3Ddelight hair is so slow now since 4.7

Angel

Why is 3Delight so slow with hair anymore? I know what your thinking and no I dont have uber lighting. My hair is on dzDefault values. No special lights. No high quialty settings. It's on base. Everything is on base value and it still takes upwards to an hour to render a 800x800 image with any hair I try... Anthing with opacity really. It takes eons to render no matter how basic of settings I have things on. It didnt used to be like this. I rember back with Daz3D v4.5 It would zip past hair most the time. I'm using the EXACT SAME prop with worse settings and still its slower then snot. No it's not my coomputer. I've tested this on multiple computers all verying levels of power and proccocor speeds. It is most certainly something they did from Daz 4.8+. I know I'm not trippin and I know what I'm doing with 3Delight. It's something going on with Daz from 4.8 on. No its not shadow maps. I can turn maps off complettly and its still uber crawl speed to the point of making 3delight utterly useless in compairsion to iray... a full iray render takes less time then trying to get 3delight to render a chunk of hair. I even went so far as to put the hair on dzDefault on matte... so that there is no way specular and gloss can interfer and still it renders a chunk about the size of a dime on my screen roughly once per minute. This has got to get fixed cause this is unacceptable...

Daywalker Designs

It always was for me, from as far back as 3.x, so I'm not sure what could have happened in your case.

Male-M3dia

There's a workaround that gives a slight speed boost, most times i would use uberhair on a product and turn off a setting. I haven't used it in a long time since iray came along, but hopefully someone remembers the trick). But yeah, transmaps are 3delight's arch enemy in all versions.

Angel

I'm just really bummed out. I know iray is the new thing but there is something about 3DL that I still enjoy not to mention the boat loads of shaders and light presets I have for it that I've spend 100's on over the years. But the speeds have gotten rediculous to the point where its not even worth it to try.

kyoto kid

...I've rendered 3DL scenes in 4.8 and didn't seem to have much issue with hair taking longer to render unless I uwas using Uber lighting.  I usually use the AOA advanced lights.

3anson

if you have the 'Uber Hair' shader set, apply one of the presets and then turn off occlusion and raytracing on the hair surfaces in the surface tab. can sometimes make a huge difference in the rendertime

Havos

I do not use 3DL much these days, but I did after upgrading to 4.8, and I do not recall a slow down when rendering hair. I did a quick test, and the scene below is 1024x1024 and rendered in 19 seconds in the very latest DS 4.9. Lit by just one distant light, and using dzdefault shaders throughout. What else was in your scene that made it render so slowly?

scorpio

3anson said:

if you have the 'Uber Hair' shader set, apply one of the presets and then turn off occlusion and raytracing on the hair surfaces in the surface tab. can sometimes make a huge difference in the rendertime

You don't actually need Uber Hair you can do it with the 3dl Uber shader that comes built into Daz.

 

Angel

I think I may of keyed in on the issue. I use LinearPointLight with raytrace. Thats the issue. (I think) They need to fix the Liner light and point light to be able to cast shadows. Raytrace is the only way to get LinearPointLight's to cast a shadow. Always thought that was odd. Now maybe they can work on fixing that.

 

Try my settings. LinearPointLight - Raytrace - 8% shadow softness. Falloff End - 1000

Spit

If you prefer using an overall light (don't know what the general term is) as I do in my 3Delight renders, I recommend UberEnvironment2. Leave the default shading rate at 32. Up the shadow samples to like 128 and go for faster rendering. You can't do that with AOA because the shading rate there is tied to the renderer's shading rate and blurs the image. Shadows through transparency are still slower than with no transparencies, but much faster with the higher rate in UberEnv2.)

(For those who dislike sharpness as a giveaway in rendered images, it's the 3DL shading rate that controls that. The lowest rate gives the sharpest image but slows the render process. But the shading rate in UberEnv2 only affects the ao shadows which is fine as long as you have a good number of samples.)

Anyway...two renders. A simple semi portrait of star with a layered hair. Only uberenv2 was used, not even a specular light. Total time for 800x1000 image was 3 minutes and 7 seconds. The other image, also 800x1000, but with no obvious transparencies finished in a gobsmacking (to me) 39 seconds. (I posted an earlier image from the same scene where I had upped the shading rate to 64 but that was a bit too much.)

btw, I only have an i5 and it's over 5yo.

Just click on the thumbs for the full images...

selias19

I often simply turn "Cast Shadows" off for the hair. It all depends on how realistic you want your picture to be though.