Render Times?
waltn3mtj
Posts: 112
First, I know this is a loaded question with tons of variables that cause widely varying results. I have a decent laptop, not a gamer or major powerhouse, but it churns through CPU intensive tasks easily (I have to replace a fan on the desktop - 8 years old). Large sets do slow it down, however due a lot to fairly low power dedicated graphics while editing. The laptop runs fairly cool as I have a custom built cooling stand for it. Calibrated IR measurements show all heatsinks and reachable devices to be 100 degrees F or lower with no hot spots found internally and all air passages and heatsinks are clean.
Rendering about 1400 x 930 (around 10:6 AR) takes over 12 hours to remove the worst speckles on scenes with reflections, three human figures - mostly G3 - and some props and background. I have tried some tips from a video in the Help/Tips link with no change in speed. The 300-400 iterations mentioned in that video are far from enough, plus it seems that rendering much larger sizes in order to reduce PP later on takes even longer. I don't run many rendering options beyond sparkle filtering.
I'm curious as to some rendering times on non-gaming non-powerhouse computers on scenes that aren't too awful involved. Maybe for a non-powerhouse computer I'm not alone with these times. I know large sets and a lot of details will increase render times. Three figures on the sets I render average 83-85 shaders it seems.
I'm also open for suggestions (cannot buy a new computer at this time) for speeding things up without compromises I find objectionable - I'll try them and keep them if they seem good & quietly forget any that don't seem to suit.
Thanks again in advance!
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Comments
I render on an asus gaming laptop.. It seems to do just fine. It is a G751JY. I usually have a render done in a an hour or two, depending on the lighting. Mine is a year old, and Nvidia GeForce gtx 980M
Yeah, I know it could be faster if I buy a desktop, but I hate sitting in a desk. I do that all day at work, so a laptop works best for my artistic style and comfort.
I'd be most happy rendering within an hour or two! I've been rendering a simple scene for 7.5 hours and it is only 18% done....... I guess it is time to save for a better laptop as I want something I can take with me. This one is only just shy of 3 years old. It will churn through a large Excel spreadsheet and a lot of other normally heavy tasks in no time, though, so I didn't think it would be this far behind when it came to rendering. It does my photography batch RAW conversions in very short order, where the older desktop takes a lot longer.
I found out that lighting seems to be the generic auto headlamp, and not the lights I set in place as the shadows are all wrong and some dark places that show up fine editing are dark while rendering. I read in another thread that there is a setting, but I don't want to interrupt the render to make that change. Everything that isn't in the render, I remove to hopefully speed things up knowing it will have to be put back if I render another view of the same scene.
No...if they are all converted to/using Iray 'native' materials, they are using one shader. Shader presets are individualized...shaders just 'are'. And it's not the number of them that matters, anyway...but rather what they are doing...lots of reflections, lots of transparency/refractions, caustics, etc will take longer. Also, the number of image files used in those presets/materials will probably slow things down, because unless you have about 16 GB of RAM, you WILL be using the swap file. And, since it's a laptop, it will be CPU only...which is significantly slower.
Refractions..... I just noticed a couple props use tons of refractions. I got the '38 sedan and just about every surface/part has difraction active, I just found even the tire treads and running boards have that active by default. My models' feet and hands are showing through them and the background wanted to show through the body until I turned refraction on it off. Guess I"ll have to go down the list and make sure it is off an everything. There is water with its reflections in this scene that is rendering. I'm afraid to try using a sky now!
It has 8 GB RAM and I have noticed the swap file seeming to get a lot of use watching the drive status. I saw that Windows has set the swap file to a fixed 5 GB that I haven't seen change since day one. I'm going to try to bump it up a bit as I think Windows may not have enough swap to work with and doesn't seem to make any changes to compensate.
I was thinking it used all those shaders as the history shows that it was compiling them. It is time to study up on shaders and shader presets. Thanks for giving me a lot to go on that may help get the most out of what I have at the moment.
If you can do layers in postwork- Tips to speed up renders: don't render your distant background stuff, or things using DOF (depth of field) at the same time as your characters.Set up your scene, then in Scene take out your characters (close the eye). Then render the background by itself at the same size that you have your scene, put that image on a background plane, then render your characters. Also, in Iray, better lighting speeds up render time. If you're using DOF, take out things you really don't need in your scene.
Just watch for where your shadows of the characters fall, and leave those props in where the shadows are intersecting them.
Also, you can hide people's body parts that aren't showing, and parts of the outfit that aren't in the view. Why render shoes if the feet aren't showing? (And I'm guilty, I forget that a LOT.)
If it is sitting there 'compiling shaders', what it is doing is converting all the presets (which are instances of the same shader, really) to Iray. In 3Delight there is more variety of unique shders, but there still isn't 80+ of them in a typical Studio install (now on my install...there may well be, as I do write and experiment with them).
Does hiding body parts and unused items work in Iray by speeding up yhe render the same as Reality I did not realize this? I will have to give this a try.
The mesh will not take as much vram as the textures will. The easiest way to reduce load on the render is to remove textures that are not needed and have Iray downsize the rest. The only things you should need to remove mesh wise is items not in view either directly or via reflections. I disagree that DOF makes it slower. Because the area is blured, the renderer is NOT rendering details so its less load there.
