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I always get a little nervous and wonder if it's going to be an MP3 thing.
Listening to a song, I can't tell what it is (wave or MP3), but comparing two files, I can hear the mp3 when side by side.
I wonder if- compared to other images or even stuff added in post, it'll look slightly, slighty grainy.
Could be nothing though.
So if everyone is stopping early, isn't there a setting for telling iray when to stop....and how important is convergence then?
I think its a relative thing
if you are doing a huge render for a poster print you probably want it to finish but a 1080HD video subjected to youtube compression is prob rather unimportant other than removing fireflies.
A smaller image say 1K x 1K pixels is probably a middle ground of if it looks ok as it can only be so detailed anyway.
Also emitters need a lot of time daylight not much at all.
Greetings,
I use WiFi for all my machines except the NAS (which is a DS413j connected directly to the wireless router's ethernet port), so I only use the network shares as storage, not as the backing for day-to-day actions. If I did a network mount of a folder on my NAS to a My Library directory, I'm not certain DAZ would be very speedy with that. You certainly could try it; it should work. If your home is all wired, 1Gbps Ethernet, you'll probably not notice any slowdown.
The only thing I'll say might be a drawback, because I've found it to be for myself, is encrypted content. I don't have any objections to it, but it does make sharing files complicated. The nice thing is that if I have a scene file that uses an encrypted content piece, DAZ Studio will prompt me to download it if I try to load the scene on a system that doesn't have that content. So I don't worry about it too much. :)
My use involves having a local (desktop) mirror of the data otherwise stored on the NAS (for my 413j) or Cloud (for Dropbox), so I don't have to worry about the network when I'm actively using DAZ. If your network is fast enough (1) I'm a touch jelly
, and (2) go for it! Set DAZ Install Manager up to install to the mouned network directory, and add that same directory as DAZ Studio content in DS, and you can start doing it at any time.
Best of luck!
-- Morgan
Awesome, think I'm going to give that a shot tonight, I've been needing to do a deep clean and reorganize on my libraries anyway, especially since I just got the DIM package creator so I can install all the non-daz stuff and make sure it's in right.
I'm hardwired for gigabit to every system in my apartment, so it should be more than fast enough. It's really not that hard or expensive to do, if you're patient enough to wait for stuff to go on sale. Of course, working just down the street from a Frye's helps with that. It's not that hard to find an 8port gigabit switch for $20 or so, and if you shop around the ethernet cables themselve are cheap too.
I seldom stop the image early. IMHO many of the fine details aren't quite done earlier, especially if I have any SSS, caustics, etc. in the image. It's probably more common for me to extend the rendering time on an image (increasing the quality and/or convergence) than it is to stop it early. But that's just me, and I'm a bit of a perfectionist, YMMV.
Yep,
I was used to render over 50 hours for 3Delight in photorealistic (bounce) mode.
So there isn't any problem if an iRay render needs over 12 hours (CPU-only) to clear the terrible grains on my character's skin (at > 99%).
I was used to render over 50 hours for 3Delight in photorealistic (bounce) mode.
Animation? You have a UPS battery system and a generator of some kind?
I've had renders that took over 72 hours (Reality/LuxRender) - single render, not an animation. Iray with GPU is a lot faster, but I've still had some Iray/GPU that took over 24 hours. Sometimes, quality just takes time.
"early" is relative. Like others that have posted here, I crank up the settings from the default for my renders, including going over the 15k limit for iterations, as I often find my renders needing more than that. For converged % I usually set 98%. The render going from 97% to 98% can sometimes take a whole day, but as it usually looks good enough then it's rare I let it go all the way to 98% and I stop it somewhere between 97 and 98.
Technically, the time, number of max iterations and convergence % that we set, is us telling iray when to stop. But it's more like setting the max values for how far it will go and really expecting the render to be "finished" before that, to let us stop it ourselves when it looks good enough.
Single picture 2000 x 1800 px., non-progressive mode. If I added UberVolume to the scene, it easily would have needed 10 times longer.
If I did this commercially, I had to have one. But no - my power comes out of the wall socket. 
Ah!! And shut off the Windows updates.
