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Optimizing Cycles Renders (Patreon)

Published:
2022-05-10 00:55:54
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Let's get shorter render times! Talking about how to remove fireflies, but mostly how to avoid them in the first place. I'm sure there's a lot more that could be said about this topic, but I think this could be a great starting point if you haven't already gone on a dive into the workings of path tracers :DHere's the refraction tutorial, if you want more information on that! https://www.patreon.com/posts/refraction-tut-57007748 

Files

Optimizing Cycles Renders

Let's get shorter render times! Talking about how to remove fireflies, but mostly how to avoid them in the first place. I'm sure there's a lot more that could be said about this topic, but I think this could be a great starting point if you haven't already gone on a dive into the workings of path tracers :D Here's the refraction tutorial, if you want more information on that! https://www.patreon.com/posts/refraction-tut-57007748

Comments

Ethan

I love when you anthropomorphize blender, makes it so much more fun!

Levy Bergman

wondering when will Ian start to post about Unreal Engine and singing odes about it :D:D:D

Kieron Estrada

Great!! Just got a 3090TI and looking forward to optimization!!

Found And Explained

Question: I noticed you do a lot of your own kitbashing - any reason why you don't use kits that are out there with loads of assets to speed up your own projects?

Visual Magi

thanks so much! very helpful!

Gehrig Campbell-Dempsey

Fuckin great tips as always. This is going to help a ton with an indoor render I’ve been trying to de-firefly! Have you ever thought about building a mini render farm Ian? There’s a great free render manager my team uses called CGRU, makes queuing up projects and renders much faster and easier, and your workstation doesn’t have to go down in the meantime. Just a thought!

Zeke Faust

13:00 You can actually use the light path trick in these strong bump cases as well: Use the camera path to mix between the high bump/low bump (or no bump at all!) versions of the shader, and the world/GI will see less bump while the camera sees strong bump. This is only if you really need to optimize a really extreme bump, but in most cases I find a bump that strong to look unpleasant anyway Same trick can be used for the low roughness problem, although technically that's what the filter glossy setting is doing as you mentioned. (unless you meant fireflies within the reflections themselves)

Zeke Faust

Unreal is definitely a cool tool but it still has limitations that IMO make it unviable for final pixel production compared to offline rendering on a studio level. Rendering, lighting, textures, shaders, etc. all behave differently, and I also feel it changes the modality from bottom up to top down. i.e., limiting your approach to what you know is possible vs devising your approach to cater to the needs of the client/project. Game engines are great at executing known tasks, but harder to use when a high level of customization is required. Take any pixar film and look at the lengths they go to in developing new lighting and shading systems, rendering techniques, etc. It would be a nightmare to be restricted to the confines of deferred rendering in this case.

Louis Lin

We need that default butt asset please 😭

D'Anthony

Just search for male Hentai assets lol

IanHubert

Ah yeah! Not any particularly good reason :P- I actually got a really cool asset pack yesterday, and looking at it had that feeling of, like, "I could arrange these with an HDRI and a bit of haze and have a pretty cool image super quick," but my feeling (and again- this is just a personal thing) is that if I don't invest some personal energy somewhere, it kind of just feels like playing with blocks? In the near future I have a lot of shots I want to blast through, though, so I definitely want to focus on modeling stuff from scratch less, and better implementing folk's pre-existing cool assets (kinda switching my "art" from modeling-everything to "the entire actual finished episode".

IanHubert

AH! Thanks, Zeke! These are great tips! I'm stoked to try out that light path trick :D And I THINK I've figured out my resistance to the glossy bits. I love having little glossy/metal parts on my models, but especially on convex surfaces, the highlights of nearby lights are still present, but without any sort of rendering optimization (since it's not an actual light source, just a reflection), and I think in GENERAL that's okay, but I love keeping my DOF fairly shallow, and by the time that extremely small/bright highlight is expanded out into a bokeh, it's hard to keep from glimmering- at least that's my current theory.

