The difference between rendering now and 15 years ago
ColemanRugh
Posts: 511
Today you spend a damn week tweaking every single morph and texture and shader and light until you just give up.
The you come back to it after a week or two... spend time revisiting what annoyed you and the frustrations you had to overcome... and then spend more damn time on it.
But there's all these fantastic 3rd party fixes and utilities that make you able to use any Vicki before on any Vicki now. The promise lures you in. It promises dreams being fulfilled.
Every DAZ advance is two steps forward and one step back. You have to read a book in work arounds and then look further for other brainiacs who figured even better work arounds.
The difference is 15 years ago you rendered for fun. Every single render today is a pain in the derriere even though it looks better. It's making rethink if the old approach isn't just the better approach overall for sanity.
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I've had to take the perspective of gardening: There's always something else to do, but the silence/joy of the process serves as an intermediate reward while I'm on my way to the goal of capturing a snapshot of a moment. If I only want the result, then I lose the beneficial byproduct.
I don't miss the render times to be honest.
Well 15 years ago professional cg apps was already very complex with full ik solutions, physics, and very good raytrace engines featuring radiosity and caustics. For many aspects daz studio today is well behind Lightwave 8 that was available 15 years ago.
Then the main features developed in these 15 years by the industry are of course sculpting then bpr engines then real-time pbr engines and the relative hardware that make all the difference when you look for fast realism.
So no, I don't think things are getting complex. They always was. It is just daz studio moving toward better support for standard cgi features. And there's a lot to do yet ..
Agreed!
13 years ago (when I started with Studio), it was more like this..
Me: "Here's my latest DS render..."
My friends (who all used Poser): "How did you get something like that out of Daz Studio?"
Me: "Well, I spent the first night loading the basic models and getting Aiko and the dragon roughly where I wanted them. Then 2 nights adjusting all of the surfaces by hand (and spot rendering to see the changes) because Poser mats didn't translate to Studio directly. Then I spent a night posing the dragon by hand, adjusting every bone of that curvy spine and tail manually. Then I started on lighting, creating my own distant light rig to try to mimic the sky I was using for a background. And I had to create other lights for "bounce" lights since light doesn't really bounce in 3Delight and the shadows were too strong ... basically 2 more evenings of setting up lights and tweaking them and re-rendering. My "final" render took about 18 hours. And I noticed some poke through on Aiko I had missed. So I had to render it again. Took about a week and a half, 37 test renders and 9 "production" renders to get it all worked out."
As a rule, the "good old days" weren't nearly as 'good' as we remember them.
I started in Studio in 2006 so 13 years ago. My system was a laptop and not a high end one so my renders were basic, either minimal background props to suggest a setting (like a desk and some file cabinets for an office) or a photo as the background. Often I used defaul lighting because that's was easy. I liked doing many of the same sorts of renders I like now, spies and cops and soldiers but typically just one in a scene because if I put more than one I'd rund out of memory and either lock up Studio or crash it outright. Also I spent almost all my iniital content budget on V3 stuff so M3 was woefully underrepresented but I did buy an M2 character called Mike Bond that I got a lot of good use out of.
With all those limitations I was able to crank out "stunners" like the ones below. The girl walking with the breifcase (full of cash!) and the pistol was the oldest render I could find. The others were a couple of months later as I was experimenting with lighint things a tiny bit better and were among my "better" renders from that period, belive it or not. Bottom line: the first renders by the newest of the noobs today look better than these. We jused to joke about Daz adding a "make art" button and while they haven't done that between advances in basic compute hardware, model quality, and Daz itself it sure has become easier to make art.
....on the left is my first ever rendered image done some 11+ years ago [removed].
...and on the right is my latest (just done last night). of the same character.
ETA: See my post further below.
....on the left is my first ever rendered image done some 11+ years ago.
There's only one image, KK. I think it's cool that you held onto a character that long, evolving it with the base models and the tools. Quite a connection! I have a much shorter attention span, I make a story with a set of characters and rarely revisit them once I'm done. She must be pretty meaningful to you!
