Advice on Hideous Render Times and Results

Amy_Bone

On paper my PC meets, actually exceeds, the recommended settings for Daz Studio:

AMD Phenom II 3.2 gHz 
16 gb RAM
Geforce GTX 980 Ti - 6 gb VRAM

And yet I seem unable to produce the most basic IRAY renders without 6-8 hours of render time and even then the results are very noisy.  The attached file took approx 6 hours.  I'd be grateful for any advice as to what I might be doing wrong.

Richard Haseltine

That's at least a partially enclosed scene, so if you are mainly lighting from external sources (distant lights, HDR, or Sun and Sky) you will have to wait for the light to bounce in. Using local lights (spots, points, or emissive surfaces) may be faster to converge - you can use "ghost lights" (emissive surfaces with a low but non-zero Cutout Opacity value) to help light the scene. It doesn't look like an issue here, but very rreflective surfaces can also slow things down as each light path needs to be checked until it runs out of oomph, lowering opacity or using the Max Path Length property in Render Settings can help there.

andya_b341b7c5f5

In addition to what Richard says above, you may find some useful info in this thread: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/53771/iray-starter-scene-post-your-benchmarks/p1. ; At least you could try rendering the starter scene and make a comparison with the render speed and results that you get on your system.

Amy_Bone

Richard Haseltine said:

That's at least a partially enclosed scene, so if you are mainly lighting from external sources (distant lights, HDR, or Sun and Sky) you will have to wait for the light to bounce in. Using local lights (spots, points, or emissive surfaces) may be faster to converge - you can use "ghost lights" (emissive surfaces with a low but non-zero Cutout Opacity value) to help light the scene. It doesn't look like an issue here, but very rreflective surfaces can also slow things down as each light path needs to be checked until it runs out of oomph, lowering opacity or using the Max Path Length property in Render Settings can help there.

Thanks, that did help speed things up a bit and reduced some of the noise.  Still a WIP though.

 

andya_b341b7c5f5 said:

In addition to what Richard says above, you may find some useful info in this thread: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/53771/iray-starter-scene-post-your-benchmarks/p1. ; At least you could try rendering the starter scene and make a comparison with the render speed and results that you get on your system.

Thanks, I also stumbled across this: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/58034/grainy-iray-renders/p1 which was super helpful, with advice on progressive settings and filters.  I had no idea they even existed.