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Well, maybe not better but Discord gets more popular also for CGI Community

Noseman's approach resembles a planar ray collision like as in area light ray-casting. I though you needed something more narrow like a laser-stripe. My suggestion to Maxon involved something like this: There's a Ray Collision node (both in XPresso and Scene Nodes) that might help you. But I'm not sure about the discreet nature of it (voxel like distribution of clones) and discreetness in space (original surface polygon space). I'm very eager to see how Noseman tackled this.

@DefJeff Very nice scene. I see the amount of complexity. I've noticed you use Global Illumination from some colored shadows near the stairs. I also noticed how well-lit your scene is by the absence of shadows all over the place. This could indicate that you either use a lot of light sources or have disabled shadows. Try not using the light objects in places were the "real" scene lights are (light bulbs). The more light sources you use the slower the render (especially with GI). Use the Luminance channel on those objects (portal, screens, light bulbs). Notice that a Luminance of 100% will just make the object bright enough to eliminate casting shadows on it from other objects. In order to make them cast light on near-by surfaces you need to exceed 100%. The exact value depends on the scale of your models. As for the metal materials, I don't see any real reflections from the surrounding environment. This means you could just fake the "metallic" surface by enabling only the Specular Strength and not having to worry about the Reflectance Strength. Legacy material models have much faster rendering times. Do you use Anisotropy for the "waves/scratches" or a texture ? Since this is an interior image you should consider disabling any Sky/Background illumination. Personally I would be astonished by the result of having only the portal illuminating the room. The light (luminance channel) from that thing alone would make a dramatic scene ! (also since it will be the only light source the render time will also dramatically shrink).

excellent feedback and really appreciate the time you spent it explaining things. I will experiment with the settings you provide and report back. It has taken about 1.5 hour to render the one frame. but working on simplifying things and taking your input as well. I updated my profile recently to include hardware and software info. Using 21.207. Radeon Pro 560X 4 GB 2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7 Not a very powerful machine, and I expect it to take more time than most 🙂 I am attaching a screen shot of the actual scene which is quite loaded... Again much thanks and I will post back once I experiment more.

most of the part yes, BUT... Render times do not rely only on materials. Most of the time it's the lighting model itself (Area lights, Global Illumination, Ambient Occlusion, photon samples etc) and effects (Motion Blur, Depth of Field etc). Usually what makes a render slow in Materials is the SubSurface Scattering and high levels of SubPolygon Displacement. And talking about SubPolygon Displacement leads to the geometry itself. High number of polygons can also increase the amount of render times dramatically when combined with the above mentioned options both material-wise and lighting model. Your materials don't have SSS or SPD but they have reflections. This can really slow down rendering when a lot of polygons are to be reflected again and again. So for starters try to drop the reflection depth to 3 and see how much that reduces time. Usually Blur in reflective and transparent materials also increase time a lot. Instead of baking the reflections which leads to a static textured material completely devoid from realistic reflection interactions with the environment and of course camera angle you can try to use an HDRI as a reflection. This way the material will no longer reflect the environment but only the image. Since you send your render to a Render Farm you shouldn't be worried about render times. How long does it take for you to render one single frame in your computer and how long does it take to render the same frame at the render farm ? I understand that render farms can be expensive sometimes but given the amount of power they have I really doubt from what your screenshot shows that it would take more than an hour to render a 300 frame video at 2K. Also your profile does not mention what version of C4D you use. I could add more details but I choose not to because it gets trivial. Better provide screenshots from your render settings from the Physical tab (if you are using the Physical Renderer)

Soooooo... I went down a rabbithole with this. Check out this video and if this is the effect yuo want, I have a solution. Youtube tutorial and scene file coming Monday. https://www.dropbox.com/s/wxrv0epg5c9o9qr/Ray_Casting_Clones_Nodes.mp4?dl=0

I'd like to tip my hat to Corebot for the set of links to the training videos. Thank you.