Unless you have overwhelming power, balance is always an issue. Until I save up and get that second video card, here is my settings for my final renders. It's quick with older hairs (strange) but the new hair for La Femme chokes my system. Still once past the hair, it moves along at an acceptable speed. So please share your settings and please critique mine. Here is that setting.

I haven't used FF since SF was introduced with PP11, but here's my sorta typical output settings for scenes with shiny and reflective surfaces or any OOT hair.

Scenes with plenty of lighting and minimum shadows I drop the pixel samples in half or more. If it's an indoor scene with tons of shadows I may even bump it another 200 or 400 samples because SF renders are so dirty.

I also typically just let the 970 render things, even though it's much slower than my 1070 I can still do other stuff with 0 slowdown with the 970 handling everything.

The 970 is pretty comparable with my 580 (Which is no where in the class with your 1070. That thing is a monster) so I can get an idea of your speed. Isn't 200 pixels a lot of samples or am I just a little slow in knowledge when it comes to Superfly? You will not be trolling me if you say yes. I think it might be worth it. Your Urban Future set turned out most excellent.

@JohnDoe641 do you output to Exr or Png, interested because of the clamps being set to 0

I have optimized my settings for both FF and SF. Speed and good rendered output because for some projects I need to render out 60+ images. Image size is 1920x1080 and render times 45min to 1.5 hours for SF and about 1 hour for FF.

AmethystPendant posted at 2:03PM Mon, 02 March 2020 - #4382326

@JohnDoe641 do you output to Exr or Png, interested because of the clamps being set to 0

Thinking about those clamps should not lead to asking about EXR. With or without those clamps the output can exceed LDR 0-255. The clamps apply to the individual samples being accumulated for each pixel, which is an average of hopefully many samples. When you don't use enough samples to really get a good average, then a single "hot" value can easily produce a firefly. So clamping is to give up some lighting accuracy in exchange for fewer firefly artifacts. It has almost nothing to do with HDR output format.

Very helpful. Thank you!

quietrob posted at 11:28AM Mon, 02 March 2020 - #4382318

The 970 is pretty comparable with my 580 (Which is no where in the class with your 1070. That thing is a monster) so I can get an idea of your speed. Isn't 200 pixels a lot of samples or am I just a little slow in knowledge when it comes to Superfly? You will not be trolling me if you say yes. I think it might be worth it. Your Urban Future set turned out most excellent.

Having Direct Samples not clamped makes renders veeeeeeeeeery noisy when there's lots of shadows involved but it allows the full range of light bounces to fill indoor scenes when I'm using Dome/HDRI lighting and many small mesh lights for indoor lighting. Even at 200 it can still be annoyingly riddled with large spots of noise but it's the only way to get the full amount of light/fill/bounce light from secondary sources. Otherwise the image is dim and most of the reflected and bounces light will simply not be there. With Direct Samples clamped I can get away with 50 samples or less and have a noise free image but I'm also losing most of my fill and bounce light, which looks completely wrong.

Sadly, Urban Future wasn't done with SF it was done with Studio using iray. I can't get my SF renders to look like I can in Studio which sucks because I'm a Poser guy at heart.

bagginsbill posted at 11:16AM Wed, 04 March 2020 - #4382377

AmethystPendant posted at 2:03PM Mon, 02 March 2020 - #4382326

@JohnDoe641 do you output to Exr or Png, interested because of the clamps being set to 0

Thinking about those clamps should not lead to asking about EXR. With or without those clamps the output can exceed LDR 0-255. The clamps apply to the individual samples being accumulated for each pixel, which is an average of hopefully many samples. When you don't use enough samples to really get a good average, then a single "hot" value can easily produce a firefly. So clamping is to give up some lighting accuracy in exchange for fewer firefly artifacts. It has almost nothing to do with HDR output format.

The only reason I asked that was because of a thread back on the old SM forum where we were looking at tone mapping and that was one of the things that was mentioned to get full dynamic range in an image, I now use gimp tone mapping to rebalance some "darker" renders but to get the most out of that I need to export to EXR rather than png/jpg