How many characters have you attempted to render at one time?
Aabacus
Posts: 407
I didn't set out to try and test the limits of DAZ but I have officially tested them on my rig and thought others might enjoy sharing their tests.
I just added my 50th G8 character in the same scene and rendered it. That's 50 different G8 models with their clothes, hair, and the environment (a resort).
On load scene takes up 62G of memory! DAZ starts at 230M.
CPU only render takes 10 minutes just to get the first pass in and uses over 175G of RAM.
This is on:
iMac 2019 running fully patched Catalina.
4x4 CPU (Edit: 2 cores and 16 threads)
64G RAM
3T Fusion Drive
===
I'm currnetly at 60 G8 characters. It's over 200G to render and is starting to lag a bit in texture shaded mode. My machine starts to complain about being out of application memory almost immediately. What a whiner...walk it off machine...walk it off.
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I haven't really tried to test the limits of my machine - I have an older machine and it would probably be unwise for me to do so. lol The most Genesis 8 Figures I've rendered in a scene was when I did the promos for Altern8 Girl 8. I wanted to show the 14 different skin tones that come with it, so I rendered a group shot with 14 Genesis 8 females. That's the most figures I've tried at once in a scene:
If I remember correctly it took some time to render - probably close to 2 hours on my old machine. And that's with an HDRI for the environment. I can't imagine how much longer it would have taken if there where an environment with actual geometry in the scene. lol I've gotten a slightly better graphics card since then though, so it probably wouldn't take quite so long if I tried to render the scene again. Since my machine has a few years on it though, I try not to put too much strain on it.
I'm definitely jealous that you could render 50 characters though! I think my machine would blow up if I attempted that. lol
@Aabacus, you are certainly adventurous. Phew.
I have a 2019 iMac en route to me right now on a UPS plane or truck somewhere out wandering the night—and all I want to render is three girls at a time as a backup singing group. Sounds like you could have the Mormon Tabernacle Choir! (Then again, I have to animate "the gurrells," so ...)
Budget made me settle for the 3.0GHz 6‑core Intel Core i5 (but that supposedly has Turbo Boost up to 4.1GHz), and I got 64Gb of memory with it. I have no idea how that stacks up against yours (4x4?) in terms of performance, but your post give me hope. I'll be watching this with intense interest.
Wow! What a posing tour de force! I see images like these and want to find a n00000000b hole to crawl into. Need to go oil my training wheels ...
hahah You're too funny! But yeah, the posing was a tad challenging. I think the time it took to get all the figures posed together, with so many of them interacting, it likely nearly rivalled the render time when it came to how long it took me. lol
...the most I've done is 9 (attachment #1 below) , Also done three with 8 (the last one below in Iray)
For a comic, I once put 15 characters + clothes and hairs in one scene, using a GTX 1070 GPU.
Haven't tried more characters yet.
This might not be the most that I ever got into an image, but it's one of the more crowded scenes I've done. These are all G1.
It was for a class assignment. Our Final project was to show Anacronism, Irritation, or Subversion. This one was the Anacroninism piece.
Is the alern8 lighter on memory than the regular shader?
Anyway, the most I got is 5 I think, while still only having 6Gb on my card.
The most I got was 56 Genesis and Genesis 2 on screen at the same time. That was with 32GB of ram. Wonder what I can do now with 64?
I did 32 as an experiment, but they had the same hair and skin with different settings.
4x4 is 4 CPUs with 4 Cores each. Total of 16 Cores.
You must be so excited! It's a night and day difference from where I was. It's still only CPU rendering but it is a lot faster.
Certainly I'm having to test my patience though...
For example once in a while I attempt to delete something and accicentally delete an entire character. If I hit "undo" the character comes back but the textures are a mes so I have to reload the scene. If I reload the scene it takes nearly 30 minutes.
A few years ago someone posted a scene with oodles and oodles of those M&M-like DAZ emoti-characters I forgot what number he'd gotten up to but the image was big, the characters were tiny and they filled the page.
I used to be able to get around 20, but ever since changing hard drives, it seems that I can't do 15+ without the PC throwing up a BSoD.
I fit 28 legacy's figures dressed and haired in a 3Delight render once
can only fit up to 3 dressed haired genesis 1,2,3&8 in DAZ studio
at least as figures, run out of RAM before rendering
as props can do more
lots more rigged in other software but those self contained FBX files no DAZ data overheads
likewise Carrara using Alberto's morphs eraser and saving as self contained.car files
I couldn't find the image with the bazillion DAZ emoti-characters, but here's an image with about a thousand unique props & people. I don't know the artist or the technique but we watched it grow over a period of several months. This is, I think, the last image posted about 9 years ago.
I've never tried just the figures alone, but in a fully loaded scene with all characters fully clothed, anything over 7 Genesis 8's starts getting painful, tho I think I could get a few more in there if I set it to one of the less taxing preview modes ;).
His name was somthing like Neilzonline, and I think the image was done in stages not all the figures were present at one time, the most I have done like that is 80.
The most I've rendered without the render dropping to CPU (1080ti) is 14 in this image, the others were added via spot rendering.
hint though, making figures props and optimising them you can fit far more
export as obj bits hidden under clothes
take them into a modeler and remove/optimise even more mesh
no good to me animating sadly
No such imac exists. 4 socket motherboards are pretty rare even in servers.
Looks like the top spec 2019 iMac has a single 9900k with 8 cores and 16 threads.
9 Genesis 3-8 characters with clothes, some vehicles, and props in 4K @ 24000 samples, quality 6, rendertime a little under 2 hr
before iray, I could render a lot more, on a far worse computer.
I can't even imagine 50 in a scene. I wish I could do it, would love to populate my environments.
But I'm forced to split my renderings after two people, three people max. And that's a hard max, because three people already means playing with fire and possible lock ups. RAM demands of this engine are just way too high.
I remember that. The image was done in pieces. Rendered in Poser and assemebled in Photoshop.
I have done large scenes several times but for Iray, due to the lack of resources on a video card, I came up with a product to help.
https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray
The below image is one of the promos of the set. Please note that the product was done when DS 4.10 was current and Iray has improved image handeling in 4.11 and up.
Image without text is here - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3Re6v
{Eyes Bug Out} Well, that's 10 more than I'll have—but I won't be trying to come even close to 50 characters in a scene. As far as I'm concerned, that's why God made character billboards. (No, wait; that was RiverSoft Art. It's easy to get confused in the Daz universe.)
What an amazing product! This image from one of the promos has the single best explanation of questions I have tried and failed many times to get an answer to—and all the other promo images have invaluable information I've never seen collected anywhere:
Does your product have its own thread somewhere? If not, it should.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/287461/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray/p1
Yeah, that is a super scene. Like a Beach Blanket Bingo excusion (don't ask what Beach Blanket Bingo actually is, I guess it's bingo at the beach).
The most I've had in a scene is 4 Toon Generations characters and 2 3DU toon animals at the some time that I can remember.
12 Reptilian 6 HD plus Morpheus/Multiman. The Reptilians were duplicated not instanced so I could pose them individually.
Flee