Rendering Advice Needed
CueFanfare
Posts: 0
I purchased Souless Empathy’s Bar Interior from the Daz store. I've added several characters to the scene, modified the wallpaper and surroundings etc.
I've turned off all the reflection settings.
I have a Imac with an i5 2.7GHZ Intel Core processer and 12gb of memory.
After about 10 hours of rendering, I'm not getting much progress (made it to about 15%).
My main concern is that my Imac will overheat and it will cause damage.
If I leave my computer rendering in a cool place for several days, will it eventually render?
Is there a faster way to do it other than 3delight?
Thanks for your help.
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there's Octane...
http://render.otoy.com/
Just an FYI, that is probably the most render intense item in the DAZ store.
I got better speed, but I had to redo the lighting entirely. Not that the lighting it comes with is bad, far from it... it's just very intense renderwise, along with all of the opacity, reflection, etc...
I would ask how many lights do you have in the scene? Are all of them using raytracing? What is your shading rate set to in the Advanced Render settings tab? What is your Ray Trace Max set to in the Advanced Render settings? If you are using the UberE light is it set to GI by any chance? What resolution are you rendering at? How many trans mapped objects are in the scene [hair, plants, etc]? Are you using a lot of shaders [not the default DS ones]?
That prop may be very high poly but there are other factors besides that for long render times. I have had renders last 5 days because of how large the scene was, ss scattering, reflections and trans maps but I have a desktop built just to render, with my cpu never going over about 40c.
If your multi-thousand dollar Apple machine can't handle running for 60 hrs or so without a break...then it's not worth owning. If your fans are running and the machine is dust free, running a render will not damage it, even if it is running at full tilt the entire time. 'Normal' use uses so little of a modern machine, it's not funny.
Thanks for your help.
It wouldn't render and after almost 24 hours, I decided to abort.
I tried rendering whilst removing certain parts of the scene and upon further inspection I found it was the wall that was slowing the render down.
That's interesting... I wonder why the wall of all things. Methinks it requires further investigation.
Wancow, I was under the impression that otoy was still working on the Octane plugin for DS. Is this product available now? Have you tried it? It looks really promising.
Unfortunately, it would seem that those of us with AMD GPUs will need to find a way to upgrade to cards with CUDA in order to use it...
For such issues as this it is normally best to show a screen shot of what you are trying to render along with listing what you're using for lighting and listing your advnced render settings is useful too. These are several factors that do affect the quality and render time of the image so learning how to balance them is very useful.
Wancow, I was under the impression that otoy was still working on the Octane plugin for DS. Is this product available now? Have you tried it? It looks really promising.
Unfortunately, it would seem that those of us with AMD GPUs will need to find a way to upgrade to cards with CUDA in order to use it...
IMHO, you're better served by using 3Delight anyway... I think things are happening now that are going to get absolutely stunning results... people in this community are learning this engine, and how to get the most out of it.
I'd like to see a bump up in the version of 3Delight that's included in DS...as many of the updates since the version in DS are specifically geared towards efficiency and speed increases, many of which are in the ray tracer (17 raytracing fixes/improvements since 10.0.70).
Keep in mind that they're always going to be behind release. It's part of the deal that DAZ is involved in that allows us unlimited cores for Rendering with DS.
A couple of comments.
(a) Souless Empathy’s Bar is render heavy using complex and very detailed materials with a lot of displacement mapping.
(b) What are your render settings? Are you rendering in a huge size of with very high render quality (shading rate < 0.1 and raytrace level over 6?
(c) Neither all-in-one computers nor notebooks are optimal for rendering as they both suffer from one of two things when it comes to heat. Cheap machines burn, more expensive goes down to a crawl when the CPU heats to avoid overheating. I don't thing you iMac will overheat, but it will crawl to avoid burning. I've compared the same scene on an MacBookPro with Core i7 and a MacPro with Quadcore Xeons, the MacPro was not two times faster, not 8 times faster, but 15 times faster, mostly due to CPU crawl induced by the heat.
The scene doesn't seem to be available anywhere anymore, and I don't have it, but reduce the Max Ray Trace Depth value in your Render Settings. Take a look of how glasses and bottles are modeled: if they have zero thickness, you can reduce Max Ray Trace Depth to 3; otherwise if they are modeled as a real glass or bottle with an inside and an oustide (i.e. 4 surfaces to cross the bottle) try a Max ray Trace Depth of 4 or 5.
I've tried to limit my render settings so it will render. I've rendered everything but the wall (6 people, the bar, the floor, the drink tables, bottles etc).
I'm rendering the wall separately as I can't get it to render. I've attached my render settings for it.
In regards to Imac's crawling at pc temperate, the main part of the scene had taken over 13 hours to do and was only at 60%. My computer crashed and I let it cool down. I put a fan behind the computer and it rendered it fully in 2 hours, 50 mins with no changes to render settings or the scene.
I haven't done any 3D modelling since Poser 3 so I am a little rusty.
This may be the problem, especially if using the UberEnviroment. When I render anything with displacements and use the UberE, I also use the Ubersurface2 on the object that has the displacement and make sure to turn on "Trace Displacements" under the Surface tab for that object. That seems to help render times and also gets rid of the ugly black self shadowing on the displaced geometry.
Good news!
it's rendered in just over 2 hours! :)
Thanks for all your help. :)
I have to concur with the OP - on my 8GB, 4 core i7 system this set is bordering on wholly unusable in DAZ4.5. With a bit of messing about I suspect it may be down to a whole raft of custom shaders, liberally spread over all and sundry and, to my horror, a vast number of overlapping shading domains (I think the term is).
To actually get a render to finish (in actual fact it'd be closer to say 'get a render to start' as it consumes all memory and then starts swapping like crazy) I set about re-texturing things to get rid of the shaders. Re-texture the bar and half the woodwork gets changed too. Change the woodwork and something else gets screwed up - frustrating as hell.