Light through stained glass

[Rick Morton]

Thanks. I’ve added new lights and they seem to be working. One thing I noticed is the light intensity has to be up if you move it farther from the floor. When I did that, the volumetric shows. Interesting.
I’m quite proud of myself for figuring out a way to make the fire without actually MAKING 3d flames, which I can’t do and would certainly affect rendering the animation. Just a fire movie in a material placed on a tube that surrounds the column. I was really happy about making that look decent! ☺ Thanks for your help.

[Jim Scott]

I see what the issue is now. Your lights are outside the walls and ceiling. You need to move them inside or create windows.

Edit: or you could work with the Light Object > Project > Exclude or Include lists.

[Jim Scott]

With your original lights set to exclude the walls and ceiling everything works fine. (Textures were disabled for faster rendering)

[Rick Morton]

Hi, again, Jim. I figured I’d just come straight to you.
I’m trying to render a short animation of just a piece of that scene. A close up of the burning light, looking down at the throne. 1920 x 1080. Standard Renderer. No GI. So far it’s been 7 hours and it’s rendered 33 frames. Any idea why this is taking so long? There are no dusted lights in the frame. Just some stone and metal materials. As you know, the fire is a QT movie. Help! I have a deadline for another job coming up and I’m afraid this render won’t be done to give me back the computer. What did i do wrong?

screenshot2019-07-13at3.12.38pm.png

[Rick Morton]

One more thing. I created just a rectangle object and using boules, cut out two text lines. Required two boules. I want this rectangle piece of metal to “drop” onto the chair. So I made the chair a collider and the rectangle group static. When I run the dynamics, the rectangle goes right through the chair. ???

[Jim Scott]

Without having the actual project in hand to test, including all materials, this is a tough question. 7 hours for 33 frames certainly does sound excessive. I am no rendering expert, so I would suggest starting a new post, and include a screenshot of your render settings and perhaps a project file with a short section of the animation. That way more people will see your question and hopefully be able to help. In the meantime, have you tried removing all textures and then adding them back in one by one to see if you can find a culprit? Perhaps start with the QT movie texture.

Good luck.

[Jim Scott]

Are you applying the dynamics tag to the boole or to the rectangle object that is being cut out? If you apply it to the boole you should get proper dynamics. If you can’t get it working please show me a screenshot of your objects list.

Edit: In re-reading your post I noticed that you used two booles. Rather than doing that put the two text objects into a null and use that as your cut out in one boole. And I think you meant to say that the rectangle was a rigid body, not static.

[Rick Morton]

Yes. The first thing I tried was putting the two text objects in to a group and adding that to the Boole. That didn’t seem to work.
That render, by the way is still going. 74 frames. 14 hours. You have that project, by the way. The render is looking down from the upper fire light towards the throne. Slight camera move to the left. Taking forever.

[Jim Scott]

Concerning your boole problem, without at least a screenshot of your Objects list I would only be guessing at what issue you are having. If you could provide one, or just a simple project file of that rectangle and text set-up, it would be much easier to diagnose your issue.

In regards to the long render, while I may have your original project, several materials are missing including the fire movie. And as I said, I am not a rendering expert so I’m not the best one to ask for advice. There are others on this forum with more experience in diagnosing rendering issues, which is why I suggested starting a new post. That being said, I did run several test renders of one frame and found that my old Mac Pro (a 2012 model with the fastest processors available at that time and 64 GB of ram) was considerably slower than your computer. After approximately matching the camera angle of your sample image I got a single frame render time of over 27 minutes, so I guess you should be happy with your results. ????

In just watching the render progress it was obvious that the “Metal – Iron Cast” material was the slowest to render. Removing the Bump channel cut the render time nearly in half but caused a noticeable difference in the look of the texture. Removing AO reduced the time by about 10%. I replaced your material with a procedural material from Greyscalegorilla’s Texture Kit Pro (“Rusty Procedural”) and got a render time of just over 5 minutes for a single frame. (see image below – dbl. click on it to get an image which can be enlarged for better viewing) With this brief analysis my best suggestion would be to replace the “Metal – Iron Cast” material. Hopefully someone else will have some other suggestions, and again they will be most likely to see your question if you start a new post. And as you are probably aware, hiring a render farm is also a possibility for projects such as yours with excessively long render times.

[Rick Morton]

Wow… thanks. That’s very helpful. I’ll change that texture to something else. I’m just not experienced enough to realize that would make the difference. The piece finally finished sometime last night. 23 hours and 18 minutes. I have to start a new angle this morning, and a longer take, so I’m definitely going to try to fix this issue.
I’ll test the Boole thing later and let you know. Thanks again.