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Seems to be the hair that takes so long - without it it renders in 5 minutes. Also, my hardware is 7-12 years old (Q6600 - first quad core CPU Intel made, and DDR2 800 Mhz), so not the fastest animal in the forest. :) Will try to play with the settings you mention, and try with other hairs as well.
..this scene (WIP) took 9m:50s on the last test at 1,400 x 1,050 in the last test.
From what I hear, if you are signed up to be notified when 1080ti's become available from the NVIDIA store, you have to basically be watching your email when the notification comes in to have any possibility of actually getting one. Oh, well, gives me time to save up....
that would be renderee :)
I still render a lot in 3DL because I'm in love with volymetrics and I want distance haze in my wide spanning nature settings, thus I still use some of those 3DL cameras that provide with that.
I see you got to the bottom of that double shadow thing. I do like this composition.
..thank you. Yeah, I used a different HDR sphere for the sky (one of the old Azure Sky ones for LDP2) which doesn't have a "sun" light. Took a bit of hunting around for it as haven't used it for some time and the expansion was created by a different vendor than Dreamlight.
Still not sure why I didn't get the double shadow issue in the bus stop scene which used one of the IBL Skies settings (even used the same one from that scene in this one and it didn't help).
A sad postscript in that the other night while working on another scene I accidentally saved that on to the filename of this one and have to do all the changes over again. I am using the 4.9.133 beta which, even when doing an intermittent save, always opens up the scene folder requiring one to click on the scene title to update the changes (this doesn't occur with the general public releases however as I didn't want to overwrite 4.9 yet, and I have read there have been some bug issues in the 4.10 general release, I stayed with the beta). Being somewhat tired that evening (as well as being dyslexic) I thought I was saving to the correct file when I wasn't.
That's a nice scene, impressive that you got to that level of quality in under 10 minutes!
...thank you. Parris' IBL Master is a huge help, no more long render times with UE. Even was able to use AoA's atmosphere camera with it to get the bit of thin humid haze.
If you are serious about working with 3DL, I recommend it as a necessity as it works with both full IBLs and skydomes with a Distant Light. Granted I have years of experience with 3DL and that helps.
Here is one of my earliest scenes done nearly a decade ago using the original Light Dome Pro. used Bryce to create the sky backdrop. The Kid, that's my first attempt at my character Leela as a child created from tall busty ol' V4 with a tonne of painstaking morphing.
That composition is full of perfectly vertical and horizontal lines that "cage" and somewhat "suffocate" the viewer. Also the character poses are "plastic", that is, they miss some dynamic from the before and after momentum. The shaders and shadows are flat. The sky is flat too.
Just banking the camera a little would help to "break the cage" and add some dynamic to the composition. Adding some fresnel, sss, ambient occlusion, and soft shadows would help the shading. Adding some hidden lights to "get out" the points of interest in the scene would help to draw the viewer attention.
EDIT. Also in this case, being a large open space, using some haze and/or color recession and/or camera focus would help to draw the viewer attention.
...this is an older scene done in 3DL and WIP that I am reworking with IBL Master and still had a way to go with when the file was accidentally overwritten. What I posted was the last test render, in response to criticism that 3DL "takes too long" (true, with UE it does) so it was far from being finished.
The characters are mostly older figures (Genesis "Classic") and for the female ones I had yet to get around to using the original Skin Builder Pro (cant do much for the male characters as there isn't a version for them). As to the poses others see them as being fine, and for the purpose, style and theme of the scene, they work.
As to flat looking shaders that is due to high specularity settings which I still needed to adjust as I have Gamma Correction turned on (as specified for in the IBL Master instructions) and had not yet got around to turning down the specularity on all the surfaces to compensate (and there are a lot to go through). Also, there is a haze effect already in the scene which does tend to "flatten" details as well.
AO? don't have Reflective Radiance (too broke). Don't have any of the Uber shaders (never bought them when they came out as I was still working on a 32 bit system and anything labelled "Uber" was a quick ticket to a render crash). Furthermore, Wowie will be releasing a very comprehensive shader system for 3DL so no point in bothering with wasting money on older tools which will be outmoded (being on an extremely tight budget, I have to make my purchases really count).
If the viewer feels "suffocated" then the scene is working as it is supposed to evoke the feeling of one of those oppressive hot humid summer days in the city when everything around feels like it is closing in (inspired by an old 1960s song and originally created for a themed challenge based on songs - Title of the work: Hot Town - Summer In The City).
Yes, in my tests 3DL is extremely slow too. At least if compared to other rendering engines I use. The only way I found to get it fast is to turn off raytracing all together and use old school lighting techniques. Below I used the UE just as a fill, without raytracing, plus a shadow mapped key light and some point lights just to "unflat" the scene a bit. It renders in a breeze but of course it's only barely acceptable given the simple shading used. Scene included for anyone interested.
EDIT. Added the same scene with Iray that's of course much better in shading. And just for the sake of completeness I find Iray very slow too compared to the other engines I use.
One must remember that individuals perception of an image does not mean everyone feels the same when viewing it. I did not feel suffocated at all when viewing that image personally. I think it’s very nice.
Yes of course that's my point of view and my feelings are personal. Though there are pretty much standard techniques for composition and shading so my comments were meant to be more "technical". But since the picture itself is "far from being finished" I guess we're talking about nothing.
