3Delight - faster rendering
N-RArts
Posts: 1,432
Hi,
I've had 3Delight rendering for the past 7+hours (nearly eight). But it looks like I'm going to have to cancel the render again when I log out/shutdown for the night (in a few hours). This is now the second time that I won't be able to complete the render.
I have a Big Cat 2 in the scene with a fur material. Everything else is rendering pretty quickly, but Daz/computer seems to have a hard time rendering the fur
Would adding another stick of RAM to the computer make an real difference to the rendering time. Changing the graphics card and processor is out of the question (for the moment). What would make 3Delight faster?
And advice would be greatly received.
EDIT: Since posting, the render has finished. But, advice would still be appreciated for the future.
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What fur shader are you using? Because that's where I'd start (and/or cut down on the number of lights/use a different lighting setup. But lighting set ups aren't as easy to replace as shaders.) LAMH can run slow because of shadow calculations. I usually find Furify works fairly well for fur trims, but not so much for animals (it can, but it can look weird, depending on the material zones, and I haven't looked at Big Cat 2's zones in a while)
I'm also assuming that there's a reason you can't let the render run overnight, which is what I usually do when a render runs long, but I'm the only one using my computer.
The primary question is, what environment lighting do you use? UE2 with IDL or even Bounce?
That'll need long render times, especially for such complex geometry like LAMH.
Perhaps you can reduce the shading rate for the furr. Or better: exclude it from shading - but that may look unnatural.
Unless the application is actively swapping to disc more RAM probably won't help. You might try reducing the texture sizes, but I suspect a better option would be to reduce the strand count for the fur. One thing that may help a bit is, in the Optimisations group in Render Settings, set the Max Path Length to a moderate number (try 8 or 9) rather than the default -1 - if the speed is down to light paths bouncing around in the hair that may help.
Since posting, the render has finished. But, advice would still be appreciated for the future.
The fur material that comes with Big Cat 2. So not really a shader(?)
I was using Light Dome LE - Mid Day setting.
I didn't check how much disc Daz was using as I didn't want to slow the rendering down even more.
I did download script that makes textures smaller. But I haven't used it yet. I don't touch any settings because I don't want to lower the quality of the final render and, I have not idea what I'm doing anyway.
Offering advice without knowing what CPU/RAM/GPU you have is a shot in the dark. For all we know you are running an old mobile Core2Duo with 2GB ram and the integrated Intel video, or you could be running a top of the line Gaming PC with a 10 core i7 32GB Ram and a GTX 1080ti. Also need to know if you are running 64 or 32bit OS because that can limit your maximum RAM.
I'm not going to give advice on what hardware changes you need to make. I am going to give advice on shortcuts I use.
Okay, that lion's mane is a monster time eater. Turn off Oculsion... and seriously consider turning off cast shadows if it won't look too weird. That's a major part of the slow proccessing. (I also don't use omUberSurface, but the DS Default shader and then change the lighting model to "skin" and a few other tweaks, but that may not give you the look you want. And the shadows will still take for-freakin'-ever.)
I don't have the LightDome LE, but I use the Age of Armor ambient lights instead. Fewer lights means faster calculations, and the Age of Armor lights are quite fast compared to the DS Default lights., but you'll have to set them up yourself and see what works best for your scene, which takes more time than Dreamlight's drop and render presets. (Also a lot of the Dreamlight sets are optimized for an older vesion of DS, and there have been some improvements/changes to DS lighting options since then.)
Edit to add:
Here's a quick Proof of Concept render. Took about half an hour, but the lighting is not realisitic at all, and the mane has cast shadows turned off (and I could have tweaked the pose a bit more to not poke through the floor and a bunch of other things that I didn't bother with to just see about a quick render.) I've just started a second render with "Cast Shadows" on the mane turned on.
Edit 2 - With the mane casting shadows, time was closer to 1 hour
Use an invisible to camera object to cast shadow and / or create occlusion on objects that have transparency maps or complicated/dense geometry and prevent the objects that are recieving these shadows (like hair) from casting shadows or from causing occlusion.
I called it Fantom shielding...... Then GPU unbiased rendering happend and I didnt really push the idea.
I wonder if my old posts about it are still around.
I would also recommend the AoA lights for speed and quality, and in addition you can flag the lion's hair to use a different level of sampling which should significantly speed up the rendering of the fur whilst maintaining the quality of the rest of the image.
Lightdome LE appears to be another dreamlight light product similar to LDP-R sold here. I would replace the lightdome lights with AOA ones.
I loaded up Big Cat 2 in his Lion Configuration, and the mane and fur are both using UberSurface, with Override enabled and flagged to 128, so not much more you can do to optimize there.
However, I did find @WiseAvatar's thread about fantom shielding. I haven't tried it yet, but this should help with transmapped hair / fur in 3delight.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/4949/
...Light Dome LE is old but works in Daz 4 and above? LDP was for 1.x - 2.x. and LDP2 only worked in Daz 3.0 - 3.1. Neither work well (or in the case of LDP2, not at all) in 4.5 or above.
If you want fast renders Opengl if you want faster 3dl renders more cpu cores.
Make sure you are also using Progressive Rendering (found in the render settings)
...just don't use any effects cameras as they are not recognised in the progressive mode.
that is not generally true, from the atmospheric effect cameras I used the fog camera and the volume camera with progressive without problem. I had trouble with the Easy Volume camera but I never explored if it would work with the progressive mode off.
on the other hand I still marvel over the fact that stonemasons dirt shaders don't work in progressive mode but I didn't have time to look into that further.
@devilsatdusk15 : My guess is that your Render Settings could be way out of balance. Pay attention to your Shading Rate, do not go below 0.2. Start with a Shading Rate value of 1 to speed up your Render times. The second important parameter could be Shadow Samples, high values do mean high render times. So start with lower values ( I would recommend 16 as a start value ) and raise step by step to get a better feeling of this parameters influence.
Please take a look at the tutorial Rendering LAMH Presets in 3Delight in Knittingmommys Laboratory. The tutorial includes a short introduction to the Advanced Render Settings and the scene described there took less than 15 minutes to render on my Not-High-End-PC.
...when I tried progressive rendering thoiugh the fog camera I never got the effect to work.
Have you tried producing lots of very quick noisy renders and combining them with averaging to produce a noiseless result?
I think 3Delight uses stochastic sampling so each render will have different noise, that's a requirement for this method.
Have a look at this youtube video (it's not just about Cinema!):
(this will work for Iray too)
Yeah, I seem to remember a note about the time 4.5 came out that Light Dome LE was 4.1 and below.
I like AOA's lights and DimensionTheory's Advanced Light Presets for AoA's Lights.
there is also DAZ Dimension Lights 1 & 2. Light Dome LE Uses a Lot of lights and that could be adding to your render time.
In 3 delight how do I make the render size in the viewer smaller. The resultant render is too big for the viewer so have to slide sidebars to see entire result . Adjusting pixel size doesn't work. oops just got an answer, using active viewport setting works, thanks.
I dont know how much ram you have, but normally when you buy your computer you only have half the ram capable. The quickest way to speed up the computer is to max the ram. I know it is expensive.