Can someone tell me why?
The dunes are very low poly when compared to the metal props.
The shader is practically the same, it’s less reflective than metal of course.
I really can’t understand what is going on.
P.S.: now while I was writing this thread I did further testing and discovered that the culprit is simply the tint: the sand is much lighter in color than the metal, and I experimented that this is the problem with its “lighting complexity”.
Can someone tell me what does this mean?
Is it a problem with Lumen because of the much higher albedo, producing more calculations?
How heavy is the problem?
The framerate doesn’t drop when watching the sand, in respect to watching the metal: quite the opposite.
I assume that having a higher albedo (or a high intensity light) is supposed to require more bounces since less energy is absorbed. In practice though I find that the albedo/light intensity don’t actually have any visible impact on the amount of visible bounce light beyond a certain point. It doesn’t matter how bright your light/abledo is, you can’t ever get more bounce light than what you’d see from roughly 3 bounces in the path tracer.
I’ve just been ignoring the complexity view honestly, it seems to be mostly useless. If there is any performance difference between a scene with white complexity view vs. blue, I haven’t been able to detect it. Given that it seems like Lumen can’t resemble the path tracer past 3 bounces, I can only guess that they were capped at some point and the complexity view was never updated to reflect that.
Thank you for the explanation!
I’ll see later on if there’s an impact in machines with a less powerful GPU than mine, but your hypothesis makes sense.
Also note that the worst part happens inside the dunes, not on the tips, meaning that it’s the part where the bounces increase in number because of the shape of the “parabola”.
