Hi.

Can anyone give me some advise how to setup mantra to render smoke ?


Here is one frame - it's simple animation with some smoke going through watches.
Simulation is cached to .sim files.
In the scene I have two arealights, envlight with hdr image and gilight with photons.
My mantra setting below:



with 640x360 image resolution - rendertime is about 45 minutes on my E5-2630v4
wich is ridiculusly long in my opinion.
What did I set wrong ?

Your indirect quality settings are ridiculously high, I'm not surprised by the render time. Is the render time less without the volume? Generally, volumetric elements would be rendered separately, and recomposited in post, since they have different quality requirements. This would free up the render cycles on the shiny stuff from having to re-iterate for every version of the smoke.

Thanks ! Now I've set this to render smoke alone (all other objects set to matte shadow and rendering with high settings for volume and minimal for rest), then glass on watches in another pass (with higher settings for reflections and refractions), watches and ground also in passes. All rendered passes merged in comp.
So much faster and better quality
Silly me…