Some more Iray questions

Choppski

1. is it Iray or Lray?

2. I'm trying to ensure that I can do renders given that my nvidia card has only 2GB of ram--obviously I am limited. Are there any tutorial on how to optimize render settings to help with memory?

3. I have tried lowering samples and that helps, but I am sure with reducing time between iterations is better or worse or matters at all.

4. I am learning the hard way that stuff like fibermesh beards, hair, moustache increases the likelihood of a crash. I assume that is because they require more memory than I have?

5. If I used hdri with lights is that more memory intensive than just using the photometric lights? I like the control of just using my own lights, but sometimes using hdri seems to light the scene more easily.

6. Is it normal for the memory usage in taskmaster to go down as the render proceeds? Also, is it normal for the percentage complete to take a long time to get started showing and then move almost exponentially fast after about 50% done?

nemesis10

To start:

1) iRay

2) there is a product in the store and a freebie which reduces the size of texture maps in the forums since texture map size is the biggest hit on the graphics card

3) I must admit I don’t know

4) the hdri is probably a bit easier than point lights... emmisives are probably a tiny bit more memory comsumptive

5) yep, the rendering is non linear so there can be speed ups and slow downs; part of the time is loading into memory and swapping locations, part is calculations, and part is rendering.

Choppski

nemesis10 said:

To start:

1) iRay

2) there is a product in the store and a freebie which reduces the size of texture maps in the forums since texture map size is the biggest hit on the graphics card

anyone know names or links???

3) I must admit I don’t know

4) the hdri is probably a bit easier than point lights... emmisives are probably a tiny bit more memory comsumptive

5) yep, the rendering is non linear so there can be speed ups and slow downs; part of the time is loading into memory and swapping locations, part is calculations, and part is rendering.

Thanks

BeeMKay

I don't know about the frebebie, but the shop item is this: https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer

jestmart

Upper case 'eye' - ray, its from Nvidia (which is the correct spelling despite their logo being lower case n and the rest in upper case) not Apple.

Connatic

There are 2 free scripts that can reduce texture sizes.  Both are quite good.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/137161/reduce-texture-sizes-easily-with-this-script/p1

I also purchased the Scene Optimizer product.  It is very useful, easy to use, and full of features.  Using the free scripts familiarized me with the entire concept, so when I saw the product I realized that it was worth buying.

Choppski

Another question if people know. I looked under advanced render settings and for photoreal devices and interactive it has CPU selected and not my GE Force 920 M. It allows me to select both. Would that increase my memory, diminish it or make no difference?

AllenArt

No difference. It's either going to use the CPU or the GPU but not both at the same time.

If it all fits on your card, it will default to GPU. If it doesn't all fit on your card, the render will default to CPU, which is much slower obviously than the GPU ;).

Laurie

krickerd

One thing I discovered, if you have too many characters in the scene and the render starts taking too long (renders from CPU - I can always tell since I have 3 GTX-1080s) there is a simple solution that works with some scenes.  If you don't need to render everthing at once, such as when you are using a backdrop, you can hide some of the props and characters, rendering only a few at a time as PNG files, then assemble them as layers in Photoshop.  Believe it or not, I ran out of memory even though I have a total of 24GB of video RAM, due to using 2 G3 HD figures and then a G2 HD figure.  When I hid the G2 figure and all clothing then saved and reloaded, the render sped up significantly so I knew it was not using the GPUs when all figures were showing.  In my situation, this will work just fine.

*Update* 

It may have been that simply working in DS and doing several renders and scene changes or working with other programs was eating memory, causing the GPUs not to work.  I closed and reopened DS, and loaded my scene, un-hid all items and they rendered at normal GPU speed - fast - 6 min.  I then installed the reduce texture scripts as linked above and ran the reducer - no speed change.  It's good to have it though, thanks for the link.  I could see NO reduction in image quality for the scene I am working with.

omnifreaker

Choppski said:

 

3. I have tried lowering samples and that helps, but I am sure with reducing time between iterations is better or worse or matters at all.

If you are doing interactive rendering in the viewport and do not want to cook your card, I would recommend setting Progressive Rendering->Max Samples to something very low like16 or 64.  This way the renderer will not continually be trying to converge.  Make sure to set to higher number/the default for final renders.