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...but what kind of horsepower does it need to drive it? I am unable to even use Iray view mode without a lot of lag and eventually having it crash the Daz programme.
...BTW it would be nice if we could get back to discussing the two render engines that are the subject of this thread.
Actually, KK, what I have seen of your work puts me in mind of Norman Rockwell, especially his later work. What a hard working guy this was. I loved his stuff. People took the time then to sit and look at an illustration and say "Look! There's another cat over there!"
I sometimes ask people, "What's more important? the shovel or the hole?" i.e., the tool, or what it produces. I have gotten some surprising answers. To some, the tool is a means to an end. To others, it is an end in itself.
As for tools, I couldn't resist but to buy IBL Master today. I've only just gotten started with it. The blurb itself couldn't be much simpler. I haven't had a worthy render box either. This will change soon. I watched an Nvidia guy running iRay in his preview window, and his machine repainted the screen so fast you almost couldn't see it happening. I want that.
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The Blender recommended hardware list calls for an 8 core CPU or better and multiple GPUs.
May God save us from amateur lexicographers.
I'm Sorry but blender gets enough crap already without people claiming you need 2 gpu's to be able to use it properly.
Also given how forums can often work like a game of telephone, in a couple of days someone will mention how they read in another thread that blender requires multiple gpus to work
...again, thank you, and a bit flattered by the comparison. I always admired Mr Rockwell's "slice of life" approach to his work. His works really told a story and have been an inspiration to me all the way back to when I was still involved in traditional art media like drawing and oil painting (before sever arthritis in my wrists and hands took that away which is how I came to working in 3D CG). I like treat my works more as painting than digital images and find 3DL so much more accommodating to creating different styles without excessive postwork (at least I find it so).
Iray is pretty much photo based (even it's tone map settings are expressed in camera controls) and that is where it's strength is. Some of the works out of the pro ranks I've seen are almost indistinguishable form a photograph. Unfortunately we are working with a slightly hamstrung version (similar to what occurred with 3DL though as I have mentioned there are a few folks pushing the boundaries, IBL Master is just one of the the results of this experimentation. There is also another one on the way which will open up a more in depth system of shader control that will move even closer to what 3DL is truly capable of.
Yeah, my works may not have the "pop" and "sizzle" of those seen in the galleries here and on DA (particularly as I have put Iray on the "back burner" for now) but that doesn't really bother me. I tend to approach my works the same as I would painting and drawing, but always with a story in mind behind the image (which is why I never could get into abstract expressionism as somehow scribblings and splatters on a canvas said as much to me as that "spin art" you could do at the county fair). As a photographer, I'm the first to admit I'm no pro, I was more of the "hey that would look neat point and shoot school". Oh I goofed around with available light photography and high speed action photography, and aerial photography, but nothing serious enough to create a portfolio with. I got some "surprising" and "amazing" shots on occasion and yeah, it felt good when that happened.
Yeah we all have our preferences our personal tastes. For example my views as to why I didn't do abstract works ruffled feathers of some fellow students at my college's art department, but that's how I honestly felt about it, c'est la vie.
Currently just looking forward to networking my two systems together for rendering in Carrara. Would be nice if it worked for Daz as I'd have 20 CPU cores and 56 GB of memory to throw at an Iray render job which might reduce the time from glacial to just slow.
There's working and there's working. I have a 1070 now, but it's paired with an old I5 no-thread quad. Even with 32G of RAM, trying to work with the preview screen in iRay mode brings the system to its knees. DAZ freezes are the daily norm. The CPU is overwhelmed. I can stop it from locking up by switching back to Texture Shaded mode to make changes, then going back to iRay mode to admire it. This is with a single figure with a lot of hair and not much else. I don't build a new machine every year, and I've never built a machine just for 3D before, but I can easily see what a robust hardware upgrade would do. I don't worship the Word of Blender, but I need a machine I can get a few years out of. That looked like a good rough outline to me.
In spite of the fact that this new box will cost every penny I have and then some, two GPUs isn't much. I've seen custom boxes with up to 20 GPUs in them, and I don't mean bitcoin miners either. FWIW, you could fit 4 on an extended ATA motherboard. And then, there is the cost of using an online render farm. Egad. For me, these things are out of the question.
