Do you often cancel your rendering process if you think it looks done?
TabooGood
Posts: 32
in The Commons
Sometimes when I render it looks like the image is already done at around 30-40% but I let it keep going, just in case i guess. Does this happen often to other people, should I just cancel it and save it as it is?
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Comments
Yes
Yup
Yeah, totally do.
Also, try rendering at a larger size than you actually want for the final image, then size it down. It's called "manual resampling" and lets you cut renders short way sooner than you would need to if you were doing it at the final size.
Very often.
Yep. Not all the time, but I do it on a fairly regular basis, especially when I know that the end result is going to be reduced significanly from the actual render size.
I was about to answer with my expert opinion, but then I found this thread from last year...lol
https://direct.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/153156/who-s-been-stopping-their-renders-early
Yes :)
Yes, because my goal is to make pleasing looking renders; I don’t get special points for somewhat arbitrary completion numbers.
If you mean you're rendering in Iray, keep in mind that Iray doesn't have the same concept of "done" as something like 3Delight. 3Delight processes each block of pixels in the final render, until that block is completely rendered, then moves on to the next block until they're all done. Iray processes the complete render many times until it hits one of the three stop conditions — render time (2 hours), the number of render iterations (5000), and the converged ratio (95%). None of these conditions have anything to do with "how good does the render look". It's not unusual for a render to "look good" long before it hits any of the stops; it's also not unusual for a render to still look unfinished when it does hit a stop. Remember that the stop values are only the starting defaults (and they are not set for high quality), you can change them in the Render Settings>Progressive Rendering tab to allow the render to run longer, for a more "looks good" final result.
If you consistently cancel the render before Iray says it's converged you should alter the render metrics in the Progressive panel. Certain pixel filtering doesn't take place until the end of the render, and by cancelling you're missing out on those. You can either change the metrics before the render if you anticipate a quicker convergence, or do it while it's rendering. Click the (almost invisible) button in the middle left edge of the render window, go to the Progressive tab, and change (as an example) the convergence percentage ratio. Make it just a point or two higher than it already is. Use the convergence completion in the iterations summary, not the overall completion bar.
Yup
I CPU render so practically always cancel after about 300 - 600 iterations. I the DAZ 3D animation tutorials where they render animation frames in iRay I notice that they do too but they also render at 150% intended final render frame size to shrink down to the intended size because that causes resampling filters and such to blur the image and hide noise. I found that I was satisfied personally at rendering at 100% intended size & not 150% intended size.
I rarely restart a render since I use the Iray preview most of the time I am setting up the scene, so I usually have a fairly solid start point when I hit render.
MVP ... learned something new! Thank you Tobor
I always have mine set to 100%, some scenes seem to benefit from letting them run to the whole 100%
Some scenes don't look to improve much after 85%
30 minutes to 45 minutes is normally a decent render for me depending on what I've got going on in the scene. It's very difficult to judge with any accuracy just how much time you need to run because each shot can vary such a lot.
Do you mean the Converged Ratio? I don't know if it's still an issue, but we used to be told never to set this to an actual value of 100%, but values just a fraction under 100 were OK. IIRC it's related to the "render never really finishes" situation — as the convergence runs through the final fraction before reaching 100, the whole process slows down until, as it hits 100, the render takes a long time and lots of iterations to do almost nothing. I've seen values of 99% to 99.9% quoted as giving good results for a reasonable effect on render time.
I don't stop because it looks done, but because it looks dumb. Most of the time I start a render as I am going to sleep because I have video games to play and don't like losing my computer for who knows how long.
I generally stop when the skin texture looks acceptable, particularly in the shadows under the chin. I rarely go to 100% convergence.
Cheers,
Alex.
I've seen this suggested before but I'm not sure how it works, how much larger should I make the image and how do I size it down?
You don't have to go tremendously larger. For example, on 1000x1300 sized promos, I often render at 1300x1600 and then rescale down to the lower size. For rescaling it, you just open in Photoshop or Gimp and change the image size (keep proportions constrained if it gives you that option).
Sometimes I will go all the way up to twice the size 2112x2600 (portrait) for 1300x1600 images or 2600x2113 (landscape) for 1600x1300, but I rarely need to be that extreme.
You do have to make some judgement calls on when to stop the render. It'll look fuzzy, or have dots, or speckles, or whatever, but when resized/resample it will look fine. It'll take a couple of tries to figure out just how soon you can stop the render and how much fuzziness/dots/etc are fine before resizing.
Here's a link that explains the whole thing in more detail: http://buerobewegt.com/quicktip-rendering-even-faster-in-iray/
Yes. I'll render out at a large size and if I dont forget and wander off, I'll only let the image go until it looks decent. I'll resize down if I need to later.