34 replies to this topic

[Allen McDonnell]

Will higher end mother boards and graphics card decrease render times with reflections on?

Does anyone have "standards" they use for reflection amounts?

 

Thanks for any input....

 

allen.

[Joseph Smith]

I stay away from Ray Trace, too long to render, reflections are a processor hog, too many variables to have standards for render i think, however lighting seems to play a big role in the desired output.

 

Maybe add additional direct light sources then bump the brightness to help gain your desired effect, notice the source position at 40' up and the target at 8' up in my example below....or a ranch house i'd use 25' source position.  This stuff is all trial and error.

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[Martin Livingston]

The better the video card with it's own memory (and lots of it) the shorter the rendering time. I have a GeForce GTX 970 which is 6 year old technology but it is loaded with its own, dedicated memory giving me a "reasonable" rendering time. But I am looking forward to an upgrade at some point in time to one of the newer processors and a video card designed to work with the ray trace protocols.

 

For reflections I customize every surface to give me a realistic amount of reflection and set all of my light levels individually. The glazing in my exterior shots have a washed out aquamarine blue/green tint with a moderate transparency and moderate reflections.

Attached Files

•  KITCHEN NEW.jpg   77.91KB   1 downloads
•  FRONT FINAL.jpg   139.6KB   2 downloads

[Mikio Nakashima]

I would like to share my own experience, as well as get some clarification from the Softplan staff but as I understand the GPU does not affect the render times in the Ray Traced mode.

 

I have run Softplan on everything from a i7 mobile chip with integrated graphics to my now setup of a Ryzen 2700x with a Nvidia 2070. So far anything with a dedicated GPU seems to be tolerable in textured view. With my current setup after the initial loading of the model the textured view is essentially real-time and doesn't load the GPU more than ~30% give or take.

 

Ray tracing is another ballgame but as I understand rendering has no load on the GPU at all. In watching my system load stats while rendering my GPU load hovers at 4%. The CPU load however maxes out on every system I've run it on, including the 8 core 4.0Ghz 2700x. So as far as I'm concerned if your primary use for a computer is for rendering with Softplan then spend the dollars on the CPU and not the GPU.

 

I'm interested to see what the next Ryzen generation will bring this summer. Going from a mobile i7 processor to the 2700x has made the ray tracing workable when rendering final images for presentations. A possible doubling of the core count I'm hoping will allow for the ray tracing renders to be used to make changes with clients in real-time without having to go for a coffee break in between.

 

As for settings, for reasonable render times I turn off the "Indirect lighting" in ray tracing to work on the basic look and really only use it for final renders (it adds 5x the render time in my experience). I agree with Joseph that lighting placement has the greatest effect on the final render look but would also add that the texture settings throughout your model will make a world of difference. Most of the defaults in my opinion give an reasonable look but if you want to get closer to photo quality renders you'll have to tweak them.

 

I personally would love if Softplan was able to produce well lit ray-traced images in near real time and hold out some hope that hardware upgrades and the latest 2020 release will make it possible. However any photo quality renders will have to be done in another program, as evidenced by the partnership with Lumion that's been teased in 2020, and I imagine that will be the case for many years to come.

[Joseph Smith]

Mikio is correct....CPU core count will make the biggest difference while in ray traced mode.  For example, my laptop processor is: i7-8750H which has 6 cores with hyper-threading.  So have 12 threads total (sequences being run thru the chip).  The second image I attached shows 12 process buckets at one time from SP render engine.  So the more cores you have...the more buckets can process the render at one time.

 

Ultimately only two ways to get faster renders; we wait for chip advancements or wait for SP to secure a better render engine.

 

........I do like coffee breaks!

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[Keith Almond]

although as you say it doesn't make any difference, I find that the way the hardware renders is substantially faster than the software. Looking at your screenshot, you have your render set to  software. If you change it to hardware on the ray traced mode, it is visibly faster ... or at least mine is. However, the software is better quality ... again, or at least mine is!

[Joseph Smith]

This is texture mode with single color lines on and black, thickness set to 1 and anti alias set to 8.  Its the best texture mode render simulation i can achieve before changing to ray traced mode.  Lighting helps alot.  Not very fast since i bumped up anti alias so high.

 

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•  kitchen.jpg   62.94KB   1 downloads

[Allen McDonnell]

Joe, are you running alienware m17?  And is your laptop your primary?

[Joseph Smith]

Alienware R5 17.  I use it twice a week, i have a remote office on wednesdays and fridays......I leave 2 monitors, keyboard & mouse at this remote office.  its not the primary however pretty dang fast and think the days of me buying PC's are over.  When i get home for the day i sync the laptop with desktop and cloud so my data drives are all identical incase something bad happens to one.

[Allen McDonnell]

Joe, Im going to have a new pc built.  Have you used Ryzen threadripper before?  Specifically, https://www.amd.com/...adripper-2990wx

 

This should work well with SP?

[Joseph Smith]

Holy smoke!  With the amount of threads and clock speed, it will create ray traced renders super fast....It should work very well.  Hold off on the PC build until you see the architecture of 2020 render.  Perhaps the developers improved way of achieving high end renders without breaking the bank on hardware.

[John Penner]

I stay away from Ray Trace, too long to render, reflections are a processor hog, too many variables to have standards for render i think, however lighting seems to play a big role in the desired output.

 

Maybe add additional direct light sources then bump the brightness to help gain your desired effect, notice the source position at 40' up and the target at 8' up in my example below....or a ranch house i'd use 25' source position.  This stuff is all trial and error.

 

Joe 

You have a beam trestle in the eave on the outside of the chimney.  What did you use to draw that? I have drawn a few of those in using solids. That takes time, is there a symbol in softplan to draw that? 

 

John 

[Steve Haarmann]

Easy to create by adding beams at the height you want and then let it be roofed.

You can then edit the beams to not extract in 3d.

[Mark Petri]

I use SketchUp to draw timber parts. It works faster and more accurately. But, you could also go into roof mode and try a roof truss, adjust member sizes, and then move it into place.

[Joseph Smith]

Hi John, many ways to get it done, this is my procedure.  Mine is pulled in as a symbol.

 

---

 

To create decorative gable trusses is pretty simple once you've done a few.

 

1. create a simple elevation to draw on to get exact sizes of what you're dealing with (image 1 below)

2. use the solid drawing command, usually i use polygon 3d or sometimes i have to use arc lines then connect them click on form solid polygon (if i have one with an radius bottom chord) (image 2 below)

3.  turn the 3d with only the drawing with the shape you just created

4. export to .dwg (image 3 below)

5.  import back into Softplan with wizard.

6. done! (image 4 below)

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•  C2.jpg   61.65KB   0 downloads
•  C3.jpg   39.2KB   0 downloads
•  C4.jpg   116.49KB   0 downloads

[Keith Almond]

It look like there may be a command in 2020 to actually add a feature gable truss as trim (See Brian's post in the Softplan 2020 thread).

[John Penner]

Mr Smith and others 

thank you a lot. Now i'll go try and follow your advice. 

John 

[Joseph Smith]

LOL