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Known Participant
July 12, 2018
Question

What type of 3D Lighting Renders fastest?

  • July 12, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 383 views

First of all, I know this question is a bit open ended, as the speed of any render depends on many things. However, I'm posing this as a general question in everyone's personal experience with Photoshop's 3D rendering. Many times it's painfully slow for me, and I'm really wanting to see what the consensus is here. Of course I have experimented with many different combinations and methods to light a scene, and know that adding more than a couple lights in PS to any scene really seems to bog things down. But would things render faster with say, an image-based light with 3 bright spots instead of 3 separate lights? And what about object illumination? Have any of you found that depicting light with an object is faster/slower than IBL or regular lighting?

Any input would be greatly appreciated, as I'm trying to become more efficient in my workflow. I design interior composites by combining real photography with 3D elements that I model outside of Photoshop. Here's an example of a room setting that incorporates both:

Yes, I feel like I have a ways to go yet in regards to realism, but basically the furniture itself is all photography, and everything else is 3D, all rendered in Photoshop. I've actually used all 3 types of aforementioned lighting in the composite. Feel free to pick it apart if you'd like, but I wanted to give you all an idea of what I'm dealing with. For example, I had the curtains a bit "sheer" with an opacity around 85, but PS rendered them VERY slowly and I had to just make them a fakey opaque. Yes, I could have masked, used a blend mode, or just erased them away, but of course that's extra render passes and as I mentioned, time is of the essence here. I also realize that other factors such as poly count, refraction and texture size can slow down rendering, so I'm taking these into account as well.

So again, any response is well appreciated,

-Andy

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    1 reply

    davescm
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    July 12, 2018

    Hi

    If you really want fast rendering, then I would (and I do) render outside of Photoshop in an application such as Blender Cycles that will render on the GPU (Photoshop uses the CPU for ray tracing). The difference in speed, with a decent GPU, is phenomenal. You can still use an image as a background layer to position the 3D camera view and render with a transparent background.

    Then bring the rendered elements together as layers in Photoshop to build the final composite. I still prefer to build a composite in Photoshop using layers rather than Blender's node approach.

    Dave

    Known Participant
    July 13, 2018

    Hi Dave,

    Thanks for your response. I do have a good GPU, so your suggestion is very intriguing. I model in Maya and import into Photoshop. However, as you know, matching Maya's perspective camera to the photography is a big challenge (At least it is for me, unless Maya has a way to do that reliably, which of course is a different topic in a different forum ).

    Mylenium
    Legend
    July 13, 2018

    unless Maya has a way to do that reliably

    Sure. Maya has had a camera tracker since v1.0 back in 1998, when this was considered an elusive high-end feature. It might help to check the Maya documentation.

    Mylenium