Iray help..

Alfawulf

Why is this render so grainy??

AND any other tips appreciated!!

And what's going on with those pants!?!? 

BeeMKay

The image is grainy because it still needs more iterations before it is complete. In your render settings, go to "progressive". You'll find Max Samples, Max Time and Rendering Convergence Ratio. Whichever of these three values is reached first, makes Studio automatically stop the render. So, 5000 iterations, OR 7000 second (2 hours) OR 95%. Check your render log which of these values was reached first, and set that higher. You can also do this without starting the render from scratch, as long as you don't close the render image. Just change the value and hit "resume". You can repeat that until you are happy with the quality.

As for the pants, that is called "poke through". It happens when the two meshes (skin and pants) intersect. It usually is visible in the preview, but when you have a HD figure and sometimes for other easons, you can't see it in the preview but only in the render.

You have three options to get rid of it (unless you want to pretend it's the latest fashion, like "Man, this designer pants cost me one thousand bucks!"  ):

1.  go into your Character's bone structure and click on the little eye in front of the offending bone section (hip and tights in your case).
2. Select the pants, go to the parameter tab, chose Actor and check out if there's a morph that either lets you increase the butt and tight size, or "expand all".
3. You can add a push modifier to the pants, or ifr it already has one, you can use the "smoothing" to cover her butt.

Alfawulf

BeeMKay said:

The image is grainy because it still needs more iterations before it is complete. In your render settings, go to "progressive". You'll find Max Samples, Max Time and Rendering Convergence Ratio. Whichever of these three values is reached first, makes Studio automatically stop the render. So, 5000 iterations, OR 7000 second (2 hours) OR 95%. Check your render log which of these values was reached first, and set that higher. You can also do this without starting the render from scratch, as long as you don't close the render image. Just change the value and hit "resume". You can repeat that until you are happy with the quality.

As for the pants, that is called "poke through". It happens when the two meshes (skin and pants) intersect. It usually is visible in the preview, but when you have a HD figure and sometimes for other easons, you can't see it in the preview but only in the render.

You have three options to get rid of it (unless you want to pretend it's the latest fashion, like "Man, this designer pants cost me one thousand bucks!"  ):

1.  go into your Character's bone structure and click on the little eye in front of the offending bone section (hip and tights in your case).
2. Select the pants, go to the parameter tab, chose Actor and check out if there's a morph that either lets you increase the butt and tight size, or "expand all".
3. You can add a push modifier to the pants, or ifr it already has one, you can use the "smoothing" to cover her butt.

Thanx!!

I'm a little unsure how to check the render log??

Any formulas out there for where these sliders chould be set at as far as time?

BeeMKay

The render log is under "Help" --> Troubleshooting --> View Log File.

The proper times depend on whyt kind of scene you have, but mostly on your hardware. Are you rendering in CPU or GPU (nVidea card)?

I render with an nVidea GTX 980 Ti, and most renders run within the standard two hours or less for indoors; however, some scenes need four or more hours to clean up properly, due to the way the lights are set up. For example, if you use emissive lights, every face counts as its own lightsource in render calculation, so it makes a huge difference if you have a surface with 100 faces, or just one face in terms of render speed.

I'd suggest that you just give your time 14400 secs (that is four hours), and see if the image clears up.

 

Herald of Fire

Because Iray uses realistic lighting, good lighting is crucial to getting a fast and clean render. The area should be reasonably well lit (more so that you'd typically do with 3Delight scenes) which should clear up the grain nicely. Also, be patient. The more complex the lighting or scene, the longer it's going to take to converge. If your machine can handle it, you could try turning on the Iray preview in the viewport to get a rough idea of what it will look like. This will help you get the lighting right before you go for the final big render.

Alfawulf

Now here's another question:

If you get an Iray going and you're satisfied with where it is, Is there no way to stop it and save it?? If it's not finished timing out?

Chezjuan

I generally set my IRAY render sliders at 15000 iterations and 36600 seconds (10 hours). That covers about 90% of the work I do, and renders that take longer than 10 hours generally look good enough after baking that long.

If you're happy with a render and it's not done, you can hit "cancel" as long as you have the render window that shows the progress open (don't render directly to file). Once it stops, you can save the result. I do that a lot for tests when I just want to inspect for issues like poke-through or weird posing.

SpottedKitty

Alfawulf said:

If you get an Iray going and you're satisfied with where it is, Is there no way to stop it and save it?? If it's not finished timing out?

Either click the "Close" button <X> on the render window, or press <Esc>. Once it's stopped, use File>Save Last Render to save it, or use the Render Library.

Note that this isn't unusual — a render hitting one of its stop limits is not the same as looking "good enough". There really isn't any way to predict it in advance, but depending on the materials and lighting, you'll sometimes find your render quickly resolving into an acceptable state.

(The opposite is also true, of course — sometimes you'll find a render that never seems to look finished, even if you change the default time to something ridiculously high. Again, this is usually due to materials and lighting needing a few more tweaks.)