@Xiste
I missed your beautiful renderings and I like your mix stage.
The rendering time varies both with the settings and with the renderer. With the default renderer it takes between 5 - 10 minutes, but using the optional Simple Photo Renderer, it takes 15 -30 minutes. It might have something to do with the different way the bucket size is handled. The studio has a rendering farm with several Mac Pro 12-core computers connected with fiber-optical cables.
When I use the default renderer, the rendering window is entirely covered by small different colored buckets, but when using the optional renderer, the buckets are a lot bigger and fewer, and works slower. I found this out just by chance, and I have not done any real testing of this. I prefer using the default renderer for interiors, and use the optional renderer for exteriors , since the enhance sky brightness sampling generally gives better results.
When I use the default renderer, the rendering window is entirely covered by small different colored buckets, but when using the optional renderer, the buckets are a lot bigger and fewer, and works slower. I found this out just by chance, and I have not done any real testing of this. I prefer using the default renderer for interiors, and use the optional renderer for exteriors , since the enhance sky brightness sampling generally gives better results.
The sunflow doc suggested that "A larger bucket size means more RAM usage and less time rendering".
So I chose a variable bucket size according to the width of the image.
(image width = 512 => bucket size = 32, image width = 1024 => bucket size = 64, etc.)
I did some tests again to compare the variable bucket size with the fixed bucket size and that confirms your observation.
With a fixed bucket size of 64, rendering is faster for the same settings.
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EnkoNyito
