Twinmotion Path Tracer Settings

hi everybody David here from via render thanks for taking the time to check out this video in this video I'm going to take a look at something that I've been meaning to make a video about for a long time which is the path Tracer settings in Twin motion more specifically it's sometimes hard to know what the actual settings do including what bounces do and what the actual samples per pixel actually means and so we're going to take a bit of a dive into that by looking at the really the same image with different settings hopefully it will give you a good idea of really the optimum settings for you to use with your twin motion path Tracer scenes with that being said let's go ahead and get into it and we'll take a brief look at the scene that we're actually going to use all right let's get into it okay everybody let's go ahead and get started you can see right in front of you we have a pretty simple scene let me move my camera back here just so you can take a look so here we are are with our SketchUp build and we're just going to use this for demonstration purposes only it's a pretty simple box and we've got one Corridor which is going to act as our light source and we can zoom back in here and you can see we've just got a few simple objects in the actual scene and I picked a variety of objects that have different material properties in the hope that we can get a better assessment of how well the path Tracer is actually working so you can see we've gotten some wood objects we've got some fabric and we've got some glass right here and we've got some really kind of stone or that kind of heavy plaster look we've got concrete on the floor and a thick plaster on the walls and I think those will do a good job of effectively showing the way that light is working in our scene on the bottom left we also have two different stored images one is going to be if I go ahead and click on that really just the overall holistic shot this would be the you know the sort of the beauty shot if you um and the second one is one we're going to look at first and in this one we're going to look specifically not necessarily at the actual paths we're going to look at bounces all right let's go ahead and take a quick look at that foreign so if we hop out of twin motion for a second let's take a look at this these are the visual settings for media tab that you can get under the twin motion documentation page and so if we look here for Max bounces this is the first thing we're looking at over the sampling we'll come to the sampling in a little bit later but if we just look at the max bounces it sets the number of maximum number of rate bounces when path tracing is enabled it corresponds to the number of times light is reflected or bounced on surfaces now if you just read that it doesn't necessarily explain what it does so let's bounce over to Twin motion here and I'm going to do control p on my keyboard to just bring up the settings and we can probably do another video at some point on the settings here but the most important one that we're going to change is path Tracer and you can see I'm just doing the low preset the samples per pixel is set to eight but I've dropped the bounce settings down to one by default these are set to well set to something slightly different of that um I can pull up exactly what those are it's not a hugely important thing okay so took me a moment to find these uh in the documentation but you can see samples per pixel at low set to eight medium is 64 and high is 256. we're looking at the bounces though and you can see rather curiously the low bounce value is only six medium eight and high ten there's not a massive range of bounces but let's go ahead and take a look our current setting is set up where the samples are eight so pretty much close to default but we just have the one bounce and let's take a quick look at how that is going to play out and this will I think help visualize what's going on when we look at the bounces or you adjust the bounce settings in particular so here we are in Twin motion and I'm going to go ahead and click on low and I will actually turn this off twin motion is kind of interesting insofar as when you make some changes to the settings it doesn't immediately update but there we go that is basically eight and one the distinct lack of bounces means the image is quite dark it's kind of I kind of like it it's kind of cool and dramatic but it is quite dark let's go ahead and do control P Pull up The Path Tracer I'm going to just double the amount of bounces again six was the default but just by putting it at four let's see what we can actually get and I'm going to turn this off and make sure we turn this back on weirdly you do seem to have to go back to this click on the specific preset there we go okay so obviously a little bit of growth in terms of time that it takes to render this especially in terms of time it takes to refresh the actual scene but overall that's pretty nice looking you can do quite a lot let's go back to image one which is set pretty far away now image one has its own sort of uh image really I had the path Tracer set up for that if we just put it back to the low again it's not bad it's really really not bad at all you can get away with a pretty low bounce value let's keep the effectively the raise at their default just eight pretty much like the lowest that you'd want to do anything with and let's see what happens when we crank up the bounces so Ctrl P again I'm gonna do path Tracer and let's put it up to 10. and this is probably the first image that I am going to render out so we can take a proper look and assessment at them later samples per pixel 8 just the lowest possible setting and the bounce settings of set to 10. okay and I'm gonna go back to image one really quickly for this I do want to know how well that works hit low not really seeing a huge amount of extra light which is kind of curious it doesn't seem like you get you know a huge change from that it's I'll just put it back to medium and then bounce it back to low really quickly just so we can