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That's certainly better than mine! It is also an i5, but with 8 GB and discrete graphics devoted to business type graphics, not anything needing a lot of horsepower. You have the advantage of running W7, too. It is one of the most resource friendly versions MS has ever released (at least in this century).
I like what I read there. I'm not griping about my current render speeds knowing the hardware DS is on, but anything will be a big help!
Here's a plugin for GIMP that does a few things including resizing: http://registry.gimp.org/node/26259 It does seem to be from 2012, but comments are newer. I don't think GIMP committed any changes that this plugin would break. I have a Nikon piece of software I do RAW PP in so that gets my batch jobs. For general messing around, I use GIMP and Paint Shop. GIMP is one of my favorites as it is the same UI whether I'm using a Linux box or Windows. Plus the price is right.
Many batch programs will place an underscore (_) at the beginning or end of the filename, too. The better ones let you decide how you want to identify the batch processed files.
Thanks! There's a lot of information there.
...yeah I'm kind of hamstrung as the converter brick for the notebook died and I'm waiting for the new one I ordered to arrive (should be any day now). Until then I have to use the Workstation for Net activity so it conflicts with working on projects.
If I could only scrape up about an extra 300$ I could get the memory upgrade I need, W7 Pro, and a 4 GB GTX 740 so I can have the older 1 GB GPU just run the monitors.
I am building the power brick for my laptop into the cooling stand I made so they both are cooled by forced air. It got almost too hot to handle so I used a spare laptop cooling stand to keep it cool. Actually I'm building a forced air holder for the brick so it is still portable, but they both will be together on the homemade stand.
I played with 3DL and wasn't at all impressed for people....or the 35 Sedans in the scene. The cars came out white and the people looked like a single peach color pencil was used. Now that Richard told me about the Aux Viewport's intended use, I may give it another try. OpenGL didn't cut the mustard in the least.
My ultimate goal is to get a decent gaming oriented machine. It may be a laptop, I'm not sure, yet. Each have their advantages, whether laptop or desktop.
I use GIMP 2.9, it couldn't find my install. I'm not sure if I want to confuse things with both 2.8 and 2.9 installed at once.
I can now confirm that the Power Tool Resizer I linked works in Windows 10. Its strange that I had forgotten about it until this thread came up, lol. I used to use it all the time. When it resizes a pic, it adds "(size)" to the file name for a new file. So if you resize a pic, lets call it "Halloween1", it will make a new pic named after the size you pic. "Halloween1 (Medium)". If you make a custom size, it will be "Halloween1 (Custom)". The tool says it will add the ability to choose custom names "in the future."
I can also confirm the tool WILL resize in batches. Simply highlight all the files you want either by CTRL+Mouse or making a box. I resized every texture on the new Sorrow Hair. What's better, it only took a second! This is actually way faster than using a script in GIMP could ever be. After all, you don't even need to open GIMP or any editor to it. It takes longer for GIMP to boot than to do it with the Tool Resizer! Just right click your texture files! The original files are 2500x2500, and are 1.75 MB. I went ahead and went all the way to 500x500, and now they are 56 KB. That is no typo, lol. So now I have all the original files and all the new (Custom) files in the same location in my runtime.
Now let's examine the Sorrow Hair. This hair has 15 different surface materials. So if you load this by default, you would have 15 TIMES those 2500x2500 1.75 MB files. That's 26.25 MB total. Not huge, but you can begin to see how textures will add up very quick. Keep in mind some hairs are using 4000x4000 pixel textures. My new resized textures total 840 KB. For those maybe not familiar with bits and bytes, that is is less than 1 MB. The file savings is a factor of over 30 times!
Now to apply these bad boys. Or girls, whatever. The good news here is that 14 of the surfaces use the same texture, while there is one scalp texture. Since the textures are in the same location, browsing will be easy, and all you need to do is find the matching file with (Custom) at the end. Easy, but a bit tedious for 15 surfaces.
When I get time, I will post the results of this test. This is pretty extreme, 500 pixels is pretty darn low. But lets just see what happens.
