I thought, when I first started this project that I had setup the nVidia mental ray renderer to be my default renderer. Apparently I did not.
I figured out that I hadn’t when looking at some of the renders I had done to show friends, family, and you lovely people, what I have been working on. I was disappointed in the renders because the edges of the objects and the shadows looked so jagged.
So I went back into my render settings and fiddled around a bit until I finally found something that would let me set my renderer. I selected what looked like what I wanted, and I would tell you what that is except that something is rendering right now and I can’t look. When I finally selected the right thing in the right spot a bunch of setting options changed. I decided to give it a go and render what I was looking at on the screen and see if there was a difference.
Oh wow!
There was a definite difference. Edges were smoother, shadows better and materials look better too.
So here is the cup from when I first started this.
And here is the cup now.
I will admit, I was too lazy to figure out how to render just the cup, without all the other components, just for this post. If I had you might not have been able to see the difference as clearly.
Changing the renderer increased resolution and polish and caused an increase in file size when I save the renders as well as an increase in render times. I went from just a few seconds to render a single frame, to a minute, 2 minutes, 6 minutes, I recently had a render that took 13.5 minutes. The initial increase in time was just due to the new renderer, however, as the project has developed and I have added more items to the scene, and more materials, and fiddled with the lights, the render time has also increased.
I have learned that the renderer makes a huge differnce in the quality of the output.