Florian Huber

You can't know it's male, we don't see the -Z...

Pencz Patrik

speaking of 'magic checkboxes' presistent data is a really good one…

IanHubert

Ah yeah that's true! *So far personally* it's only served to ruin my overnight renders (I think it doesn't play nice with certain animated elements), but in the right situations it could save dozens of seconds per frame, yeah!

Adrei Dulay

we definitely need the emission volumetrics thing

Anderson Atlas Author

yes, I found that some things were more satisfying if I modeled them. That's why I love your quick time-saving tips. somethings I refuse to model, like food, stop signs, baseball hats. I don't get any satisfaction reinventing the wheel :)

Kays Al-Atrakchi

You should check out this Turbo Render add on that I recently started using. It's basically a smart noise reduction. I think what the guy is basically doing is splitting out the passes, then noise reducing them individually, and then recombining them with blend modes that retain a bit more detail. Anyhoo...I've been using it quite a lot and it seems to deliver quite well. Check it out and see what you think: https://youtu.be/toManFMUSFQ

alex aulson

This is super useful info. Thank you so much. You just sped up my render that I've been pulling my hair out over for the last few days.

woodystyle777

Do you overclock your 3090 or have you changed any of the settings in the Nvidia Control panel to "Performance" setting?

IanHubert

OH HO! It looks like this could specifically really help with rendering interior volumetrics scenes! I'm going to check this out immediately! Thank you :D

Kaeden Hahn

Persistent data is great if you don't plan on using motion blur, which is the greatest contribution to ruined renders while Persistent data.

David McSween

Cheat bounce by adding area lamps... sounds very Blender Internal to me 🤣 Everything old is new again with regard to optimising renders, i do the same in Eevee. I wonder if you can do a material LOD by distance and aperture for cleaner bokeh?

Joshua O'Brien

This is quite a helpful video for these kind of weird situations where you will have intensive path tracing to calculate. Although, I usually just put a denoiser over my renders, which gives it a unique, painterly feeling that i usually prefer in my renders, although this could be required when doing nice and clean renders for VFX and such.

Chris Alldridge (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-20 10:00 Great video! How did you get the shadow to pass over the various cockpit instruments in the phaeton at 12:58? Looks fantastic! I'd have no idea how to do that myself ( I'm not a luddite I promise... just grossly incompetent!)
2022-05-12 21:17

Carter Burr-Kirven

The actor is on an image plane inside the 3D scene, allowing him to interact with lights and shadows like any other object (well, nearly—he's still a flat card. There may also be some cheating in that scene with extra invisible shadow casters, or it's just very judicious light placement.) Check out Ian's "Wild Tricks for Greenscreen" video https://youtu.be/RxD6H3ri8RI for the short version, or any number of posts on here from the past few years if you want to see him figuring out the workflow in real time. https://www.patreon.com/posts/ae-to-blender-3d-34871595 https://www.patreon.com/posts/working-on-green-35698025 https://www.patreon.com/posts/making-shot-in-37501621 https://www.patreon.com/posts/re-animating-in-36909454

Godzookie

I find that SID (super image denoiser) works a little better and it's free on Gumroad.

Chromfell

I just checked the caustics out since I am totally in the same boat in terms of superstitious avoidance - they are a little more noisy than other sampling but do clear up pretty quickly, and are absolutely required to get a realistic response from metallic surfaces in my opinion. I say it's time to keep it on by default and perhaps turn it off if it ever does act up, but so far it seems perfectly fine and adds a lot!

Anonymous

That idea of using area lights and adjusting render settings really helped a lot. My first day on your Patreon and so far lots of great data for improving my skills in Blender, Thank you, Ian!

Josh Oberg

Hey Ian, I'm a little Tardy to the Party but congrats on your first episode release! I just want to say that I am going to be trying my hand at making short films that are VFX heavy and I am really grateful for all of your videos. I'm 10 minutes in and I'm already finding a lot of useful information. To have all your knowledge compressed down into one spot is invaluable for me so thank you!