Not quite...the size on the hard drive is immaterial. The size used is approximately 3 Bytes per pixel. So, what 'counts' for memory is 2500 x 2500 x 3. Or around 18 MB...for a 4k image it's closer to 50 MB/image.
Just for general info: if your laptop's "brick" ever approaches the point where it is uncomfortable to hold then the brick is overloaded and on the way to failure. Excess heat is a indicator that either the amps being drawn are higher than the hardware can handle or the watts being drawn have exceeded the capability of the components. Either of these conditions can become true due to aging of the "brick". Once the part generates more heat than is comfortable to handle it is prudent to replace it with a new unit -- preferably one with more amps/wattage so that degradation doesn't cause the same conditions as quickly.
In any case, a laptop's PSU should never need active cooling if it is spec'd correctly. If you have a new unit and pushing the laptop "hard" causes the PSU to heat to uncomfortable levels, then the PSU is too small and should be replaced.
Kendall
I rendered a 1660x930(?) at 10:6 nighttime scene with two G3F figures, 2 old sedans (the '36 Chevy Sedans) and the Forgotten Tunnel set and at default settings it wanted to render in half an hour, I cranked things up to a Quality of 3.6, turned on the Noise Filter and it took just shy of 3 hours. Light was from Point source lights I put in the headlights and a spot to imitate the moon to give a blue cast over everything. I also used four Point Source lights for taillights and two Point Source lights for interior lighting. the figures were outside at the gate illuminated by the headlights. Experimentation showed less noise with the Noise filter off...... As somebody already said to leave Noise Filtering off, I just wanted to see the hit, and it was large on this machine, plus seeming to do the opposite.
Tomorrow will be playtime with water again to see if I can get rendering times down there. One of the Pond scenes available did very well in experimentation yesterday, but I want to see what can be done at the Grottoes. With enough vegetation, I think I can now put individual trees, shrubs, etc...where they do good so DS doesn't have to worry about the ones not in the rendered scene.
My "too hot" is purely subjective, actually. I design, build, and repair electronics for fun and as a previous career...... My background leads to some serious derating practices. I just don't like things getting any more than barely warm (My ham radio and backup power supplies are all forced air cooled). I am about to contact HP to see about this power supply, I think it is a recalled unit as well from an email I just received. that may be a contributing factor. I've been going since 2:30 this morning, and it is almost midnight, so that will be a project for tomorrow as my schedule should be halfway normal for a few days.
I forgot the math on that.
Also, I didn't count the different textures maps in play. Normal, bump, opacity, gloss, and so on. The normal and bump maps on this hair are 3000x3000. That comes to about 27 MB each. At 500x500, that would be 750 KB. So the saving would be factor of 36 times per texture. Now you factor all these textures across 15 surfaces, and that adds up very quick. A single hair prop can take hundreds of MB of ram.
Back to the testing. What I did is replace every texture except the opacity map on the first surface. Then I carefully copied these surface settings and pasted them on the 14 surfaces that shared the same textures. I went and fixed the opacity maps for each, since each one has its own opacity map. Now one thing I noticed, is that a few of the surfaces actually have slightly different settings between them. But since I copied and pasted the first one, now they all have the same settings. I was too lazy to swap every single texture manually. So this means the resulting renders may have slight differences for that reason. Sorry. I noticed afterward the there are hair strands that have more gloss than others to make them stand out. In my resize renders, those hairs do not stand out so much. I thought I had render quality set higher, but I must have reset it. All render settings were at default values, this was in the Daz 4.9 beta, but not the NEWEST beta that just released. (Not touching that until the bugs get worked out.) I have a GTX 670 2gb, my machine has a semi-recent i5-4690k with 16 gb ram. So I don't even have a fancy i7 that all the cool kids have. The 670 is very old now, but it was a beast of a card in its day, and still a decent card for gaming. That's what I built this machine for a few years ago.
The renders were done at 1500x1500, because I didn't want to do this all night, lol. Goldtassel makes great hair, but they are hairs that will devour your GPUs and render times because they often have lots of textures and surfaces. For that reason, I often avoid them, to be honest. Anyway, at 1500x1500, default textures and one sort of dim spotlight, it took just over 28 minutes to render.
