Render that epic scene without running out of RAM or lagging your system with what you have now.
StratDragon
Posts: 3,167
Nothing beats a good hardware upgrade for that huge rendering job, the problem is not everyone has a disposable cash flow for that new nitrogen cooled mobo, dual hexcore cpu, a huge psu to push the triple sli cards and the 32GB of low latency DDR RAM that's going to solve all your problems, but there are several simple work methods you can do with what you have now to make bigger and more complex scenes without hitting the limitations of your current rig and they are either free or already part of Daz Studio. Just keep in mind not all of these practices work well with close up/detail and may requires some trail and error but for work on epic scenes, or crowded scenes or just background scenery these are life savers, and they work in DS3 and DS4.
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• Optimize your render settings for the scene your rendering, more is almost always not better when it comes to 3Delights default settings in Studio. For example Turing up raytracing is not necessarily going to make a better render it's going to make the same render slower and more likely to crash and burn, try turning it down. There is an excellent response on this subject by Adamr001 here
http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=144303
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• Use smaller textures, especially on non-closeup work: Do your eyeballs need to be 4000x4000 virtually loss-less jpeg when 768x768 will do and use 1/5 the time to convert to TDL during the pre render setup 3delight or conversion over to Luxrender if you use Reality? Lowering texture resolution requires less RAM to work in the scene, less RAM to render and creates a smaller (collective) file size. More often than not with this method you can not tell the difference between the high and low res textures once they're rendered. While the software to do this might have you looking at Photoshop ($$$) try GIMP, it's free and very powerful.
GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/
just don't delete those original high-res files!
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• Use fewer textures when possible and supplement colors with by changing the surface of color. Green pants, blue skirt, light skin, dark skin? Use a solid white texture (or no texture) and change the surface colors to whatever you want. Use a skin texture on one M4 and adjust the surface color to something other than white, use another M4 use the same skin texture. You've now made two models with color differences and used half the textures you might have had to load/save and convert when rendering.
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• Use Texture atlas (free from Daz3D at the time of this writing) and export models as OBJ's especially for distant models. Using this combo you can make a library of low polly, limited texture using scenes that load and save faster, and use far fewer resources when rendering. Keep in mind these will become static props (you wont be able to pose them, but you can position them and use them over and over in different scenes) This method does not translate well to close up work, but for crowded scenes it is infinitely better than piling up models and textures that will adversely affect load/save/file/ram use/rendering stability/interface stability. Need two people in a helicopter? I did this and got my load time down from 32 seconds to 2, files size down from 17.1MB to 231K, textures down from 80 to 1. At a glance I could not tell you the difference between the raw studio model and the one I did using the method.
Hide anything that doesn't show when you export your obj, it will make a smaller file that uses even less resources. There may be a little trial and error with this one but this is a awesome combo if you have limited RAM or several dozen gigs of it.
Texture Atlas: http://www.daz3d.com/shop/texture-atlas-for-daz-studio/
I might need to elaborate on this technique, but I use it constantly
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• Discard what you don't need: As a rule, if you don't see it, get rid of it. If a model is out of the cameras range delete it from the scene. You can always make multiple scenes and save them and go back later to reposition lights, cameras and scenery. Hide anything in the scene tab that you don't need to show if you don't want to delete it.
[edited for spelling and formatting]
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Comments
Moved at poster's request.
I can ad a few more.
Simplest one for DS : Use "Image File" rather then "New Window" in the "Render to" options in the Render Settings tab.
Textures are not the only thing eating RAM, morphs do too. Once you are happy with a scene make a copy of it, save the texture settings and export the morph heavy figures as .obj delete the original figures and import the .obj and apply the saved materials.
Shader Mixer is your friend, get to know it. Find out what procedural shaders are and what they can do for you.
There is a free version of the 3Delight stand alone render engine, It use RIB-files that can be generated by DS. It has better memory management and is more stable then the built in render engine. You can do quite complexed renders with limited resources. The drawback are that it is limited to two kernels (slow) and you have to use a few DOS-commands to run it.
