Rendering limitations

antinetcentral

I'm failry happy with Daz setup overall since I wanted ease of use, and spent nearly $300 on various odd models, environments etc.

What I'm not liking is the tendency for any scene with low light and high dynamics to generate so much grain and 'fireflies' all over the place and not in a consistent way.

Removing speckles, gaussian blur is not an acceptable answer. This shouldn't happen. I've never seen it happen this much in any other renderer.

Now, granted, I've got ancient intel graphics on a mac that is a quad core otherwise, so that probably has something to do with it, but I've never seen this in other renderers,

the generation of thousands of white dots all over the place. And brightening the light is not an answer either. If I want something dark, I should be able to render that.

Also, as far as resolution goes, I'm limited to 10000 pixels on any one side. Not a low limit, but is that it for iRay?

I'm trying to do complex still renders with these models, which Im universally happy with, but not the renders. So, yes, of course, I need a newer machine, but is there another

renderer that will do more than 10k on a side and not generate all these light pixels?

nemesis10

antinetcentral said:

I'm failry happy with Daz setup overall since I wanted ease of use, and spent nearly $300 on various odd models, environments etc.

What I'm not liking is the tendency for any scene with low light and high dynamics to generate so much grain and 'fireflies' all over the place and not in a consistent way.

Removing speckles, gaussian blur is not an acceptable answer. This shouldn't happen. I've never seen it happen this much in any other renderer.

Now, granted, I've got ancient intel graphics on a mac that is a quad core otherwise, so that probably has something to do with it, but I've never seen this in other renderers,

the generation of thousands of white dots all over the place. And brightening the light is not an answer either. If I want something dark, I should be able to render that.

Also, as far as resolution goes, I'm limited to 10000 pixels on any one side. Not a low limit, but is that it for iRay?

I'm trying to do complex still renders with these models, which Im universally happy with, but not the renders. So, yes, of course, I need a newer machine, but is there another

renderer that will do more than 10k on a side and not generate all these light pixels?

I begin by saying it is good to see someone else rendering on a mac.  You may not like my answer at this though it is actually hopeful.  IRay works best when you treat it like you are using a real camera. Imagine thou were using a physical digital camera and you took a phto in a dim room; what you would see is a photo that is very dark, grainy, with "fireflies" fro the camera sensor.  Fortunately,  phototographers and filmmakers figured out over a hundred years ago that if you flood the scene with loads of light (lit well enough that every detail is visible but not washed out) and then process the film so that it is as dark as wanted,  you gain awesome dynamic range and exactly the look you want.  In rendering, you light the room to be a bright room and then adjust the image or movie in an editor (color grading) to hake it look like a dark room...  If you google "color grading", "day for night",  or look at videos of the making of Aquaman, you will understand the technique.  If you abnsolutely have to to render in low light conditions, you can adjust the time of amples and rendering in the IRAY rendering > Editor Tab, and set it to render for days if you want which is the equivalent of doing a very long exposure.

3anson

re the 'grain' and 'fireflies'.  increase maximum iterations and maximum time.also there is a noise filter that you can switch on and tweak settings. these are all found in the Render Tab.

Iray renders to a 'Convergence' value, which is also dependent on the afore mentioned settings.

the 'darker' the desired final render, the more time and samples are required.

you could purchase Octane and its DS plugin, but that could be quite expensive.

sadly, if you do not have one or more fairly highend nVidia Graphics cards, you will be using CPU only for rendering. this grossly inflates the rendertime.

brimstoneomega

As others have said, you're going to want to light a scene fairly well. It will help a lot. This is something I struggled with at first as well, because sometimes you want a darker image. Well, the answer to this is still to light it up, but don't worry, you can still get a darker final image, even with a fair amount of light. Under the render settings tab find "Tone Mapping", From there enable Tone Mapping and raise the exposure value a bit. Default is going to be 13.00. Raise that up a bit to 15 or 16 and change your veiwport to iRay to see what it looks like. Adjust it till you get your desired darkness. 

There might be better ways to do this too, but that's what I tend to do when I want a darker image. Hope this helps!

fred9803

Note that surface shaders also have a significant affect on render times. Vendors seem to have an annoying habit of setting specular, glossy and reflection values way too high. I have more than halved the time for some scenes by simply lowering or removing these values from walls, floors, ceilings and other objects where there is no need for them. No point in having them on mat painted walls but everyone does, and clothes like cotton shirts and jeans invarably have unnessary reflection and glossy values.... turn 'em off. I've got a business suit for G3M that comes with Glossy Weight set to 100% and Reflectivity 50% on everything... what were they thinking? It seems like some vendors feel they need to use every shader value in the book just becase they're there.

Rant over.

3141592654

Regarding the 10,000 limit ... that is the recommended limit ... you can change it. In your render tab you should see the "pixel size (global)" setting - click the gear icon and uncheck the "use limits" or change the max value to something higher.

Regarding the fireflys ... as stated above ... and yes it seems counter-intuitive ... brighten the scene and in postwork darken it down.

Sven Dullah

antinetcentral said:

I'm failry happy with Daz setup overall since I wanted ease of use, and spent nearly $300 on various odd models, environments etc.

What I'm not liking is the tendency for any scene with low light and high dynamics to generate so much grain and 'fireflies' all over the place and not in a consistent way.

Removing speckles, gaussian blur is not an acceptable answer. This shouldn't happen. I've never seen it happen this much in any other renderer.

Now, granted, I've got ancient intel graphics on a mac that is a quad core otherwise, so that probably has something to do with it, but I've never seen this in other renderers,

the generation of thousands of white dots all over the place. And brightening the light is not an answer either. If I want something dark, I should be able to render that.

Also, as far as resolution goes, I'm limited to 10000 pixels on any one side. Not a low limit, but is that it for iRay?

I'm trying to do complex still renders with these models, which Im universally happy with, but not the renders. So, yes, of course, I need a newer machine, but is there another

renderer that will do more than 10k on a side and not generate all these light pixels?

Since nobody bothers to mention it, I suggest you look into the 3Delight renderer. With the right shaders and scripts you can produce photorealistic renders quite on pair with Iray. And it's a CPU renderer only, no need for a fancy GPU. It has no problems with doing dark scenes, you don't have to optimize your scenes to try to fit them into your GPU, to name a few advantages. I'm a Mac user, btw, scripted pathtracing with 3DL on CPU is roughly 4 times faster than Iray on CPU, and almost as fast as Iray on GPU, (depending on your hardware of course, generalizing a little here) thanks to the very active developers in here, who keep improving and optimizing this stuff! Just my 2 cents;)

https://www.daz3d.com/aweshading-kit-10-for-daz-studio

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/280441/awe-shading-kit-for-daz-studio-and-3delight-commercial/p1

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/277581/awe-surface-shader-a-new-physically-plausible-shader-for-daz-studio-and-3delight/p1

fred9803

To illustrate what I mentioned above.

First image with original shaders, second with glossy and reflection removed. Images reduced in size for posting and DS restarted between renders. Both converged to 100%.

[For some reason the image without glossy/reflection actully looks lighter than the one with.]

The finished images are nearly identical but look at the times. Once you start filling up that room with stuff the difference in render times will be much more significant.