I feel like the defaults for these are getting a bit dated? Or better to leave well enough alone?
Lowering these settings can make a difference. However I usually find increasing them makes little difference.
Cycles seems to bias on the side of too much attenuation of energy, so I find bringing up brightness in a subtle manner is difficult.
Entirely based on personal experience with it anyway.
Please elaborate - how are they dated, and what does it mean? What are you trying to achieve changing these?
Maybe I just need to read up on what all these do.
An easy thing to refer to is the ‘number of passes’ for the default settings. They seem like they are 10 years behind.
I guess I’m just wondering if anyone messes with these other settings or just leaves them alone (I think that latter).
The screenshot doesn’t mention ‘number of passes’. I assume you are talking about Samples
in the screenshot. How is it 10 years behind, and what do you think is a better setting?
Edit: and if you have better settings, please elaborate why those would be better than the current ones?
Because the passes are so low, relatively speaking, compared to the speed of today’s systems. I’m wondering if the other settings are too, if I should increase them?
This isn’t a critique or claiming something’s broken. It’s nice to draw on someone else’s expertise. For example, if someone posted a render and explained 1 or 2 of those settings.
Given something like architecture, you may find some limited benefit in increasing to 1500 samples on standard late daytime scenes. But really, the denoiser can also do this.
The other settings I tend to find do not do much in stuff that isn’t either dark or very specular; across many of my scenes anyway.
It’s variable what samples are appropriate. Really it’s more a question of what can you get away with without it looking too speckled?
The other settings… I wouldn’t bother normally.
1000 is more than enough for most cases. Not sure what slow means in this case.
If you want quicker completion then the denoisers mentioned can help. And if you are on Rhino 8.16 then you can search for the setting RhinoCycles.AdaptiveThreshold
and set it to say 0.1. This may have Cycles jump to completion quicker at the expense of larger error in pixels - these however are generally not visible to the human eye.
Turning down the amount of bounces is what can help a sample (pass) to complete quicker.