Taming IRAY

[jammixx]

   When I am doing computer graphics, one of my favorite things is to spend two or three hours in the evening putting together an image, a few test renders along the way, and then "final" rendering to see the results.  Unless you have a great computer, you can't do that with the IRAY default settings.   One of the great revelations for me was when someone noted that IRAY will render into infinity.  The default settings are designed to create a render that can be enlarged significantly without pixelating.  Here is a tip to help you just enjoy your time playing around.
Load a character or a few things into the scene (something to render).Go to the Render tab, select the INVIDA Iray render engine.   Next, go to Progressive Rendering.  Look at Max Samples and Max Time.  These are the setting that control how long IRAY will take or how many times it will run a complete image scan for processing.  For casual use like I am talking about, set iterations to 1500 to 2500.  Also, set max time to 1200 to 1500.  That calculates to 20 minutes for 1200 seconds.  You can get a pretty good render in 20 minutes and you can always stop the render when it looks good to you.  Lowering the iterations is more about having more than the time will allow but not a huge amount.  A proper tutorial will tell you that you can control the time of render by specifying the number of iterations as well, but I think that is more of a professional feature.  Why not  just set the time and be done with it.   Turn render quality setting to OFF.  I usually set it to on and then use a quality setting of 2, but it probably adds processing time.I hope this will help you have more fun with IRAY.

 

[jammixx]

When I mentioned IRAY could render to infinity before, I didn't say how that could happen.  Under the Progressive Render tab there is a setting called Rendering Converged Ratio.  In the most basic terms, this is the measure of how closely the render engine will match the reality of your image.  As the convergence approaches 100%, the processing demand on your computer goes up dramatically.  I think the default convergence on my computer was set to 98%.  For the everyday renders, I set the program to about 96.  There is plenty of detail for casual use, you'll see. 
       

[sanbie]

So where does one find this Rendering Converged Ratio.

[jammixx]

Load a character or a few things into the scene (something to render).Go to the Render tab, select the INVIDA Iray render engine.   Next, go to Progressive Rendering.  One up from the bottom is the Rendering converged ratio tab (a term worthy of a Geekasaurus). 

[sanbie]

Must admit I usually render in Iray until I hear my computer changed it's noise...like it's revving harder...then just cancel the render lol