Then I did my render with the 500x500 hair textures. Keep in mind, the skin is still full size. This render took right about 15 minutes. It cut it nearly in half.
I resized the skin textures. Face textures to 2500x2500, other skins to 2000x2000, and eyes to 1000x1000. I may have missed a few bump maps here and there. This time, the time difference was not much, 14 minutes. This surprised me. Perhaps the dress is holding us back?
With the dress textures resized it dropped another minute, to 12~13 minutes.
Then I tried the downsampling method. This was interesting. I doubled the scene size to 3000x3000 and rendered. It stayed at 0% for 2 minutes, then suddenly shot to 77% just after 2 minutes. So at 2.5 minutes I stopped the render. I used GIMP to resize it to 1500x1500, and also tried the power tool. This didn't work so well. On one hand, the power tool resize worked almost exactly as well as GIMP did, which is pretty fantastic when you consider how fast and easy it is to use. However, both were still grainier than the original 1500 pixel render. I should have let the image render longer. So I did it again but waited to stop the render at roughly half of its full render time, which was 13 minutes. So I let it render for 7 minutes, and resized this pic...
BINGO! This hit the mark very well. The resulting image from this is strikingly close to the original image that took 28 minutes to render. The original image also had some grain in it, like I said, the render settings were all default, so 1.0 quality, 95% convergence. The scene was somewhat dim, and as we all know, Iray does not handle dim light so great. (That's another thing to think about when you set up a scene to render.) But overall I dropped my render time from 28 minutes to 7 minutes, and it only took 1 second to use the power pool resizer to resize that render. That is a MASSIVE reduction in render time, without making any hardware changes. We are talking a factor of FOUR here. The biggest issue was indeed the hair. That one item choked up the render times. So simply resizing hair textures and downsampling should produce decent results. But my picture was also a portrait shot, it did not focus on her body or clothes so much, and there was no background.
So if you can get a factor of 4 out of your machine, a 4 hour render will take an hour. That is huge. Someone said they don't feel handicapped not having a nvidia gpu using Iray...I'm sorry, but I must disagree. You can only learn by repetition. The saying goes "Practice makes perfect", but if you cannot practice because it takes all day just to render an image, how do you learn Iray? Having low render times is absolutely essential in learning how Iray works. So I hope some of these methods here can help make this possible for people. That's why I'm doing this.
The biggest challenge in this process is assigning the new resized textures in Daz. There isn't really an easy way to do it, and it can easily test your patience. But once you have it done, and have that item saved, it will be ready for you later. So you can save your texture resized hairs for use on other characters and scenes.
When I get time, I'll upload the some images.
Actually, the easiest way is to do a search and replace for the file names in the uncompressed duf for the materials presets....in a text editor.
That doesn't sound much easier, imo.
I find it easier...but then again, a good text editor with robust search/replace does help (Notepad++ would be where I would start in Windows).
vi...vi...vi...vi (for the humor impaired
)
Kendall
I did some testing a while back and found that above quality 3.0 I could see no further difference or advantage. With your current hardware I would drop it back to 2 and take the little speed increase you can get.
Do you want to send them into shock?
Can you resize textures in DS, or do you have to use something like the GIMP? I've looked and haven't been able to see how to do this in DS & not sure what files to look for to use something like Paint Shop, GIMP (Paint Shop is priced where I can afford it, and of course, GIMP is FOSS).
I'd also like to alter some textures and colors. I got the womens Sport Sneakers (forget the exact name) and Surfaces don't allow me to change colors as I like. All I can do is make it seem like a translucent stain has been applied. I have a feeling that answering one issue might put me in the neighborhood for solving the other question. The laptop is now rendering a G3F where I got the Shiny Leather Pants and they recolored perfectly first try, but the sneakers won't. Looking at the popup map, I see the sneakers seem to have each surface individually made up for size, color, and texture.