Either way, iRay or 3DL via IBL Master, I have concluded that the CPU may be a bigger factor than I realized. Who was it said that, so far as computer speed is concerned, any increase less than a factor of three is imperceptible? Another rough estimate that I accept. An 8 core dual thread CPU should speed me up by a factor of four. I'm gonna like it.
...yeah that's why I upgraded my old system with a 2.9 GHz 6 core Xeon (the most cores that LGA 1366 will support). It's no 3.4 GHz 16 core Threadripper 1950X but any improvement is welcome.
Crikey when I can get busy scenes to render in 10 - 15 Min in 3DL on my 5 year old system that would take hours and hours in Iray, and see the "realism gap" narrowing (the bus stop scene I am still experimenting with) I wonder how much farther can it be pushed. When Wowie's 3DL "Mega Shader" system hits the store, we'll see.
That sounds strange. I also have a 1070, my CPU is a 12 year old Q6600 2.4 GHz Core2 Quad (Intel's first Quad - I'd assume yours is faster?), and 8 GB DDR2 RAM. Iray preview is pretty fast for me, and hardly ever crashes. I can even run a screenrecorder at the same time, here's a video clip of a 1442x1036 size scene:
https://www.screencast.com/users/Zazen/folders/Snagit/media/880fb4ad-3b86-4b9f-bd04-ce801faa88fb
(note that the video may pause regularly the first time you view it, it's downlod that's slow)
...for me, Iray view is incredibly sluggish as I only have an old 460 running the displays so it almost immediately dumps to CPU, and then to swap mode, if it's one of my bigger scenes and if I let it go to long, Daz crashes to the desktop.
For GLSL and EEVEE the required hardware is just base to mid-level, depending on the complexity of the scenes you want to handle. That's the beauty of it. No more "giga-power" platforms required to get the job done. The advantage of EEVEE is that it brings PBR or "realism" to what can be done already with GLSL, that's the "old school" for fast rendering. To work with Cycles a mid to high level platform is required, though it's much more resource friendly than Iray.
Personally I find the official requirements not up to date. I would double the ram and vram and stay with 64 bits.
https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/
To express something you need a tool, without a pencil you can't draw. It is also true that if you have nothing to express a tool doesn't make it for you. And these are just the basics anyone can do. Then comes the "way" you can use the tool to express yourself. That's where techniques and training and personal experimentation comes by. And where an artist can distinguish from others. And where the fun is IMHO.
...well given the added recommendation of doubling the VRAM and system memory that pretty much leaves my system out for the "Recommended" hardware (which would be the optimal one) as it it fairly borderline. More memory (24 GB) but borderline on the GPU.
...and that only matters if somehow after all these years I experience that "Eureka" moment and suddenly understand the UI.
Thank you, it's good to see what another machine can do. Your performance is quite good for old hardware like you have. My own current experience may be due to the fact that my files and assets are loading from a network drive rather than a local drive. If so, a 10G LAN connection should take care of that. Otherwise I'll change my setup to load from a local drive. I'll give that some thought.
Until recently I never cared about render capabilities because I didn't know enough to make anything worth rendering. This year I hope to change that.
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KK, yes, the Blender UI is sent from hell by the devil, no question about it. On the other hand it is supported by mass quantities of written documentation as is rarely seen today. That evens things up for me. I have in mind to give it another try later this year. I am considering a set of custom keycaps. They seem to be affordable. No way can I memorize all those keyboard "shortcuts."
BTW, I have read that in his later years, Renoir had arthritis in his hands so bad that he tied the paintbrush to his hand with rope. As for "modern art," much agreed. If I have to ask "What is it?" I already don't like it. I'll take Edward Hopper any day.
I've got the IBL Master basic setup completed, and today I'll try to actually use it. I have to say, the doc that accompanies it is very professionally written. It is especially good at speaking to the new user. I assume Parris wrote this. Parris, if you're reading this, my hat is off to you as a tech writer. The best software in the world has no value if you can't tell people how to use it.
