Iray is very slow
Barric
Posts: 24
Everything has gone to Iray. I have over 800 products thaat are not Iray. I went and invested a $1,000 dollars in a new Pc including up grades so my PC would run Daz faster, this was going to be my hobbie. Then they go Iray and it takes forever for 1 picture to render. I can run 3Dlight pretty fast 30 seconds to 2 minutes, Iray, same pic 20 minutes is the fastest and I gave up on the pic that went 3hours plus. I mean really. I got nothing better to do that sit aropund and wait for forever for a pic to render. Am I the only one having a problem with this. I have invested THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS into Daz, over a grand an a new PC only to get Iray. Try making a story board when you have to wait 45 minutes for a render. Should I go spend $2,000 dollars on a PC and up grades. They have a new Nvida card out for $3,000, $5,000 on a PC for a hobbie.
I really don't like Iray. As a result I have not purchesd a lot of products because of the fact render times are way to long. You can adjust your settinjgs. Really, you think. I'm beging to think it would probably best to cut my loses and go with another 3D art program any suggestions?
Edited for language
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I just upgraded from a CPU only laptop to one with a 2060 graphics card and turned one of my 19 hour renders into a 3 hour one so I would check your computer and make sure everything is working as it should.
Funny, I was going to leave a forum post remarking just how amazing the rendering has become compared to even a few years ago (which was when I last used Daz)!
Then again, I do VR development so I have a VR-capable computer, and that means a decent graphics card (Nvidia 1070). My renders are taking about 6 minutes total, a little longer depending on clothing accents and if I do fibermesh stuff like peach fuzz (granted, these are characters, hair, clothing, and props only -- not entire environments).
BTW, my moderately high-end computer doing all this was only about $1000 total cost. (my MSI VR-ready laptop could also probably do well, and was also about $1000)
You do not need to spend more than about $300-350 to have an excellent graphics card.
I empathize; I do storyboard & set design work too. I flunked retirement.
But the way of the world is going to be GPU from here on out, so a different app isn't going to help in that regard. The Gold standard is pretty much nVidia; don't even know if there as anything else presently. But you can't just slap a new card into system. The base system is vital in order for the card(s) to have full potential.
I'm posting a link that is definitely NOT for everyone (least of all those faint of heart when it comes to cost), but more to look at their vids to better understand the reality of serious graphics these days. Being a "hobby" doesn't make it any less serious frankly plus, time is a non-renewable resource.
www.boxx.com
I could barely even preview let alone actually work with or render in Iray with my aged Win7 system for more than a minute or two; It would overheat the GPU and shut the system down. All a thing of the past now (I went with an Apexx system). Renders are generally in the minutes range for 1920x1080 rez with pretty much everything set to max. I don't render when I do this, but I can even run my primary 3D app (Lightwave) on the second monitor at the same time, running it's equivelent to Iray, in order to compare lighting & texturing.
You may have noticed that there are available separate scene files for tweaking to Iray {some were in the PC+ bundles}, some were provided freely by vendors for their products. Many are now providing mat files for both 3Delight and Iray. The precise "same scene" is not going to render as well in both rendering engines. High octane gas is not mixed with diesel fuel. Somewhere in the Shaders folder is a base Iray shader which can be applied to any model. And then there are numerous other Iray shaders available as well to retexture models.
In asking 3Delight to render this image, it took hmm... many minutes, about 20, the holdup being mostly on the hair and figure which has also some geograft geometry. The grass plane was completely black. Took awhile to render that part too. After 3D was done, I removed the centaur and rerendered using Iray. Flash, done. And as you can see, the grass is green. It makes a big difference which type of mat files have been applied to the objects.
I spent £450 on an RTX 2070, not $3,000. My render times are about 10 minutes for decent convergence in a reasonably complex scene. 10 minutes is long enough to go and make a cuppa. Anyway technology moves on and yes, that means you have to invest in new hardware from time to time.
FWIW, in the pre-iray days people were commonly rendering overnight. A 2 - 4 hour render was considered shockingly fast (or very simple). Ever try doing storyboards by hand?
3D rendering is not for the faint of hardware.
