How to speed up 3D Rendering in Photoshop CS5

[viveredesign]

Hello,

My 3D rendering (ray trace) seems rather slow in Photoshop CS5. Would it make a difference to upgrade my GPU or my 2.5GHz Quad-Core CPU, or both? The CPU peaks for over 10 minutes during the ray-tracing rendering, but the "interactive" 3d stuff is instant on my PC.

thanks,

JP

[Mathias_DK_]

When you say its slow, what are you comparing to? Ray-tracing is a complicated computing task.

[Chris Cox]

Ray tracing is CPU intensive.  The more cores it has available, and the faster they are, the faster it'll run.

Don't forget you also need plenty of memory (and fast memory) to keep up with those cores.

BTW - professional ray traced images may take a day or more to complete.

[SG...]

Hi,

Are you setting it to Draft or Final? You can try removing some of the more expensive operations, such as soft shadows, refraction, >100% opacity, texture maps over 1024px. If Final Raytrace quality, you could also go to the 3D prefs. and set the High Quality Threshold down to 1 or 2 to see if that helps.

regards,

steve

[viveredesign]

Thanks for your answers.

I'm working on rendering some of our 2D samples in to a 3d scene and chose a final resolution of 2100x1500 (in case these were to be put on a postcard in the future). It sounds like this may be a bit much for a destop PC to render out quickly.

It would be nice to know whether there's a significant advantage to upgrading some of our CPUs in order to determine whether it's worth the cost. I suppose that would require exploring some benchmarking sites to see their findings. We have 8GB of RAM (64-bit systems), so I don't know if increasing that would help either.

I don't think I like the lights with hard shadows, so I don't think I'll remove their "softness" for my scenes, but I'll look in to the other suggestions to increase rendering speed.

Maybe the optimal workflow would be to set-up several 3D scenes, create an action to render and then stamp the 3D layer and save, and then batch-process the files overnight.

Thanks for your help!

JP

[Mylenium]

If you want an honest opinion: Just buy yourself a proper 3D program! No matter how much hardware you throw at PS, compared to a highly optimized raytracer like VRay, modo or interactive, graphics card accelerated renderes using CUDA like Octane, it will always be a lose-lose proposition. I will refrain from lengthy explanations of specifics as no doubt it will only result in the PS engineers hijacking this thread and telling you the opposite and how great their program is, but I've done 3D for 17 years and PS just isn't meant for it...

Mylenium

[viveredesign]

Hi Mylenium,

That's a good point. I think our exposure to 3D graphics thus far doesn't justify the costs of adding a 3D suite, so we're just trying to get the most out the tools we currently own. I've used Blender to create a few needed shapes, so I think that suits our needs for the moment. But as you suggest, looking in to a dedicated 3D suite may be more cost effective than upgrading a CPU to run Photoshop's 3D engine.

thanks,

JP

[Daniel Presedo]

Chris made some good points, I run a Mac Pro :

Model Name:    Mac Pro
  Model Identifier:    MacPro4,1
  Processor Name:    Quad-Core Intel Xeon
  Processor Speed:    2.26 GHz
  Number Of Processors:    2
  Total Number Of Cores:    8
  L2 Cache (per core):    256 KB
  L3 Cache (per processor):    8 MB
  Memory:    12 GB
  Processor Interconnect Speed:    5.86 GT/s

Ray Trace screams on all the cores. Granted 3D scenes will vary with complexity. One example of complexity is many lights, or meshes with opacity (eg Glass effects). That is not say Vray is not superior since it is a much more mature technology and that is not say we will not catch up

And finally, I would take anything Mylenium says with a grain of salt as it seems he (unfortunately) only lives to insult Adobe Photoshop Engineers who do know something about 3D.

[Chris Cox]

Mylenium likes to complain (especially about 3D :-), but he generally knows what he's talking about and provides helpful answers in the forums.

[Morcom]

I have the following system specs

OS Name Microsoft Windows 10 Pro

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6400 CPU @ 2.70GHz, 2701 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)

BIOS Version/Date American Megatrends Inc. P1.40, 2016/06/16

Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 12,0 GB

Total Physical Memory 12,0 GB

This render was done in PS CC. As you can see, it is super simple

A total time of 8m 50s is unacceptable

I decided to try the same type of Render in Cinema 4D R17. This is my go to 3d software which I have used for years. I kept it simple, used a material to light the scene off a plane, and set Global Illumination to HQ Indoor. I also included an infinity screen, all of which adds complexity to the scene. This is the result:

As you can see, this render took on 10 seconds.

With this test in mind, I have to agree with Mylenium. If you want to do some serious 3d work, PS is not the way forward, but if you need a simple 3d element for a once off job, then the tool is available to you. It is possible to edit video in PS, but in production, I don't think anyone will use PS for this task, but would rather use Premier. The rule applies here, just because the feature is there, does not mean that it is suitable for production.

[davescm]

HI

I do use other 3D applications - which can do their final rendering on the 2560 Cuda cores of my GPU rather than the 12 logical cores on my CPU and are therefore much faster.

However a couple of tips for rendering in Photoshop.

1. Put a selection border around the part of the image to be rendered (including shadows) that way you do not waste CPU time rendering empty space.

2. You do not have to wait for the render to finish. If the quality has reached an acceptable level for your purpose - hit Esc and stop it at that point.

Dave