Cheers! Oom
I forgot this one:
mcjTeleBlender - render Daz Strudio scenes and animations using Blender’s Cycles Render Engine
The Cycles engine is still in development but well worth a try. You can get very nice renders with caustics and image based lighting. It's not really a RAM saver but it is light on another resources as it is free.
This is currently not an option as the compiled shaders ( from rc2) conflict with the new 3dl version available for download. This is listed as fixed in the changelog for the next 4.5 release. I got bit by this one hard.
Kendall
DS doesn't load morphs at non-zero values after the scene has been saved, cleared and reloaded. So you're really not getting killed by morphs like you may be in other applications.
Good tips. Some caveat's:
Raytracing: watch for transmaps, especially hair. Drop below 2 at your peril. General rule for Raytracing settings is transparet or translucent layers+1.
When hiding/removing items... watch for reflections. It is easy to forget that glass may show the contents behind the camera. If this is a problem, render just those items in the glass/mirror and then assign a bitmap as the texture instead of using a reflection. Then remove at your heart's content.
Kendall
.TDL is a mipmapped format, so the further from the camera your texture is the lower it's res is, as DS switches between the different mip levels.
I don't know the distances from the camera that DS uses so this is just an example -
0m - 10m = 4k x 4K full texture
11m - 20m = 2k x 2k first of the reduced res mips
21m - 30m = 1k x 1k second of the mips
and so on until you hit the 1 x 1 final mip.
So if you reduce the size of the original texture by half, then at 25m from the camera you'll be using a crappy 500 X 500 texture, rather than the 2k x 2k you thought you were using.
True, but if your render size is, say, 1200x900, do you really need things in the distance to use a 2k x 2k texture.
This is currently not an option as the compiled shaders ( from rc2) conflict with the new 3dl version available for download. This is listed as fixed in the changelog for the next 4.5 release. I got bit by this one hard.
Kendall
3Delight made an older versions available when they learned about the v10 incompatibility, There is a post about it in the 3Delight forum (link). The post also describes a way to modify RIBs to work with v10. I have not tired the later but used the older engine successfully together with DS4.0 . I mostly use Genesis so I might not have notices .cr2 related problems.
Oom
3Delight made an older versions available when they learned about the v10 incompatibility, There is a post about it in the 3Delight forum (link). The post also describes a way to modify RIBs to work with v10. I have not tired the later but used the older engine successfully together with DS4.0 . I mostly use Genesis so I might not have notices .cr2 related problems.
Oom
I know. If you look I'm one of the users who is being responded to (krsears is me). :-) I tried. It doesn't work with RIB's exported from 4.5rc2.
Kendall
Sorry, I misunderstood you. :red: Just to get this straight : The engine I linked above (v9) will work with DS 4.0 (?). DS4.5 will not work with v10 at the moment but the next release of DS4.5 will.
Oom
Sorry, I misunderstood you. :red: Just to get this straight : The engine I linked above (v9) will work with DS 4.0 (?). DS4.5 will not work with v10 at the moment but the next release of DS4.5 will.
Oom
Yes, the v9 that was posted to the 3dl link will happily work with versions of DS4 up to (and including) 4.5rc1. At rc2 something changed that caused the .sdl (compiled shader files) to become unusuable by either v9 or the current v10. The changelog for DS4.5 lists a fix for this problem.
That being said... unless one is working with making new shaders, one can take the "standard shader" .sdl files from an earlier DS4 RIB output and replace the "bad" 4.5 shaders and then work from there.
Personally, I'm hoping we're getting a new RC soon.
Kendall
Is setting geometry to not visible in render the same as removing it?
It's always worth a mention about the render settings. The shading rate can dramatically affect the time of render. It is misleading because the measure scale is so large and yet the useful numbers are probably 0.8 to 0.2. The lower the number the slower it goes. The lower the number the more details stand out, so there is a trade-off.
BTW: This is a fantastic thread: subscribed.