Keeping the lighting while rendering another scene

hapciupalit

What I'm asking might not even exist, but I got to try.

I have a room with bunch of lights coming from bunch of different objects and doing a render in that room takes more than 2 hours on a GeForce 1080TI. The result is nice, but the waiting time is killing me, It's not a problem when I have to render a single scene or something, but as soon as I'm trying to render an animation or several shots from the same spot, only with different poses and facial emotions it's annoying to have to wait again 2 hours.

So I was wondering if there is a way to do it with layers? Let's say I first render the background and then I do the different poses. Is there a way to keep the lighting? Don't know, create an HDRI or something?

If it's not possible than, that's it. I'll reduce the quality of the light and stuff like that so I can reduce the waiting time.

kenshaw011267

What's taking so long is the reflections. The more light and more surfaces for light to bounce off of the longer a render takes. So there isn't really a way to cut the render time without substantially changing the lights.

What I'd recommend is getting renderqueue and just render overnight. Do a render just until you're sure the poses and lighting are right then stop it put it into the queue and then when you're done and going to bed start up the machine and DS and launcgh the queue. In the morning you'll have 4 renders done.

For animation that a whole different issue. You should dial back the various quality settings as far as possible, and use things like scene optimizer to reduce the size of the textures, to speed up the whole process. If you intend to render animations in reasonable time frames you need to reduce the quality of the renders, which won't be as noticeable in an animation anyway.

hapciupalit

kenshaw011267 said:

What's taking so long is the reflections. The more light and more surfaces for light to bounce off of the longer a render takes. So there isn't really a way to cut the render time without substantially changing the lights.

What I'd recommend is getting renderqueue and just render overnight. Do a render just until you're sure the poses and lighting are right then stop it put it into the queue and then when you're done and going to bed start up the machine and DS and launcgh the queue. In the morning you'll have 4 renders done.

For animation that a whole different issue. You should dial back the various quality settings as far as possible, and use things like scene optimizer to reduce the size of the textures, to speed up the whole process. If you intend to render animations in reasonable time frames you need to reduce the quality of the renders, which won't be as noticeable in an animation anyway.

That's exactly what I'm doing curently with both the animations and the other scenes. I haven't stopped my rendering machine in like 10 days, the reason why I believed I could do something about it is because I found this asset. 
https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-iray-hdr-interiors

It has a few hdr images from an interior, so if I can build my own HDR based on a room made by me, maybe I can render the scenes on layer. The first layer where I set the camera and have the background while the other layers being only with the important pices of the furniture that the character interacts with and a transparent background while it gets the light from the HDR.

Not sure if I make any sense.

Kitsumo

It depends on what type of lights they are. If they're the regular spotlights or point lights, you can just unparent them from the scene and delete everything else. If they're mesh lights, you can use the geometry tool to delete or hide everything that's not emissive.

Also, you'll need a Iray matte plane under everything so that they cast shadows. The Daz Studio floor does this by default, but you can't really move it around when you need to.

hapciupalit

Kitsumo said:

It depends on what type of lights they are. If they're the regular spotlights or point lights, you can just unparent them from the scene and delete everything else. If they're mesh lights, you can use the geometry tool to delete or hide everything that's not emissive.

Also, you'll need a Iray matte plane under everything so that they cast shadows. The Daz Studio floor does this by default, but you can't really move it around when you need to.

The light in the scene comes from the HDRI background, a plane I use in front of the window to cast light and some emisive lights from the lamp or bulb, depending on the situation.

Kitsumo

So you want to render just the figures inside the room, with the light from the window, the emissive bulbs and the HDRI? The easiest way I can think of would be to convert the whole room to Iray matte material. It would be invisible and cast shadows correctly, but speed probably wouldn't improve much because all the light still has to bounce around inside the room.

I just tried it in DS and it doesn't really work that well. I'm going to see if I can come up with something else.

Edit: another question - is your camera stationary or does it need to move during the animation?

hapciupalit

Kitsumo said:

So you want to render just the figures inside the room, with the light from the window, the emissive bulbs and the HDRI? The easiest way I can think of would be to convert the whole room to Iray matte material. It would be invisible and cast shadows correctly, but speed probably wouldn't improve much because all the light still has to bounce around inside the room.

I just tried it in DS and it doesn't really work that well. I'm going to see if I can come up with something else.

Edit: another question - is your camera stationary or does it need to move during the animation?

It is stationary.

Kitsumo

I'm out of ideas. The only thing I can think of is make your own HDRI map by setting the camera lens to spherical. It would render faster but you'd have to adjust the light manually so it looks realistic.

Cinus

This technique might work for you:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeLdxBQzDdw&t=7s  

kenshaw011267

hapciupalit said:

kenshaw011267 said:

What's taking so long is the reflections. The more light and more surfaces for light to bounce off of the longer a render takes. So there isn't really a way to cut the render time without substantially changing the lights.

What I'd recommend is getting renderqueue and just render overnight. Do a render just until you're sure the poses and lighting are right then stop it put it into the queue and then when you're done and going to bed start up the machine and DS and launcgh the queue. In the morning you'll have 4 renders done.

For animation that a whole different issue. You should dial back the various quality settings as far as possible, and use things like scene optimizer to reduce the size of the textures, to speed up the whole process. If you intend to render animations in reasonable time frames you need to reduce the quality of the renders, which won't be as noticeable in an animation anyway.

That's exactly what I'm doing curently with both the animations and the other scenes. I haven't stopped my rendering machine in like 10 days, the reason why I believed I could do something about it is because I found this asset. 
https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-iray-hdr-interiors

It has a few hdr images from an interior, so if I can build my own HDR based on a room made by me, maybe I can render the scenes on layer. The first layer where I set the camera and have the background while the other layers being only with the important pices of the furniture that the character interacts with and a transparent background while it gets the light from the HDR.

Not sure if I make any sense.

You could do that. I certainly doubt you'd be pleased with the results but go for it. Build a room and use a spherical lens for the render. I think you'll waste far more time trying to get the lighting to work and get anything like normal shadows.