Stucco Modern House: New renders & thoughts about time-quality aspect of 3D rendering

Hello Everyone!

It’s with pleasure to present to you the latest renders to be added for my Modern House project. And before I show the results, let me talk about some of my insights while going through the process of rendering the 3d scene.

One of the challenges in rendering is maintaining the balance between time & quality. In 3d rendering these two aspects are directly related and there’s no going around it. I’m speaking from some standpoint where I have to render the 3d image using my own computer and not using any type of “render farm” services. I’m not going to explain about “render farms” since I’m not experienced enough to discuss it.

In my case, I render 3d images using the only resources I have which is my laptop computer. It’s a 10 year old 1st generation Core i7 machine. It’s good enough to work on smaller scale projects but not able enough to handle heavily detailed scenes or incredibly large scale projects. That’s why most of the 3d projects that I post in my blog are personal and relatively small projects.

In 3d rendering, image quality has a direct relation to the time required to complete the rendering. For me to achieve a smooth result, I will have to bump up the render settings to almost three times the default values. However, the time required to render doesn’t multiply to three times the usual. In most cases, it will multiply to about ten times. It’s exponential basically.

To give you an idea, the first image that I rendered in this post: Stucco Modern House "3dViz" (WIP#1) took me about 5 hours of rendering time. That’s because the image resolution that I set is 2100 pixels on its longer side. And the material settings were set to 3 times the default value.

Item	Description
Render Settings	x3 default
Material Settings	x3 default
Image Resolution	2122x1200
Render Time	5 hours

While on this latest rendering, I reduced the image resolution down to 1300 pixels on its longer side. Material settings were reduced to about 1.5 times the default settings. The rendering time was drastically reduced to about 1.5 hours.

So, is it worth my time to wait for a 5 hour render which will result in about twice the quality of the usual? My quick answer is “NO”. It’s because I’m only working on a personal project and I only have one laptop to work on everything that I do online. And rendering a single image will consume most of my CPU’s power. And I don’t want to be idle for 5 hours for a single 3d image.

And so I decided to lower down all render settings to complete more 3d images in a shorter span of rendering time. Here are the results:

Item	Description
Render Settings	x1.5 default
Material Settings	x1.5 default
Image Resolution	1379x780
Render Time	1.5 hours

Item	Description
Render Settings	x1.5 default
Material Settings	x1.5 default
Image Resolution	1379x780
Render Time	1.5 hours

As a final note, even though a higher render settings has clearly shown a better result, I don’t think that the time required to render is not worth to wait. For personal projects like this, I will simply rely on lower render settings and a faster rendering time.