Something that a lot of people tend to over look is render quality settings. Quality 1 is ok for tests but for the final, it should really be turned up to 2 or 3. The extra quality will not affect rendring times that much to be noticable but it will improve the quality of the image.
The #1 factor for speed is your hardware. Top end cards will render better then lower end cards cause of the increased number of CUDA cores, higher clock speeds and more vram. Also two cards are better then one. Scaling in Iray is improved over the past versions so if you have two or more cards you will get better results (Just dont enable SLI for Iray rendering).
@Mattymanx " The extra quality will not affect rendring times that much to be noticable but it will improve the quality of the image."
Are you sure about that? My expereince is counter to both or your points. I grant that improved quality of image is subjective, but I suspect lighting is a much bigger impact. That is, better lighting will give good/better/great result at qual 1 when worse lighting might need 2 or 3 to achiecve same look. HAven't done these tests, so purely speculation.
As far as the quality setting, the tests I did several months ago, showed a roughly linear increase in rendering time for a given quality setting.
I'm glad Render Quality doesn't affect render times that much. I'll turn quality up my next render. I tried turning off stuff out of view and other suggestions and thought I had something great going as it reached 12% in about 15 minutes. that was 17 hours ago.....and it is up to 29%. In 17 hours it has done a bit over 2300 iterations. I'm currently limited in hardware so I'm looking to squeeze what I can in performance by cutting wherever I can that doesn't affect the outcome too much.
I've turned the lights I created off as they didn't light what I wanted so Auto Headlamp is in effect. That will be another thread, just saying here in case that makes a large enough difference. Does it render from cameras that I've created to help composing the scene? Of course I know it only looks through the one that is "active".
I spoke from my own experiance with it.
The tests i also did with render quality cleared the grain sooner with a higher quality setting. Yes higher settings will slow you down but it DOES improve the quality. i dont know the technical stuff to explain what its doing but I read somewhere that its related to how it samples each pixel. Also, I dont often wait for full convergence as there is a point where the eye cannot see the difference so I go by what I see. Its not 3DL, it doesn't need to hit 100%
I also forget to mention that I am using two 980TI's. I do not use the CPU at all as it does not add enough to bother.
You're best to shut off the auto headlamp via the render settings and never depend on it.
Forgot to mention, shut off the noise filter as it will double your render times. Leave the firefly filter on as it does not affect render times and its bennificial. I also do not recommend using the Architectural sampler as it will increase render times as well. Its suppose to make interior shots look better but I cannot tell personally and am too impatient to test it out.
If you're referring to my post? If so, that's not what I was implying, but I can see how it came out that way. I said render things in the background and use them as a background image, and the reference to do DOF meant that includes DOF items (since they are often in the background) Sorry about that, I should have said "including" DOF...
I'll be turning Auto Headlamp off as soon as I get it working as 40+ years in stage and studio mean it should work. I am sure I'm just not doing something DS wants. I did open another thread for that.
Noise Filtering is now turned off and Firefly has been on from day one. I tried Architectural Filtering early on and having aborted it because it took so long, I can't say how well it works.
I have a render that has been running over 20 hours and is about 16% finished......2032 iterations so far. And that is after turning off everything not in the scene and dropping a few things it really could live without. The biggest reason I think it is taking so long is that there is a shadow area that I can't get any lights at all to fill, so it is working overtime because Auto Headlamp is all I can use. Trying other lights left that area completely in the dark so they are deleted and Auto Headlamp is on - again, hopefully I can get help on the thread I started for that.
That render is about 1440 x 930 or so in size. Render Quality is about 2. There is a waterline in the shadow area that may be leading to the extra long render time (also it is a laptop, not a slouch, but not a gamer either & is running OK temperature wise as IR shows the device and heatsink temperatures to be 100F or lower). Nothing is using refraction that I am aware of. DS is set to use "Higher than Normal" priority which helped some, AV automatic detection is disabled, but firewall is active and it is in Airplane mode anyway. The Swap File has been bumped to almost 10 GB - fixed size, and DS seems to be able to get more RAM and the disk activity has dropped a lot after increasing it from 5 GB.
I'm beginning to suspect this is a 'stuck' render and will never finish...
It is rendering and making progress, when I go away and return, I can see progress in areas. While the laptop can breeze through very large spreadsheets and other processor intensive tasks, DS brings it to its knees. I also have graphical software for running two-way radios while handling either voice and/or digital data which is quite demanding on processors that have no problems, and I can multitask with no problems running that software. DS, I guess takes a lot more than I've ever called upon that computer to accomplish.
Its ok. Im sorry I misread that.
My computer is no slouch even though it's not the newest thing out there, but it seems like pretty much every render I do needs to be done over night, and sometimes part of the next day.
I don't feel so alone then. I'm OK with it taking overnight, it just gets old as I have to hold any ideas I may have for a day or two until the render in progress gets done. My simpler renders have finished up overnight, but I've started doing a series with water that take forever. Bryce doesn't take nearly as long, problem is, I can't get Bryce to recognize DS 4.9 so I can send things back for tweaking. Another couple threads have had many good suggestions, none working for me. The laptop in question surprised me as it tears through all other tasks including RAW photo batch processing.
