Shaderlight forums

Hello Afroditi,

A couple of the most common causes of noise are using too many ‘part-glossy’ materials and having skylight portals coincident with any glass faces.

Partially glossy materials (with blurry reflections / highlights) are difficult for the raytracer to render because they require many reflection rays to be generated at each hit, which can quickly branch into thousands of rays if there is inter-reflection between partially glossy surfaces.

If a skylight portal is in exactly the same place as a glass face, rays will sometimes hit the glass before the portal and sometimes not, resulting in noisy renders. This can be worked around by moving the portal just a millimetre or so away from the glass.

There are other reasons renders can be noisy, so if neither of those are the case for you, perhaps you could send the model to us at so we can investigate it more thoroughly.

Regards,
Shaderlight support

Thank you very much for your quick reply! I will revise the model one more time taking account these suggestions and give it another try!

Regards,
Afroditi

Hi Afroditi
besides the Shaderlight Support´s suggestions it often helps - especially for interiors - to work with additional artificial lights. - For example to lit the corridor which leads to the backroom.
Is your (nice!!) scene only lit by daylight so far?

Best, Egie

Hi Egie!

Thank you so much for your input, yes it is indeed only lit by daylight at the moment. As I am a new user, I haven’t experimented a lot with artificial lighting although I did think that probably it would help the dark corridor areas. What would you recommend? Could it be a visible hanging lamp that emits light or could I ‘trick’ the scene but just dropping a point light or area light without it actually coming out of lamp?!

Best, Afroditi

Hi & Welcome !
Although I illuminate a lot of things artificialy I still remain a bungler(?)  ;-))

My favorite lighting is using arealights - one reason is that I have not yet used SL for SU2017 and so arealights are the only light sources that allow soft shadows and somehow I don´t get IES lighting not working well for me as well. The current version of Shaderlight allows soft shadows also for point lights and spotlights which is certainly very good.

Anyway - I would suggest spotlights on the ceiling with faked downlights pretending to shine by using self illu material. But in fact you use an Area Light that shines down - somehow like in this examples:
https://artvps.com/index.php/discuss/viewthread/1307/
https://artvps.com/index.php/discuss/viewthread/661/
https://artvps.com/index.php/discuss/viewthread/2899/
If you are using Artificial Lighting in combination with Daylight, you have to use extremely high lightpower settings to get this lighting visible “against” the sunlight´s power - so please try and play a little to get a feeling for this…
Also it is possible to add more arealights near the ground to bring enough light and lightmood up to the ceiling…  And it is worth playing with different sizes of the arealight rectangle!
I hope you get a few more tips from the really excelent light gurus here :-)

Best Egie, and let me/us see and know how you get ahead