EDIT. And by the way in the words of the author getting the viewer feeling "suffocated" seems to be on purpose.
...which other render engines? Maxwell? Octane? V-Ray? Carrara?
For Iray, indeed unless you have a good GPU card that can hold the scene during rendering, getting the optimal performance out of it on the CPU takes a long time. Not as glacial as LuxRender (if you want decent quality), but still more than I am willing to put up with.
..thank you. Once I get back to it (taking a break after the disaster of losing what I had done and having to go back to the original scene file again) it will be even better.
Cycles, BI (Blender Internal) and Lightwave. The main weakness of Iray over Cycles is the lack of an integrated denoiser. The main weakness of 3DL over BI and Lightwave seems to be a very slow raytrace engine, but also the initial time spent optimizing textures contributes a little.
...well Lightwave is way out of my budget, and Blender's UI/set up never clicked with me, so I have to make the best of 3DL, and when I can finally get my hands on an Nvidia 1070 without selling the farm, Iray.
Also node based shader systems look like a spilled bowl of udon to me (dyslexia). I prefer Carrara's shader builder (I find it much more intuitive) and I wish Daz would have gone with that format for the Shader Mixer/Builder.
In 3DL, I usually only have to deal with one optimisation pass during a work session and that is when I launch the first test render. After that it starts rendering once I click the button.
I like this composition too. :-) "Every picture tells a story," we say. I look for the stories, but sometimes the story isn't easy to find. Some compositions, like yours, make the story both apparrent and multifactoral. I appreciate that.
...thank you again. That is what I strive for.
Now I get what you mean. You're just using the wrong words. Whay you mean is "storytelling", not "composition". Composition is essentially a set of photography techniques used to draw and catch the viewer attention and help storytelling together with shading and lighting. Storytelling is what the picture or movie means. In the case of a single picture it is "barely" composed of elements and the interaction among them used to connect with the audience. In the case of movies there is a much more expressive set of tools you can use for storytelling.
You may want to just google around for "photography composition" and "photography storytelling" or "movie storytelling" I'm sure you'll have a lot of fun with these.
...true, motion makes it simpler to tell a story, however, I don't have the hardware resources of a Pixar to do clean smooth CG based animation. It is a lot more difficult to convey stories in a single frame format (and as I mentioned that was a very early work).
Visual Story telling through animation doe not require
the hardware resources of Pixar.
if that were the case no one would be making 3D animation
outside of Pixar Studios.
@Ivy has done many animated stories with home equipment and Daz studio.
...it was just a joke. However, I am very aware of the fact that my system certainly isn't up to the task of creating clean animations unless I don't have any plans to use it for a few months, so just sticking with creating still images.
One trick for fast animation on basic hardware is to use GLSL for rendering. This way you'll need a modern card but not a powerful one. You'll mostly just have to resize textures to fit the vram. Of course the shading will not be "realistic" at all but for toons it may fit.
Also, DAZ Studio has improved the GLSL shaders from 4.5 and now there is at least a basic set with also a simple sss for skins. You have to use the default shader and activate GLSL in the rendering panel.
Personally I find the Blender GLSL features much more advanced. And when EEVEE will come out of beta there will be a whole new world to play with.
...unfortunately my system is now legacy gear so even the GPU is out of date (Kepler). I'm talking a 5, going on 6 year old system here which I built when Daz 4.0 and Genesis "classic" was "new", with a first generation i7 (LGA 1366) and 12 GB DDR3 memory (that cost me as much back then as 32 GB costs today). When I purchase a new card, it will be a 1070 (whenever the price comes back down to earth or Nvidia finally gets some back in stock in their store) so I can actually do something with Iray instead of feeling I'm watching paint dry.
Again, I gave up on trying to wrap my brain around Blender's UI and setup as every time I try to work with it I feel like I've been hit in the head by a slice of lemon wrapped around a gold brick. Anyways Hexagon is in the process of being updated (including getting 64 bit support) and it has a much more intuitive UI in my view.
I would only add that IRAY /PBR/"photorealistic " rendering
or "toon" style rendering are not the only optionsfor animation.
I Have Vray and Maxwell for C4D.
as well As LightWave 2015 's Final gather & Monte Carlo hybrid GI renderer.
and of course Blender Cycles
You can get very decent and fast animation results however with standard point/spot/area lights.
and knowledge of compositing.
I use C4D's native Advanced Render 3" in NON GI mode.
and easily stay within my arbritrary 7 minutes per frame budget
for animations like this one:
Rendering animations of any length& complexity,using DUMB,non optimized, brute force solutions like Daz IRay
with utterly ridiculous 4K texture maps on every scene item.
is a masochistic excercise in self flaggelation.
And no.. you dont need a $3600 USD program like C4D to render 7minutes per frame animations like the video I posted.
Talented users of programs Like Carrarra are getting similar
animation results with similar render times.
Absolutely stunning work. thanks for sharing that video. I love watching your animations
Thanks Ivy!!
And just for anyone curious this is what can be done with GLSL and EEVEE in Blender .. In both cases the average render time is from real-time to just a few seconds per frame though of course it may vary depending on hardware performaces and scene complexity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErvjTcDSDlM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p4B-_PKyRI