Someone mentioned rendering the background by itself and saving, and then if it stays unaltered, render the foreground stuff by itself and post process the two as layers in another program. I'm going to give that a try whenever this current render finishes.....1 day, 6 hours plus at the moment!
...yeah, rendered a fairly simple scene yesterday with one figure, a set, in Iray at 695 x 900 with the Sun/Sky in CPU mode, and it took one and a half hours to finish. In 3DL it probably would have taken 6 - 8 min.
How does Iray compare with 3DL? I imagine quite a bit or everyone would be using 3DL...... Maybe I'm rendering too large a size, but some are meant to possibly have use as wallpaper and a video from a Help link in DS suggests rendering much larger than you need running fewer iterations, and then reducing the size to remove sparkles and artifacts. Experimentation didn't seem to make that an option here. 300-400 iterations were suggested in the video, and running as many as 1000 didn't work.
I'm still finding out about power hungry options that are turned on by default that aren't really essential...
...I can get pretty decent quality from 3DL considering I have worked with it for almost seven years. Yes, it is not "photoreal" however, that's due to the limitations the version which is integrated into the Daz programme has to work under. Renderman/3DL by itself is capable of very high quality realistic results, we just do not have the access to its full toolset in Daz.
Same pretty much for Iray as well.
When I did a comparison test of a 1,200 x 900 scene in both engines (for Iray I manually converted the materials before rendering) 3DL beat it out by miles time wise (14 min with optimising for 3DL vs. about two hours for Iray) Both versions of scene included reflectivity, transparency, and had two G2F characters. Yes the Iray version looked more "photographic" in some ways (though characters are it's biggest downfall) however surface details (bump and displacement) of the set and props were also negligible, even in the foreground.
I'll have to play with 3DL then. I have some new terrains to check out so that may be the time to test Iray and 3DL against each other with the same scene. I wasn't expecting them to be identical and it will be interesting to compare differences whan I get around to it. I have a couple other ideas I want to see about working with and then the new terrain testing and likely rendering tests.
I got lighting to work about how I want (another thread where a lot of good suggestions and help came my way) and throwing a ton of light on the scene and bringing EV way back seems to have cut render time dramatically. I'm not sure how much, but I'm at 34% in about six hours instead of taking almost 30 hours. I'm using the same scene with minor G3F figure pose tweaks (raised hand, etc). Everything else is the same and I'm sure the pose tweaks don't make any difference at all. I think the figures are squinting in the light!
Now that Pascal support is here, I rendered a 4K iray figure that took 1:46 on my GTX 760, on the GTX 1080 it took 0:38. My desktop isn't the most powerful but apparently it is not bad at all. I've not tested 3DL yet. Ever since iray came out I've really never looked back at 3DL.
...what type of lights are you using?
My primary lights (remember this is my first actual render using something besides Auto Headlamp so I'm learning) have been two Distant Lights and I've used maybe four spotlights and one Point Source (I think that's right - a render is going on and I can't verify the correct name of the last). I've tried to keep reflections and shadows simple, translucency turned off everywhere I can think of.
I have several cameras I use for creating the scene, and am not sure if they are involved in any way during render (besides the one I'm 'looking through').
Dark clothing textures seem to render quickly without a lot of sparkle, but other dark areas still seem to take a long time to clean up. Maybe I need to pump the lux up more. Some lights, I set 20,000+ lux. Too bad DS doesn't have a light meter! I'm used to using one.
You should be happy with your render times! The laptop is limited to working with its CPU only, it has discrete graphics, but a very low card meant to run business graphics on an external projector, nothing more. I'm interested in experimenting with 3DL, just because......it exists...... If I render anything with people where textures aren't that important, I may use it for speed, but much of what I do right now have them as the primary subjects. If I can get Bryce to send to DS, then people won't be that important due to how well I feel it does landscaping, and Bryce renders very well and quickly.
I'll be looking later for something better than what I have. My desktop had a fan failure that killed it the other night from heat. I'm hoping it is the 3.3 V rail in the PS which I have a spare PS. It has 5 and 12 V OK. I just need the time to take a good look at it. I have spares of everything except the MB itself & can change the capacitors if need be. It is about 8 years old and one of the earlier quad cores, so I'm not sweating it too much..... I can give it new life beyond Vista with Linux and Wine if I get it going again.
EDIT for clarity...
Iray luminance values do not comport with real world luminance values. The behavior of light is realistic, the parameter values aren't. you shouldn't be surprised at 100000 lumen settings.
Thanks! It is good having you confirm that.
They do. The difference is the tone mapping tab. The default exposure settings are for a rather sunny day outdoors. If I use those settings (f/stop 8, shutter 128, iso 100) and take a picture with a real camera in my real room with all the lights on, I get a picture of a black abyss.
Its not difficult its just slow, and 3dl isn't that fast either if you are using long hair lots of trees and transparcies with decent lighting, honestly some of my 3dl renders took overnight the same as the Iray ones do.