial you can experiment with to get "best quality" renders. I run between .4 and .3 going lower will increase the quality but SERIOUSLY affect render time. Adjust it in small increments, a little goes a long way!
• Aux Viewport - If I had a "secret weapon" this would be it. The viewport is my favorite tool, I can NOT live without it! It only works with 3Delight but it is a LIFESAVER!

 

It's important to note that render settings aren't the only thing that affect a scene though. Render settings only calculate how the available light will interact with the visible surfaces, so your lights and textures are all integrated with how the final scene will turn out.

Nothing beats experimentation, it's the best way to really understand how everything ties together. It may seem daunting at first but hang in there. Whenever I get start to feel frustrated I think to myself, "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." You can jump in anywhere and expand on it bit by bit. 3D is an intense and extensive art form, nobody learns it overnight. Don't let the dirty technical details get in your way of having fun!

Kerya

Kitti said:

• Aux Viewport - If I had a "secret weapon" this would be it. The viewport is my favorite tool, I can NOT live without it! It only works with 3Delight but it is a LIFESAVER!

 

Uhm ... you can set the Aux Viewport to Iray ...

Kitti

Kerya said:

Kitti said:

• Aux Viewport - If I had a "secret weapon" this would be it. The viewport is my favorite tool, I can NOT live without it! It only works with 3Delight but it is a LIFESAVER!

 

Uhm ... you can set the Aux Viewport to Iray ...

There was a point during the beta release when 3Delight was the only one that worked, so that's definitely good news for the Iray lovers! I don't use it so I don't keep up with it.