...yeah I edited the post to mention that for some stupid reason the site software just stalls out with the "Uploading..." message. Trying to figure out what the bugger is going on as it is a .jpg and is well under the maximum size limit (and smaller in file size than others I have posted in the past).
__________
ETA: experimented on another thread with a different image from my system and it posted fine. Looking at the properties of both files, there are absolutely no differences at all between the two save for file size yet the one that won't upload is the smaller of the two) and both are the same resolution size, so I have no clue why the one stalls on upload except some sort of glitch in the forum software that is being triggered by that particular file. Even copied it to the desktop to see if it would upload from there but just got the same result.
...annoying.
I actually like tweaking things to my liking so long as it doesn't take days, but then I'm not the norm. LOL
Laurie
..ah finally discovered the reason why the image didn't post. While Windows doesn't mind an ampersand (&) in a file title, the Magento apparently balks at it.
This was the image, originally titled Leela & Piano which is now just Leela Piano (also re-attached the first Leela pic for the side by side comparison).
Yeah, she's changed quite a bit from the Vicky4 days.
@ColemanRugh
It's not the software and products.
Hmm...don't know...sounds just like me doing an aweSurface render
Same here! My first Iray renders were done on a 3.5 Ghz I5. This took hours and hours and hours. I then went to a Nvidia 970 which was at least ten times faster. I'm currently rendering on a 1080 which is substantially faster than the 970.
Cheers,
Alex.
...my first Iray rendering was on a 2.8 GHz 4 core/8 thread i7, and that still took hours, particularly if the scene exceeded system memory and went into swap mode.
Now with a Titan-X and 24 GB of system memory render times have dropped significantly.
To get the garbage renders I showed below would take 15 minutes or more on my ancient laptop 13 years ago. That doesn't sound too bad considering some Iray convergence times but, you know, look at them. sometimes no shadows, no reflections, just bad. The render quality to render time ratio was not good. a 15 minute render today... no comprison.
All this said most or the problems in my renders were in my own skill. I was a newbie and knew nothing about shaders, lighitng, etc. I couldnt make a morhph or even use dformers. There were some artists here who were making incredible pieces in those days. In my case it was the craftsman at fault, not the tools. Although now the tools make it easier to get started with good renders (I mean, the default IRAY HDRI lighting alone is miles better than the default camera headlamp that I started with for my early renders).
I've been doing this for about a year and if I didn't find it fun, I wouldn't have continued with it.
I have ADHD and one of the big draws for me with DAZ is that even if I have to struggle with some things, I get almost instant feedback that reminds my brain I'm making progress toward an end product that will come together in the near future. Getting the broad strokes of what I want to do down and in a decent place is easy, so fiddling with everything until it's Just Right and customized to my liking becomes an interesting challenge instead of a frustrating roadblock.
But before the visuals were at the level they are now--and more importantly, before computers reached a point where I can easily create them on my 4-year-old gaming PC--I probably wouldn't have gotten into it.
...well that depends on if you have a powerful enough Nvidia GPU to handle the scene. If you don't, it will dump to the CPU and still take hours.
Really?
My first IRay render on a 4-core AMD with no Nvidia took 1 hr 40 minutes.
Then I upgraded to a graphics intensive machine.
Still took 1hr 40 minutes....
....He! He!
.and that is why it took 1 Hr & 40 min.
The only render engines AMD supports are their own Pro Render and LuxCore (which used to be LuxRender).
More than 25 years ago, I have looked at 3D Studio and its demo animation Achoo on the MS DOS computer with 2 MB of RAM and monochrome display,
and thought, that is something, I would like to do in the future. Well now, I can do much more sophisticated renders and animations...
Hardware and software changed a lot during these years.
Yesterday I found a folder on an external HD, it said InfiniD and was created in 1999:) Had a good time going through a large number of short animations I had made. Totally had forgotten that some of them actually ended up in a TV series that a friend of mine produced for Finnish broadcasting company YLE. Also found a number of .obj:s that I created in InfiniD, everything from lizzards to UFOs