I tried the downsampling a couple weks ago after seeing that video in Help and Tips, but like your results, I found it worse off than rendering full size. Besides, for me doubling the size doubled the render time. Despeckling in PP only served to soften the features that should stay sharp and tweaking radius and size didn't really improve anything either.
I'm glad you had the same experience I have with the percentage reporting. It will sit at 0% for a while and all of a sudden jump to a high % number, I've had it jump to 70% from 0% after sitting five minutes simply counting iterations, then take a couple hours to finish. then I know there's stuff that might bear removing and doing without when it takes half an hour to reach 1%.
...the more I read about what's all involved in working with resizing textures to cram everything in GPU memory, the more I am becoming convinced I would run into diminishing returns time wise for the types of scenes I create. I might just be better off getting a pair of 8 core Xeons, and a boatload (128 GB) of fast DDR4 quad channel memory, a middle of the road GPU (say 4 GB) just to run the viewport and displays, and call it a day.
If that forthcoming 16 core AMD CPU lives up to what I have been hearing and is cost effective, that might be good solution. 2 of those and I have 64 cores plus octo channelling for the memory.
I agree! Since it was rendering so fast, I wanted to crank it up and see the hit on time. It certainly didn't make any difference I could see between doing it at 3.6 or at 2. It had rock textures, hair, skin, and clothing as well as light sources as a good test. Lighting was fairly dim, provided by Point Source lights used for headlights turned waaaay up. I had a spot overhead giving a faint low blue light similating the moon for everything else not intentionally lighted, but adding nothing to the scene. Point Source lights as taillights provided a red glow to the ground and nearby objects, but weren't used for anything except to define the two old sedan orientations. Point Source lights also illuminated the interiors and gave a faint glow to the ground on one car. Any alterations to that scene will render at a Quality of 2.
....Especially if you don't have to mortgage the house to get two 64GB sticks to make up that 128GB RAM....... In the past, I've found by benchmarking that it can be quite a bit faster in many situations taking this route instead of populating all the slots with smaller sticks. Your assessment matches mine as well. I was thinking 8GB video RAM though, depending on cores. Reality likely will dictate 4 GB at best....staying with what I have most likely, though.
For rendering, I'd love to take the AMD route.
A DAZ Studio Texture Atlas tute - simple version: http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/artzone/pub/faq/software_gamesdk/texture_atlas/textureatlas.pdf
Thanks! I tried to see what Texture Atlas would do, and this explains it quite nicely. I can't wait now to be finished at work and home around 10 tonight to give it a try.
I also found something to play with later as well. I found a way to prioritize what gets the most rendering horsepower. Marble structures don't usually need the details skin needs.
I too am hoping that AMD's offering is viable alternative to Nvidia and Intel; they've had it their own way for too long.
...the design I am working on uses 8 sticks of 16 GB on an X99 2011-V3 board that supports 16 sticks (Corsair Dominator 2666 Quad channel). 4 x 32 GB would theoretically speed things up a bit more and kits can be found at around the same price though it's unbuffered server memory with no heat spreaders. Filling a 16 slot board would be expensive (about 3,500$) but I'd end up with 512 GB, though I'd then need to move up to Windows Server 2008 to support it which is another 600$ or so. Swap mode...? I don't need no stinkin' swap mode.
Ummm. Windows server 2008 essentials/standard (your $600) only supports 32GB. You need the BIGGER licenses to go above it. See microsoft's link below.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx
Kendall
...OK so I see different versions of 2008 Enterprise (which goes to 1 TB). For a single user system which one is needed?
Just cannot stomach W8's UI and having every programme open in full screen mode.
New WIndows Server 2008 licenses are no longer available for other than "standard", WIndows server versions above standard/basic/foundation are licensed on a per CPU and per CAL (Client Access License) basis directly from Microsoft on yearly or multiyear contracts. They are not sold like Workstation installs. MS used to sell Small Business Server versions, but those have been stopped.
google "windows server 2008 costs" to see what it cost to run a Windows server.
Kendall
Hint: Spare body parts comes to mind...arms, legs, left....