Can't get a final frame to render

[Anonymous]

Hello. So most scenes I do go pretty quick, but this scene with atmospheric volume I have spent several days just trying to get a single frame final render out. The best I got is 5 hour render before I hit a cuda error. After 5 hours it was still full of noise. I am going to try using the gpu with CPU as a fallback in case of error. I believe the time is mainly due to having atmosphere and many area lights.

I am about to try some new settings including adjusting light linking.

By the way I have three Titans and I am seeing only one is being used during the render which is upsetting.

If anyone can help me, I would be really grateful.

My scene is located here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/syo58zamrrb7bpv/AAAbquAvhQJsLrIVYqoyBJvxa?dl=0

scene will need to be restarted and played to about frame 40 for nparticles.

update: This latest file is giving me fatal errors now. i may have to switch to redshift. I'm out of ideas.

[lee_griggs]

Hi Kevin, I opened your scene. There are no textures btw, so I could not render it. However, I did notice some things about the scene. This might sound a bit harsh but it is a mess.

I noticed a lot of hidden objects and lights, none of which are grouped or named correctly. Have a GEO group for all of your geometry and a LIGHTS group for your lights.

Always delete anything that does not appear in the render, don't just hide them. Hypershade: Edit>Delete Unused shaders will clean half of the unused shaders.

There are sooo many unnecessary lights in this scene. Do you really need this many lights? I am sure emission would work just as well. You have also used area lights when point lights would work just as well and would be cheaper to render.

All of the light samples are set to the default 1. This is fine for test rendering but for final frame rendering, you will want to increase these to at least 3.

Mesh lights are expensive to render and can cause noise in your scene. Mesh lights can require more samples than regular lights too. Yet these are also set to 1. Could these be replaced with other lights?

Diffuse and specular ray depth is set to 2. Is this necessary? Increasing this value will increase render times.

Finally, Camera (AA) is also very high at 15. Why is it this high? Renders would be useful.

What are the errors that you are seeing? Can you upload the log file? Did you get this to render with CPU?

I hope this helps and doesn't sound too brutal 🙂