you know trust but verify but even by cranking up the the bounces you're not getting more light that you think in the scene it's not like a linear value that just goes up so let me see and yeah it's not a staggeringly large increase in light what happens if we go just a little bit crazy with this and just take this all the way up path Tracer let's go ahead and put the number of bounces to let's put it up 30. let's just go a little bit wild with this one see if we can't get my computer to explode and again I'm going to put that back on low yeah that's kind of rather curious you not what I was expecting logically you would expect that this image has become a lot more blown out you would have expected a lot more exposure uh or at least something akin to exposure let's go ahead and put this back too low here and turn this off and we'll turn it back on again and you'll see if collectively it affects the image as a whole very comparable let's go ahead and render this out and we'll be able to take a look see at the different bounces to see how much of an effect they actually have on lighting the scene we'll be right back as we move into the next section where we look at the sample value now it's probably a good time to actually look at our environment and just look at the environment setup that we currently have all right I'm gonna just move that little guy out of the way and we shall just pop over here to image one and I'm going to click on more and when you're doing this stuff with a path Tracer really the two areas that are going to matter most you are going to be the render button right here and the lighting tab you can see we are currently in the 2023 preview version of D5 so a lot of the interface we already know from what twin motion I've released is going to be overhauled and changed which is something I'd mentioned in the previous video was probably my least favorite part of twin motion but the interface is going to be overhauled the one thing that's also been interesting is that how they're labeling certain content like the skies the Skylight which used to be the Sky Dome and then the backdrop hdri those are slightly changing we are just using the default Dynamic sky for testing and what we had intended was just to have a column of light a single if you will tract of light that lights up the scene there's no artificial lights in here we're relying just on really the path tracing and the overall bounce light to light up this scene the exposure we've put at the default I have cranked up the sun intensity and the ambient value those are about the only things that have been heavily adjusted but I thought it was worthwhile taking a look at just that before we go ahead in case somebody says well what about this or what about this setting or this or that these are the settings that we're actually using really just trying to minimize any additional light coming into the scene except what we've established okay with that being said I'm going to get out of the media mode we're going to go back to our original image and the original image is going to be the one from this angle and I'm going to render out a variety of different versions of the same image and what we'll be adjusting is the samples per pixel and once we have them done we can also compare how long it actually took based on the amount of samples that we've increased we're actual bounces to really about 10 which is what twin motion suggests for really the high quality path tracers as we saw you know taking it up to 30 didn't really change a huge amount so let's just leave that at 10. and then the only thing that will change is the samples per pixel one last thing I do want to mention is under the render we've turned down the Shadow and if we actually turn on the path tracer the other thing that I will be changing and will be fixed in all of these is the anti-aliasing by default it's really smooth um the effect this really has is it softens your renders and I think quite a bit this will be set to one for all of the renders so they should all have the same level of effective sharpening if you will anti-aliasing sharpening so again the only thing that should be different here is the samples per pixels will change and that will give us a good idea of where that sweet spot for you know increasing the samples starts to really level off and you get diminishing returns so let's try and find the optimum setting for a shot like this also please be aware every shot is going to be slightly different and the best we can say is these settings will work as a decent starting point for a render but you're obviously gonna have to go in there and make some changes all right I'm gonna spare you guys having to watch a render scene and I'll see you back in a moment with the Finnish renders and we'll look at those with the different levels of samples all right I'll be right back see you in a moment all right everybody so it took not a huge amount of time to render out five different variations all using the same bounce value which is 10 which is probably Overkill we we already saw that the 10 might not even be necessary but the only thing that's changed here is the samples per pixel and so yeah theoretically you would expect a substantial increase in quality especially going from the really low all the way up and so what we have here is five different renders all of them using the same lighting settings and all of them set to 4K this is the lowest and by the way I have up here in the top left you can see on the screen where it says eight and then 64 and 256. that is the basically the samples per pixel so hopefully you can see that on the top left corner of your screen so right now looking at the eight this is the lowest sort of the just the standard you know the twin motion low setting for the path Tracer it's it's not bad I mean weirdly had you gotten this you know a few years ago or if you could replicate this using the rasterized version of twin motion so without path tracing or hell if I got this in lumion I I think I'd be pretty happy with it all in all um the materials look good it