Decrease render time by deleting body parts?
NotAnArtist
Posts: 367
Hi folks! I'm at a point in this learning process where I'm ready to create a few videos. I got the shock that you all must have experienced at some point, as well. My 10 second test video was going to take 2 1/2 hours to render! That's 15 hours per minute!
Since this video will be from the character's perspective, only his arms will be seen, so I'm wondering if anyone knows of a way to delete all but his arms, to speed up render time. Hiding, of course, has no effect. I'm using a basic Genesis figure, but if earlier models are easier with regards to removing parts, I'll be happy to go with one of them.
I worked so hard on lighting and shadows, and other elements, I'd really prefer to get rid of what's NOT necessary. Any help would be deeply appreciated.
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Comments
Deleting body parts is probably not going to help. The things that are making your render take so long are the things you mentioned. One thing that you may be willing to give up more readily that the other things is layered transparencies. Take a look at your hair and check if it has transparencies on top of other transparencies. You can try rendering without hair and see if that gives a significant improvement.
You may have to save all the high quality stuff for stills and go with lower quality video.
BTW, if you're not posting in a forum that specifically lists DS/poser & their version numbers, you usually want to let people know what you're using so you don't get a lot of non-pertinent info.
LATER
Sorry, I missed the reference to Genesis.
you can't delete the body parts or you will delete the rest as well. but you can under the surface setting change the opacity of the body parts by making them transparent, or on the parimters tabs you can turn off and on the visiblity of the body parts but thats not going to speed up your render times.
3Dlight is slow as heck. especially if you have one or more of your lights set to Raytrace. instead of deep shadow mapping,
A couple of tricks I learned. that can speed up render times using daz studio.
!) when you can use spot lights set to deep shadow maps instead of distant-lights set at ray trace.
that will usually cut your renders in half. but will give you the same shadow effect in the render , one thing to beware of though is spot lights are not very useful if you are rendering big environment scenes, so that will be a down fall.
the second thing is, anything in the scene not directly seen by the camera or used to create a shadow. I would delete. or or hide the visibility under the perimeters tab,
because those items give light bounce which adds to render calculation in the render.,
also darker lighting takes less time to render than brighter lighting.,I dunno why, its just takes longer for me to render bright lights in animation By about 20%
One last thing. Sometimes using less lights can give better renders
Meaning 3 spots lights may give you the light you need rather than 4 distant lights.
or than having a bunch of lights just for ambient light source.
I am rendering a Haunted castle animation, I got about 5 minutes of it renders., some of the scenes are 55 seconds -1650 keyframes long. and i can render then in about 3 hours using these same kind of lighting tricks with other programs like poser..
here is a great link for rendering.and settings though the artical is a for older versions of daz the render principle still apply. I hope that helps good luck :
http://rubicondigital.host22.com/index.php/articles/poserdazstudio/4-optimising-render-settings-in-daz-studio
For turning things invisible you want to set visibility off -- using the opacity slider means more transparency calculations.
I don't get it...
3Delight is used by studios all the time. In major motion pictures. For all sorts of things from complete scenes to just doing effects.
A 10 second clip in 2 21/2 hours...they'd be over the moon. Granted there's probably more in a typical Hollywood scene, but the way that the renderer works, the lights used, the basic geometry of the models and all of that are the same. And we are talking many hours on 'network' enabled render machines...in other words more cores than any one of us can slap together.
So, what I'm saying, is that the time frame you quoted is well within the 'norm' for render engine, given the hardware limits of the typical DS user. You don't specify your hardware, but I'd say you have at least a 4 core/8 GB...maybe 6 core. The 3Delight included in DS is not core locked, but it is not able to be used over a network....
If you really want to speed up the process, without undoing all your lights/shadows the only answer is the throw more cores/RAM at it. The included 3Delight will use it. In other words, if you went to a 24 core dual Opteron with about 64 GB of RAM, you'd probably drop it down to minutes.
Basically...cut back on things (especially shadows) or increase the 'power' (raise the hardware bar...).
3Delight actually have better render engines now with real time rending for the Marionette animation program . it just can not be used in Daz studio. which be awesome if it could.
Though if you are using Poser you can render with renderman http://renderman.pixar.com/view/renderman using poser-fusion http://poser.smithmicro.com/poserfusion.html which is free with poser and combined with Autodesk suite.http://usa.autodesk.com/
which is a little faster and smoother. but those aren't for Daz either.
I reckon not yet anyway. : )
Um...not any of the 10.x version that I'm aware of can 'real time'/GPU or other than CPU core render...and DS 4.5 has at least the 10.62 build of 3Delight in it (I think 3Delight 'standard' is at, or it was a couple of weeks ago, 10.7x for the 'paid' version...still an early 10.x build for the free stand alone version).
I haven't looked too deeply at Marionette, but it is a rather specialized animation tool and not a general production environment, so I'm not sure it really counts.
Everyone here offered some really important info. I've been naive, being mostly a PhotoShop addict.
As to saving as stills, that's a good idea for some scenes where I might try using a quick little morphing program to create the transition frames between each. That'd speed things up hugely where I don't need clear, bright beautiful rendering. Scary/weird night scenes, for example.
I am using DSM vs Raytrace. I'll definitely replace one of the distant lights with a spotlight. And I'll hide the visibility of objects not within the scene's path.
And wow, the rubicondigital link is fantastic! Thanks!!!
I have another idea. I could render, say, from frame 0 to frame 300, at one time, and render other chunks in later sessions, and combine them later in Premiere. I need this computer for "real" work for long periods each day, and the power in this building isn't reliable enough to run it all night.
You got me thinking, folks, and I really appreciate it!