My last couple of posts have been about improving the render times in my Hyperion render engine. I've been able to significantly reduce render times, enough that I can now do test renders with higher polygon count objects. No more rendering simple spheres or boxes, or doing brute force renders for several hours!
With the success at dropping render times, I turned some attention to the colours and lighting. I had some problems previously, including issues with HDRI skies not being rendered. But with these fixed (or, working better...), I can now let the render go for many more passes. Here's our Stanford Dragon again:
The image above is 150 passes of the Stanford Dragon, which rendered in 16 minutes and 54.33 seconds. I was doing other things while it rendered, so some time could come off this further. It's a little noisy, but that's because of the limited number of passes. Cleaner images really need several thousand passes, and maybe a noise filter applied. I have built a noise filter, I just didn't use it on this render.
I'm really happy with it. He looks good.
With progress ticking along well, I decided to let one render go for awhile - uninterrupted. Here's the final result:
1,500 passes: 2 hours, 37 minutes and 6.502 seconds.