Rendering in Maya 6.5 (A simple speaker drive unit.)

[Intuition]

Oh Also I just figured it out. You mean 3 rays in the render settings? Not the light?

You can probably take all rays down to 2 in render settings. Just to cover reflection and diffuse.
With the lights you can take ray depth limit down to 2 and just use the shadow rays to clean up the noise in the shadows. I usually start at 8 per light and work upwards. Its looking good though.

[Irinikus]

Oh Also I just figured it out. You mean 3 rays in the render settings? Not the light?

You can probably take all rays down to 2 in render settings. Just to cover reflection and diffuse.
With the lights you can take ray depth limit down to 2 and just use the shadow rays to clean up the noise in the shadows. I usually start at 8 per light and work upwards. Its looking good though.

Here are my current settings:


   
   

[Intuition]

Try this test to see if it will reduce render time without much quality difference.

Take the shading down to 2 and leave max shading at 8 to start.
You can leave shading on 2 and work upwards max shading as you need.

This may take down your render time a little.

You are telling it with these settings that it can try to resolve 8 samples but if shading resolves in less than 8 samples in a pixel to move to the next pixel. Where as it is set at the moment all pixels take 8 samples minimum even if not needed.

The contrast threshold that has rgb values separated is actually the value for anti-aliasing a pixel. All modern engines start around 0.1 and no longer have rgb values but just one threshold value. In Vray for instance I'll start at 0.01 but it can get really picky and get down to 0.007 values. Redshift 0.005 for super crisp triangle filtered images. Though in the maya software renderer of this era I think 0.1 would bog it down.

At the moment the defaults in the rgb values are fine but you will see some sharpness improvement if you take them all uniform down to 0.250 to 0.100 ranges but it does add render time. The lower number is a higher setting here. It is a division of contrast value.

Further down the panel on the second screen shot you can take all these 10 values down to 2.

reflections 2
refractions 2
shadows 2

The primary one that gets hit in your render is the reflection. BUT since it isn't really reflecting anything but a diffuse ground surface you probably may not see much render time improvement.

These numbers are basically ray limits for raytracing.

So if you have say 2 in the reflection and point two mirrors at each other after two bounces per reflection it will reflect back black in the 3rd reflection in the mirror or just give you the diffuse result. Same with refractions. If you have two transparent glasses refracting each other it will only raytrace the result of the refraction through as many surfaces as you have rays. So if you have two glasses of water and only 5 rays then it will get through the first glass, front glass, water surface, back inner glass, then onto front of second glass, water surface, and then black as there is only 5 rays. Leaving it at 10 for refraction doesn't change render time unless you use refractions in your shaders.

Shadows I set at 3 because you don't usually need a shadow to be cut through too many surfaces. This would include textures that basically create transparency even though the geomerty isn't transparent. So Maya has to cast the shadow through the opacity channel vs just the fact that there is no geometry blocking the light. Though even if you leave shadow at 10 it will probably only use 2-3 rays to make it unless you are cutting through transparent glass or a transparency texture.

See if that helps the render time.

The shadow rays on the light itself determine samples given to the shadow trace itself and determine the smoothness vs chatter.

[Irinikus]

This is a rendering with the settings that I showed:


   


This is a rendering with the suggested global settings of 2:


   


There is really no discernible difference between the images.


Unfortunately, the reduced settings didn't reduce the render time.

[Intuition]

Hmm, I honestly thought the min max would change it a little.

Though I am not surprised by the 10 to 2 because I don’t see anything in the render that would require the rays to go beyond 2 for reflections anyways so it wasn’t doing any more calculations.

Pretty neat dual speaker renders.

You could probably add a wood texture to the floor plane color slot and then use the same in the bump map, though use bump sparingly as it gets quite chattery fast, and get some interesting reflection hits in the metal parts.

Last thing would be a very mild ambient light. Like used at 0.020 value to create a fake gi.

Ok. I’ll stop back the seat render testing

These older Maya were quite capable.

[Irinikus]

I'm going to continue with a complete cabinet building process for this driver. (A purely conceptual wave-guide system which I call the GIGO profile.)

I developed it years ago (around about 2006) and tested it by building a wave tank constructed from laser-cut perspex, to prove that it in-fact works, and it does very well.

It completely eliminates the rearward traveling wave produced be a drive unit, by rebounding it to infinity in an extremely compact form factor, which can be constructed radially symmetrically, to allow for internal reaction cancelling. (a much smaller volume than the B&W Nautilus)

It will also be ported in such a way as to reduce internal cabinet compression to an absolute minimum and eliminate a mass of air moving backwards and forwards through the wave-guides due to the large volume of air being displaced by the drive unit. (Only small pressure waves will be channeled through the wave-guides.)

[Irinikus]

Here's the rendering with Intuition's suggestions implemented: (This is the last time I will bore you with images of plane drive units.)


   

[Intuition]

Looks nice.

If you switch to mental ray you will probably have a very similar looking image but you can then use reflection blurring to simulate the diffuse reflection from semi glossy surfaces. It should be under the mental ray subsection in each phong/blinn shader. A number for reflection blur. Combined with a subtle bump it will help certain surfaces feel more organic.

You'll probably want a min max of 0-2 in the mental ray custom sampling and the rest can be default. Perhaps triangle filter.

Overall it is a very nice render for this era of Maya. I envy that quad cpu render power.

[Irinikus]

I added a bit of bump mapping to the wood texture:


   


Same image with one light source:


   

[Irinikus]

The next level of the build:

I have rendered a translucent model of the initial build of the driver carrier/port module (the model still needs lots of polishing), which will slot into the cabinet: