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It's samples = iterations. In the "Rendering Image" popup that shows your render progress however they will turn around and call samples iterations instead. They are the same.
Setting Time at 0 will make render time forever and depend on another parameter to stop. In this case Min Samples leave at 5 and Max Samples set at 2000, 5000, 10,000, more or less according to your tastes. I set mine at a very low 2000 only because I render on an old CPU and not an nVidia video card so it is very slow.
I see. Well, English is not my mother tongue so the Iterations = Samples part eluded me.
I do have a new, reasonably powerful gaming PC, and I hope to be able to do at least one more scene before the deadline, allowing me to enter the contest.
Or set it to zero, which turns it off.
You don't need two renders of the same scene. You just need to have two or more different entries into the contest. We like to try an encourage new users so we want to try and get you to render more. What the others said about your settings. If you need anymore help, just reach out.
Samples & iterations aren't exactly the same concept in English either but the way iRay works makes the equivalent so it's only in this specialist case.
Chohole turned me onto this contest and, ever since I've been going through and voting at the end of it all. I get so little time to be on my computer and when I do I almost always just dive into Carrara and keep plugging away on material for a CG movie. It's my favorite thing to do on a computer.
Well, being a Carrara user, Genesis 3 and 8 are kind of out for me. I see that there are ways around this, but I went the route of using purchased content to reduce my workload, not to forever think up solutions to compatibility issues. Anyway...
So I enjoyed continuing to work with my Generation 4 figures. I was (it felt like the only, for a while there) a big supporter for Genesis compatibility for Carrara, so when they announced the beta for Carrara 8.5 Pro, I jumped on board and bought as much Genesis stuff as I could afford - it was mostly all manner of shaping morphs, especially monsters and creatures, but the whole unisex thing was really cool - especially with Auto-fit for previous generations, so I bought all of the clone shapes and started getting a bunch of clothing, hair and people shapes and textures. I really had a lot of fun with it.
Genesis 2 came out fairly quickly and I love the improved human form shapes. It didn't last lost before Genesis 3 came out and I was all on-board to open my wallet some more and make the switch, but Daz got completely silent about support for the new Genesis figure for Carrara. The latest semi-official post wasn't even in the Carrara forum - but it sounded hopeful - but that was years ago.
I promise this isn't a rant! Now I come to the point of why I'm saying all of this! LOL
So I had this nice collection of people and clothes growing for Genesis 2 and, when I looked back at it I saw a really amazing collection of all kinds of things for Genesis 1. When it came time to work on my movie, however, I had invested a LOT of time and money into Generation 4. The biggest clincher was emotion morphs (not face poses) and animated pose files, like PZ2s from PoserMocap and aniBlocks from GoFigure ad both from Nerd3d. Being the big supporter of Genesis in Carrara, I was pretty good at getting these aniBlocks and PZ2 animations to work on Genesis 1 and 2, so I would foray into using them quite a bit - this whole issue really through me off track for a while until I finally decided to just stick with Generation 4 for now.
It doesn't feel that long ago when I was talking to my friend, WendyLovesCats, and I couldn't help remembering that she had this crazy thing called Genesis Generation X2 so I aksed her how it works. As she does, Wendy gave me a really thorough rundown on it - it's my perfect solution, I thought. Why Have I not picked this up before?!!!
Wow. Genesis Generation X2 is the key for me.
...and that's what this whole ramble-session comes to. My very first "It's Raining Men" contest entry is the first official render of the all new Dartanbeck 5 character. Dart 5, for short and officially know to Carrara as DT5G1X2.
So this gives me the power to use those cool pants with fitted boots from Wild Hunt Wildenlander for M3 and the upper armor belts and shoulder and wrists from Highlander: Wildenlander for Genesis on the same figure. I love this sword from Female Rogues for V3. I just scaled it up as well as made the steel thicker (he has to use this thing for all kinds of stuff). I bought some of the newer aniBlocks and PZ2s for Genesis, but my Generation 4 ones work well too, with a bit of tweaking in Carrara's amazing sequencer and graph editor.
Okay... so I've used some female stuff - no, I am not entering this as a conversion entry. What I did, I did out of necessity and don't feel that it plays into the spirit of that category at all - just wanted to be clear on that!
After watching Alita Battle Angel (best CG character movie I've ever seen - one eye on Alita is more geometry than all of Golem of LotR, also by Weta Digital) I felt a reinspired urge to have another try with Carrara's Dynamic Hair. It works so good, but I could never get my main character - my Wife, Rosie to get the curls she has without getting all wonky during animations. I solved that whole thing and now both Rosie 5 and Dart 5 have dynamic hair as well! Sweet!!!
My heroes cross genres on their way through Carrara's amazing ability to create animations. Like Rosie, Dart's life as an official new character begins with inspiration from Frazzetta, and I recently (finally!!!) got Predatron's amazing Giant Fantasy Snake. Perfect way to begin Dart 5's life on the Still Screen.
I'm not much of a still artist. I just wanted to participate in the awesome event because, like Genesis in Carrara, I support this thing. This is really cool!
The scene gets busy with bounding boxes, so a lot of that stuff is set to Not show in 3d view. I work that way because it can really bog down OpenGL if I don't, but did some here so that you could see the main points more clearly. I know this doesn't get posted here, it's in the Entry thread, but I didn't want to get into details in there.
I make little accent light rigs for all of my prominent characters, monsters, villains, etc., and that's what those little dots of spot lights are all about. Some are just fill lights, some help to deal with dynamic hair under a linear workflow (Gamma Correction = 2.2) and the others are just rim lights to help outline the characters and get them to pop.
The cluster of white bounding boxes seen on the left are surface-replicated plants and trees onto some cliff terrain. I ended up not getting much of that in the final shot, but I need to feel that balance in the scene as I got everything together - which really made a difference. If I rendered without that stuff, it throws off the whole thing. I really love Carrara's terrain and plant modelers. Tweak away at sliders and/or import images and meshes - all of which can be made quickly in Carrara, and then, terrain and plants can also be converted into vertex mesh objects and further tweaked that way too - and both systems include special shader setups to help get really nice looking shaders even if we don't have any texture maps to use - but get even more versatile if we do (have maps). And then to have the ability to easily duplicate, replicate and/or surface-replicate them in an instant and have them render so smoothly... getting Carrara nearly ten years ago was a 3d art dream come true for me!
So once I get a nice 3d backdrop going on with plants and terrains like this, I turn off their view in 3D View, but they still render, even in Spot renders. It helps to remove clutter from my central focus and gives OpenGL much less to think about. Ryzen does care - it just renders them! So for this screenshot, I had to turn some of it back on so you could see it (noted by "Replicated Trees" in the screenie). Just in front of all of that we can see a small clump of terrain with actual individual Carrara plants all over it. By default it doesn't show the leaves in working view. This one is about six or seven main plants (including two dead ones, a few in poor health) and then I just duplicate them individually and plant them onto the terrain, scaling and rotating them as I go. This makes for a much more specific look and feel than random replication for more up-close, specific needs. Sometimes, like this time I do it just because I want to - no actual specific need was required.
Carrara's Realistic Sky atmosphere system is incredible. This render is only using it for time-of-day for the color of the sky and the atospheric density for depth but I usually also use the clouds and fog as well. In this, I'm using Carrara's Volumetric Clouds for clouds as well as fog.
I originally had a lot more of the cliffs and plant life in the scene, but felt it took too much away from what the image is really about - a hero being a hero.
Anyway, sorry for the long babble. I get that way when I'm excited and I rarely get a chance to spend this much time on a still render - so I'm just really glad that I could add something to the foreverness of this special activity! :) (always fun to look through all of the renders of pervious contests!!!)
@Dartanbeck Thanks for the details. Yeah, when I'm rendering crazy big scenes in Daz Studio, I'll set a lot of stuff to not be seen in the viewport, but still set it to render out. It saves a ton of resources.
Only two more days!!! Can you believe it? How fast time has flown. The contest ends at Daz midnight on December 31. I'll be staying up late to close the contest out. Hopefully, I can manage to stay awake. You still have time to render something so get those render engines fired up!
Nope. Cause I doubt I'll win. Or place. Or show. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't know what the prizes are amount wise. I did my 3 renders and that's that. I wasn't going to enter at all but I wanted to try me hand at using Dog 8 and SBH to make a dalmatian. It doesn't matter if I get no prize of $0 or whatever the prizes are if I do get a prize as I'm getting the AFE for G8M Bundle and the additional products that will be released when AFE for G8F gets updated prize or not soon as I finish building me new desktop. Course like the Christmas Freebies I'll find products to get when they're essentially free. I like all of Oskarson's catalogue but have only about a half dozen items in it.
I am still waging war against the rendering part of the creation process. I had to significantly reduce the amount of light, to the point of the scene looking way too dark, to get the renders to progress more than before, but a couple of days later, they are still completed unfinished. I still see a lot of not properly rendered "dots" even at 15k Samples and no time limit. I am trying an Ultra HD render now, in hopes of some of the ugly stuff not being so obvious when I reduce the quality by reformatting the image.
I hope to be able to enter with two renders, but I may not make it in time. I would love to enter, even if only for the feedback.
Anyway, if one would like to donate a gift card to the contest, does one simply buy it and send the code to @KnittingMommy by a PM, please?
You can always post an image to this thread to see if anyone can see why your images would take so long to render. Screenshots of your render settings might help. From the description, it sounds like you're having issues with what are calle fireflies by some. Little pixels that don't fully render out? Depending on how most of the image looks, you can always try to fix isolated pixels in a 2D program. I've had to do that on a few images before that never seem to completely render out.
As for donating a gift card, you can do it that way. I always leave it up to the donor how they want to distribute the gift card. Some donors like PMing the winner of their prize personally. A lot of other donors want me to do it. Either way works, whatever you're comfortable with doing. Just PM me and we can talk about the details.
Unfortunately, I am running out of time, I only have one evening to create the second scene, and the night to let the final render be completed, so that I can post it in the morning before leaving for work.
Below are some images of my first scene. Some of the models have slightly different positions or poses, as I changed them some between the renders, especially because of the lights and shadows. The render settings are default, with just the time set to 0 and Max Samples set to 15k. The Aspect Ration is 12:9. I am absolutely certain that it is a matter of many basic mistakes and wrong assumptions, as I am totally inexperienced in the whole 3d art business and I only started using DAZ 3D studio two weeks ago. My only previous experience is with screenshots in PC games, but one cannot influence much there, apart from some careful posing and chosing a good camera angle. Most of the process of creating entries for this contest has been trial and error for me. Mostly error...
This is an image with an Iray fire outside the field of view:
This is an image with the fire removed:
And a detail of the main character's head and shoulder with the dark "dots":
I cannot seem to be able to reach the same quality as in this previous render of mine:
https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/909586
@watchdog79 Are you actually rendering through a camera or using the viewport view to render? I might be wrong, but I believe rendering through an actual camera does speed things up and get's rid of some of those issues. Also, you might try rendering a slightly smaller image than the size you're trying to render out. One thing that can speed things up is to render without lights and use and HDR in the environment. That will speed up your render times, too.
Thank you for the tips, but I am afraid I lack the knowledge required. I am still at the very beginning of the learning curve here. I have exactly zero previous experience with any sort of programmes similar to DAZ 3D studio. I have no idea how to render an image through a camera, I have no idea how to render an image without lights (won't it be totally dark?), nor do I know how to use HDR in the environment.
I am just an enthusiastic newbie.
@watchdog79 When you're looking through your saved scene, does it go to exactly the spot you had it when you closed it or are you having to always set up the camera angle again? If you have a camera set, then it should remember where your scene is so you're good there. If not, then set your scene up the way you want it to look and go to the menu and click on Create>New Camera. When the popup menu shows up, select Apply Active Viewport Transforms which is your perspective view and the camera will have that view.
As for rendering without lights, you won't be. The HDRI will be your lights. You have one already set in Daz Studio by default but I wouldn't use that one. It's great for test shots, not so much when you're ready to render. You can find a lot of free HDRIs at https://hdrihaven.com/ ; Just find one you like and save it to your computer. I usually have a directory I use to just save those. Go into the Render tab, Select Environment, click on the picture where it says Environment Map and replace that image with the one you downloaded.
My guess is your render is using the default HDRI if you haven't specifically told Daz Studio to render scene lights only. So your render is using whatever lights you have in the scene and the HDRI. Plus, if you aren't using a camera, it's using the light on the perspective view which has a light (I think) but isn't really a camera.
I like playing with lighting, but if you want to speed things up for faster render times, HDRs and HDRIs help speed things up because Daz Studio doesn't have to do any calculations for the lights in them.
@watchdog79, that also looks like you're not giving it enough time to render. Low light = more render time. Some things you can do:
At 15K samples you need to reduce Rendering Quality to 1.00 and Rendering Converged Ratio to 95.0%. Higher values will cause each sample to take much longer time without a significant increase is visually detectable differences by non-experts in that iRay SDK.
Time has gone by way too fast, not sure I be able to finish my last entry in time but we'll see :)
The prize list has been updated with another donation and an additional prize for the Storyteller's category. Thanks to @watchdog79 for the donation! :)
You can check out the complete prize package at the following link:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5055381/#Comment_5055381
Thank you for the advice everyone. I am trying to render the first scene again, but it is still going painfully slow and I may have to redo it anyway. I am not sure whether I am going to be able to create a second scene. I may not be able to enter the contest at all, but even in that case, I have learnt something new here, and for that I am grateful.
Remember that you need two entries if you want to enter the New User category. However, you can still enter the rest of the categories with one entry (as far as I understand). ;) If I'm wrong, @knittingmommy can correct me.
You are correct. You only need two entries for the New User category. If you finish your first entry @watchdog79, please go ahead and enter it. You still have a shot at the main prize. It will also give you the experience of going through the process of entering the contest.
Wow! So many great prizes and interesting categories. After just a few events, The Its Raining Men Challenge has grown to a wonderful end-of-year party that many of us look forward to. Congratulations, Knittingmommy, on making it happen (with help, of course). Your efforts are much appreciated.
I know, and I am throwing the towel into the ring for now.
I did everything I could and the final render looks even worse than yesterday. My scene comes out rendered unfinished no matter what I try.
I must be doing something very basic totally wrong, and I just don't know what it is. My first renders, those that are in my gallery, went well (and fast). This scene simply won't reder finished for me. I apparently lack the basic knowledge of what does what exactly, and what is influenced by what and how. There is not enough time left and I have other things to do than leaving my PC rendering in vain for days.
I think you can attach a scene file to a post in the forums. It's basically just a text file that tells Daz Studio what items to pull up and where to place them in your scene. Try attaching your scene file to the the thread and I'll pull it up in my Daz studio. I'll look and see if I can flag anything in your settings that might be causing your render to take too long. I had to temporarily replace my old computer set up with a very basic down to the bones computer so I could work. If I can render the scene, I will try to see how long it takes on my system and see if I notice anything that makes it take too long. I might not have all the assets, but I'm betting I have most of them.