Some optimization options for your rendering in Redshift

If you want to render faster or produce higher-quality results in Redshift or any render engine, it has many options and one of them is to optimize your scene. In this article, let’s find out some optimization options for your rendering in Redshift.

If you want to decrease the rendering times, try lowering the trace depth limits. However, you have to be careful to achieve a fairly good and correct result.

The trace depth limits control how deep reflections and refractions can go. There exist separate settings for reflection, refraction and transparency. The “combined” setting specifies the upper limit for both reflections and refractions.

Pay attention to a scene that contains glass, you will need to raise trace depth limit to avoid incorrect results behind a few layers of glass, as shown below:

Similarly, an “opposing mirrors” scene like the one shown below will require the reflection trace depth limit raised.

One way to optimize your scene for rendering in Redshift is to keep the Threshold of Hair Min Pixel Width as low as possible. The ‘threshold’ parameter controls the amount of thickening that’ll happen. A lower level of thickening means less semi-transparency and, therefore, shorter rendering times.

However, there a downside, too low of a threshold means hair will start getting missed again by unified samples which, in turn, means the min pixel width technique will be less effective and the rendered images will be noisier.

You can also pay attention to the Trace Depth parameter. The larger the trace depth, the longer the min pixel width technique works and the higher the quality (less noisier).

Therefore, it’s the best to use the automatic threshold setting enabled. From that point onwards, the only setting the user will care about is the trace depth setting as well as the global unified samples (in the Output tab).

To produce the best quality for the scene, you should disable all the cutoffs.

As rays go through reflections, refractions or shadows, they get tinted and become dimmer. For example, a ray coming from the camera might hit a very faint mirror. Whatever is reflected on that mirror will be dim. When the rays become dim, they contribute very little to the final image so there is no point for the renderer to keep bouncing them around.

The Cut-off threshold set of parameters allow the user to specify minimum values that are considered “black” and allow the renderer to terminate tracing earlier. The defaults should work fine for most scenes but, in some extreme cases, a very dark mirror might be reflecting an extremely bright piece of geometry. If the renderer “cuts off” the mirrored rays early, grain will appear. If you suspect this is happening to your scene, you can try lowering these numbers. To disable this optimization altogether, set the values to 0.0.

You can optimize your scene by modifying the Russian-Roulette. It allows renderer to shoot only one kind of ray once the importance of the ray is low.

The “Importance Threshold” decides when the renderer will start performing this optimization. Very low numbers mean “start doing it for very dim rays” while higher numbers mean “do it for slightly brighter rays”. So the higher the number, the earlier the optimization will happen. Starting it too early, though, can introduce grain artifacts. If you see grain in your glass and you are suspecting the Russian-Roulette, you can try lowering this number to 0.001. To disable this optimization completely, set it to 0.0.

The “Falloff” parameter ‘eases’ into the Russian-Roulette optimization. This means that once a ray’s intensity crosses the “Importance Threshold” value the renderer won’t go abruptly into Russian Roulette but will do it gradually. This improves potential noise-banding artifacts. How gradually the renderer will ease into Russian-Roulette optimization is controlled by the “Falloff” parameter. Setting this parameter to 0.0 will enable the optimization abruptly, while 1.0 does it very smoothly. It’s very rare that users will need to adjust this parameter, so it’s advised you leave it at 0.5.

To demonstrate the Russian-roulette parameters, let’s check below:

In a scene it’s no need to use all high-quality texture. It just makes your scene heavier to load and slow down your work. Most scenes only need high-quality texture mapping for parts of the image that are directly visible to the camera, i.e. the “primary rays”. Secondary rays (reflections, refractions, GI, lights) and shadow rays are often less visually important so they can get away with using lower-quality texture sampling techniques.

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Source and images: maxon.net