Quote - Alright bob.. i tried rendering the car shot in just lux and not slg.. after a few minutes I made a screenie so I could show you the stats bar.. I'm not sure if this is fast rendering or not or am I just being impatient and should stop watching my luxrenders bake.

Any more insight you could give would really be appreciatedand help my learning curve with this get flatter.

Hey Sharky. One reason I noticed in your stats bar is an exceptionally high effiencency, however, your render speed is a paltry 5ks/second. Which means to smooth out even a basic scene will take around 40 hours. Add a character, a building, etc, and that goes up to DAYS.

While more ram helps you with a larger scene, making an Efficient scene will help even more. My first year will Reality and Lux, I only had 4gb of ddr3 at 2000Mhz. Now I have twelve OC'd to 2753, but that's another story.

For efficency, the usual tricks apply: Hide all unnecesary parts not seen in your immediate camera view. Hide all body parts not visible through clothing. YOu can even null the skin if you want, but it doesn't make much difference, maybe a kilosample or less.

Where you get the biggest improvements are your lights. I know others will disagree, but if you're doing an outside scene, just an IBL with a single character on my rig will net me 778ks/s on an extraordinary day, which will net me around 500 samples or more per pixel in 15 minutes. Add in a few props and that comes down between 330-670. Textures are what bog down render speed also, followed shortly by extreme poly counts (unnecessary geometry) and then gloss and specular settings (keep specular under 84, or 15-30 when you can).  So if you've got something like this:

This was run at  ~188 ks/s a few days ago. It looked acceptable around 25 minutes, but to make it really nice, I capped it after 7 hours 42 minutes and 2.95k samples per pixel. Even though there's a bit to see, the render was fast as I had one mesh for a fill light and the IBL running an HDR image, and the majority of the settings optimized for speed and good quality. It could have been faster still, but for image quality, I set some things higher than speed can compensate.

Watching it in ram, the whole scene was 1.48GB, very doable on an older machine even.

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