does need quite a bit of work in Photoshop to you know make it pop and sing a little bit but all in all it's not it's not bad the other thing is it took literally no time at all to render I'm on a stock standard 3070 so a little bit above medium entry graphics cards from really last generation so not even for not even in the 4 Series um but this was at 4K almost immediately in terms of render time and honestly it looks pretty okay like I think this is quite nice if we bounce forward though and we look at the the default twin motion medium quality you'll notice there is a big kind of jump there especially when it comes to this the Pampa so if you look at the detail that you get here in this version versus what you get in the eight and I know it might be a little hard to see so 8 64 864. you don't see a huge amount of increase in some of the other areas the the wood here looks pretty much the same but in terms of the you know the sort of high detail High Fidelity details yeah you're getting a big Improvement Okay the third one I want to show you is this and you may you may notice something so this was just the twin motion High the standard High it set to 256 samples and it's set to a bounce of 10. so a little bit higher than standard bounce but the same for all of the other images now you may be thinking something must have changed or some setting has been adjusted I I did this actually twice to verify this is how it actually came out and I have no explanation for why the light values are so much brighter the only thing that changed is this was set to high and it is it's quite bright and it's really really nice looking to my mind you can see you are getting over in the corners you are getting Shadow and you're getting lovely Shadows sort of contact Shadows where really the walls meet this would be equivalent to sort of lumion's omni Shadow by cranking the Omni Shadow slider and I think it looks really good the detail here is actually superb I really like it and the glass looks good you can actually make out you know sort of the the area where the strands here the sort of stem is kind of coming into contact with the glass this just looks really good to me now weirdly though this is sort of the medium 256 samples and 10 bounces and brighter so I decided to crank the number of samples and I have two more of these done one is at 500 and the last one is at 750. and again you would be expecting some sort of linear Improvement in terms of quality you just actually don't get that at 500 and you can see that in the top left corner we're back to weirdly a darker image and there's not a massive increase in quality and to show this I'm going to go into Photoshop and I've got my three images this was the slightly brighter 256 samples the high by twin motion standards this is the 500 and the 750 and so if we look at the 750 and I'm zooming in on the the plant Series this sort of green area here again this is at 4K so there is a sort of noticeable loss of fidelity when you zoom in and I do the same at the highest setting the 750 I I mean that's just the highest that I render that you can take this up to some pretty high levels no what's interesting is the 256 the brighter right now the nicer looking one looks really good render time for this at 4K to get a really nice image was about 45 seconds on my stock 3070 and this is definitely the image that I'm preferring and really that glass looks really gorgeous and this stuff just looks really really good at 500 the render time sort of shot up quite a bit to about a minute and a half and then if I took this all the way up to the 750 like that's a lot of samples per pixel I don't see a substantial Improvement now you could argue if you were to redo this under different settings if you were to reshoot this with a lot of caustics so an awful lot of glass and an awful lot of reflective surfaces then perhaps you would see a very pronounced increase in the quality from 256 to 500 to 750 onwards time will obviously increase exponentially with or at least of some degree will increase with the number of samples per pixel but in this image just this image alone with very limited lighting effects and just relying on path tracing and the bounces quite simply I don't see a big enough Improvement you can produce a lot quite a lot of different shots all at the 45 second Mark you could line up like six or seven of these and produce them really rapidly just using the default path Tracer high setting and you can do that really quite efficiently as opposed to setting up a whole bunch of 500 or 750 samples per pixel shots which still seem to take quite a bit longer it's the difference for me for 45 seconds all the way up to just under two minutes so yeah um kind of an interesting takeaway from this bounces uh really to us takeaways one is that bounces hasn't had the profound effect that I thought it would it's not going to massively lighten up your scene and perhaps it was never intended to do that perhaps somebody who has a bit more knowledge of how path tracing Ray chasing Works would you know feel free to comment on that the second takeaway is there is a Optimum sweet spot to my mind which is really somewhere between this 256 samples and this 500. and you know I I might spend a little bit of time and see can I try and figure out where this extra lighting is coming from and if you know if this is really worth the expended time if I was to submit one like professionally to a client and to be like hey here's the work this is actually the one that I would pick that's just without any Photoshop whatsoever okay I am going to go ahead and leave it there for today and with that being said we are done if you made it to the end of the video thank you so much for watching and I will go ahead and see you in the next video which hopefully will be coming a little bit sooner than the gap between this video and the last all right see you soon foreign foreign

Channel: ViaRender

Views: 21,766

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Id: Fy9j2_KUGV0

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 14 2023