@guru20 $350 isn't going to get you an excellent GPU. It will get a marginal one for any Iray work.
Like I said, moderate. I don't know what resolutions people are going for and how detailed their scenes are, of course, but I have a GTX 1070 and it is doing nice Iray renders in about 7 minutes (some of the renders -- when viewing character from behind and with simpler clothing with fewer materials/textures -- have taken like 3 minutes.) GTX 1070 can currently be had for $350 (new) or $300 (refurb). RTX 2060 is newer (but similar performance, probably slightly better) and runs $325.
The thing with graphics cards is, like fine wine, the prices start growing exponentially for performance increases that are marginal and not commensurate with the cost differential. A $700 card does not give you twice the performance of the $350 ones (and then, of course, you can consider running two cards in SLI)
The RTX 2080 Ti is over $1000 - more than 3x the price of the 2060 - yet only gets about 50% better performance. That, in my opinion, is not worth the price difference. Like someone else said, just get up and go to the bathroom or grab a cup of coffee (or I like to play a quick 10 minute game of chess on chess.com.) [When I was deciding on a card, my comparison was between the 1070 or 1080 Ti... and it was the same thing, 50% better performance for 300% of the cost.] As it is, a 1080 Ti is about 25%-30% better than 2060, but still costs more than twice as much. Simply not worth it.
And I disagree -- the 1070 or 2060 are more than sufficient to render in Iray.
I was just yesterday remembering my first render using Poser and Bryce back in like 1998 -- it took literally all night, and was garbage quality compared to what I can get now in 7 minutes.
Out of curiosity, what's your system config exactly (hardware)?
I begun my adventure with Daz on a laptop completely incapable of handling Iray (Gtx960m), so I only used 3Delight. I could do a full-hd render with my laptop's i7 6300HQ within ~15 minutes. Now I have a new PC with GTX 1080ti and I'm able to do pretty much the same, but with Iray, which is an ray-traced engine. I struggle to understand how longer render times "suck" - have you ever used other raytraced engines? This process (raytracing) requires massive computational power. Also, have you not noticed any quality improvements when switching to iray? Now, when I compare my old 3Delight renders with Iray they look like total crap to me (like an 1990's video game).
And, as others said - if you want fast renders with Iray, go for an RTX card, preferably 2080ti. These dedicated RT cores do their job well with the new iray/daz update.
EDIT: Also, doing some tweaks in render setting can save you buttloads of time. Proper usage of rendering quality parameter and nominal luminance can often cut render times by hundreds of %.
Isn't this kind of like complaining that a second-hand Yaris isn't competitive in a Formula 1 race? A $1k computer is fine for a lot of things, but rendering Iray isn't going to be amazing. Why not continue using your old assets and getting an Iray to 3DL converter for anything new?
Here's one vendor's instructions for converting one of his products to Iray. http://flipmode3d.com/converting-3delight-skies-to-iray/
And here's a free script to change Iray to 3Delight ... in the lst post ... irayto3delight-conversion-script/p1
Just to show how not-too-slow iRay is... here's a test render I did (ignore the geometry overlap problems for now, gotta tweak it)...
This render took 54 SECONDS on my GTX 1070. RTX 2060 will be as good or a little better (maybe like 45-50 seconds for this one?) at a pricetag of $325.
If you really wanted to go the extra mile, you spend 3x as much for a 2080Ti (over $1000), and render time goes down to maybe 35-40 seconds instead for this one. Worth $700 to save 15 seconds of my time? Not in my opinion.
If I were you, I'd look into upgrading your computer (I don't know how you have an insufficient one at $1000, unless it is several years old or you simply didn't custom-design the specs to be 3D-friendly. I got mine at $1000 about three years ago and as you can see it's still a workhorse), but you don't have to go nuts and get top-end everything. You just don't want to get minimal anything either (your rig is only going to be as good as its weakest link), my advice would be to get the 2nd or 3rd best in each category (ie. not the fastest CPU, but a step or two below; not maximized RAM, but decent amount and speed; and sufficient PSU and a decent SSD for storage), and when you do that, you can get a plenty-capable setup for $1000.
As for graphics card... the 2060 is what I would go with for best bang-for-the-buck if I were to buy one today.