..indeed the documentation is very straightforward. I also like the fact it is in text format (I have difficulty with video retention due to short term memory lapses [old codger here] and the fact many are just poorly produced only compounds the matter).
So far I can't see the effect of the iRay boost lights in the Preview Pane, although I see them in the render. I wonder if I'm doing this wrong.
...not sure, haven't used it with Iray nor have I used the preview pane (limited system resources).
... And neither would Pixar, as what they do couldn't have been done without what came before. :)
I don't think it matters much that the files are on a network in this case. I'd assume that the data that's being processed when doing Iray preview would all be loaded into memory, anything else would be bad practice. I don't see any increase in disk activity either when moving the scene around, it remains below 0.1 MB/s all the time and total CPU usage remains below 45%, which seems to confirm that.
You may be right, but I have no idea what else could be going on. I monitor everything -- file sizes, VRAM usage, everything I can. My drivers are current. The CPU is the weakest link, and the LAN is not very fast. I do tend to flog DAZ at times, which can result in a crash, and sometimes in a corrupted file. Some of my file sizes do look enormous to me, but the RAM usage numbers seem moderate. BTW, if the GPU is processing the scene, and the resources are loaded into VRAM, why would there be any substantial CPU activity at all?
"When you have eliminated all the likely possibilities, whatever is left, no matter how unlikely it may seem, is the answer."
That said, I'm surprised to see that IBL Master boost lights don't show up in the workspace, only in the actual render. ALR lights work fine in the workspace. I'd be happy to find out I'm missing something. If not, I won't be able to use this tool.
You could ask Parris in this thread if you have problems: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/215066/released-ibl-master-image-based-lighting-control-for-both-renderers-a-new-ibl-for-3delight/p1
DS is doing some processing while rendering, not sure exactly what it's doing but the current scene I have loaded uses around 30% in Iray preview when it just renders. When you move the scene around though it will use more CPU as this requires some processing also. If you have enabled CPU under Iray Advanced settings CPU usage may increase a lot as well, but only when rendering, while moving the scene around it will pause so CPU usage may actually go down.
BTW, in DS, try to check Preferences > Interface > Optimization and see if it's set to Best. If it's set to None some scenes can be very slow to move around, which might be the problem here. Otherwise you have ruled that out too.
Might I not be just observing normal operation of the program?
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Later...
I went where you suggested Sven, thank you, and I asked. Yes, I am observing normal program behavior.
To me, the idea of actually seeing the render result in the workspace and working there at the same time is the grail. I think Parris did a masterful job with this product, but I don't think ghost lights are what I'm looking for.
Apart from what @Taoz already pointed out, another thing that may affect viewport performances is to use the same card both for the viewport and iray. This is because Windows checks the card to prevent driver faults. If the card is busy for rendering or iray preview then it doesn't reply and the viewport gets sluggish and/or the driver gets restarted and/or the driver breaks in the worst scenario. This generally should only happen for very heavy scenes though. Using a different card for the interface prevents all of this.
If you only have a single card but you have a modern processor with a "good" integrated card (HD 630) then you may try to plug the monitor to the mobo. This way the processor is used for the viewport and the card is free for rendering and iray preview. You should also uncheck the card used for the viewport in the iray rendering panel.
My settings seem correct. One post in this thread suggests that a high number of morphs is a factor. That wouldn't surprise me, I often use a load of them. Perhaps brute force will fix it. I'm naming the new machine Arnold.
Yes, it could be related to the properties of certain content and that you've had bad luck with what you have tried so far. I just haven't come across anything that's causing problem yet. And that just a figure with hair should cause this does sound strange to me. Whatever it is, I hope you have better luck with the new machine.
This seems to be what I'm experiencing. I try to whip it while it's "preparing" and it locks. If you've not experienced this, you are fortunate.
OK, that's a different story. I experience this too, but just wait until it's finished preparing, which may take several minutes in some cases. Hopefully they'll find ways to speed this up at some point.
I've noticed something strange though, and that is that a large scene I've just been working on takes about 10 minuts to prepare when doing a normal render, but only half the time to prepare in Iray preview. And size is the same (render = viewport size).