That's usual as long you use "normal" PCs. Now Iray is "way" faster even only CPU renders.
UPS?
Thus with normal equipment you need a lot of patience - or a lot of rework to get rid off the grainy noise.
And have a look at the promos. A lot of the iRay ones have a bad quality due to the lack of time (patience?).
Most promos seem to be quite good, but there was a new product recently that the promos were extremely grainy. If a vendor doesn't cook the render long enough, then I wonder what other short cuts (i.e. reduced quality) have been used to quickly get the product to market. I fully understand the whole time is money concept, but it just seems that you would want to make sure your promos are the best quality possible to show off the product you s[ent many hours working on.
As a side note, I'm always a bit amused at the obsessive interest in speed some people have when it comes to setting up and rendering their "art". I find comments like "I don't have the patience or time to wait for a render that takes longer than 5-10 min." interesting. It's kind of like saying "I'll improve my art if I can do it in 5 min, otherwise I just don't find it useful". I wonder what the ceiling of Sistine Chapel would look like if Michelangelo had taken this approach to paining it (it took 4 years IIRC). Even though I don't consider myself an artist, I still feel that when I'm working on an image, it will take however long it takes to finish it properly. If I happen to get an image I really like in 5 to 10 minutes, that's great. If an image takes 2-4 weeks to set up, and 2 days to render, I'm fine with that too (as long as I'm happy with the final product). For me, it's all about the final image, not about the time invested .... except for when I decide to enter a contest, then I have to get the work done within the proper time frame, which sometimes means the entry it not quite "finished".
DustRider: For me, part of it is that art is an evolution.
When renders are slow, that slows down my entire development. Or, if it's a paid assignment, it slows down my pipeline -- because I need to get a render to the customer, get any correction feedback, and then integrate that. If my render takes days, that... seriously messes everything up.
That SAID, for a really good photorealistic image, I will take an hour or overnight render.
Mind you, one of the cool things about working with non photorealistic stuff is that a lot of the fine detail won't show up, so render times of 5-10 mins are actually fairly normal.
I'm used to slow renders, so leaving something overnight or while I'm at work to fully finish off is what I usually do. I don't have to worry about deadlines, so if it takes all night and some of the next day to finish, I don't sweat it.
I pretty much always stop early. How early depends on how much postwork I'm planning on doing, my painterly styled renders are great, I can stop those so early :) Even My non painterly renders I've started doing a lot of do a lot of secret cleaning.
I'm also a big fan of spot rendering small parts of an image that might take longer to clear. Lets say 90% of the image is cleared enough, however, there's a small section or two of the image that is still grainy (like the eyes or the shadow under the chin) Now I could let the entire thing bake more, however then my compuer will waste a bunch of energy on the 90% of the image that is already clear or I can rerender just that 10% of the image that needs more iterations.
...and as an example of render cleaning in 3 steps from initial render to final-ish image
left is the initial untouched render, which is still very noisy. Normally I let things go a bit further, but this is a great test case. You might notice that the noise it is not uniform. The face is pretty noise free whereas the shadow on the neck, the hair, and shadow cast by the dress on the torso are very noisy indeed.
middle render is my cleaned version. Its pretty simple to do actually I create a duplicate layer of my image use photoshops camera raw filter noise reduction tool to... reduce the noise. and then erase the parts of the new layer where the original image was already clean enough, like the face, which remains identical (I also used it to make the bump in the dress less evident, I thought it was a bit overdone in the original render).
Final render is just tonemapping and such using the NIK colection tools. Adding a little bit of bokeh blur with everything not the face a little out of focus helps confirm the face as the focal point and kills the final bits of noise still remaining in the hair
(you'll probably want to full view this so you can actually see the noise as it goes away)
And on the speed thing to me 20 minutes is quick but I try to keep my renders under the 4 hr mark in general. I'm working on one fairly underpowered and not particularly well ventilated laptop. I'd rather not have it explode
Wow I only stopped mine to save a rough draft of an image to show someone something, never even thought to cancel and keep an image that didn't finish if it looked good i just tried to wait patiently lol
I try not to but sometimes yes.