iRAY Animation?
Superdog
Posts: 765
I've read a lot about iRAY but not tried the Beta. Now that DS 4.8 has been released does iRAY work well for animation rendering? There's a lot of info in the forums about iRAYb still renders but I can't find out much about iRAY animation rendering. I currently use Octane which just about renders animation but apparently is incompatible with DS 4.8 so before I update DS and dump Octane I wondered if iRAY rendered animation well and fast?
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Fast, is of course relative, hardware dependent and scene dependent. It renders animation as well, and as fast, as it renders stills.
Note that if your scene is running on the edge of Video Ram that animation does add some overhead and can cause your video card(s) to drop out.
The SDK did not change so there is no reason, from our end, that the Octane Plug-in should stop working.
As far as the crashing goes, have you tried to make sure that the video card in render settings is turned off before you access Octane? Maybe both engines are fighting for the card and causing the crash. Just a guess.
Yeah the octane plugin is crashing with 4.8 apparently...I'm just gonna wait to update then >_>
I'm reporting the experience of a couple of OcDS users on the forum. I've not yet tried iRAY so I can't verify if this crashing occurs for everyone but I'm holding off installing 4.8 anyway.
Has anyone compared the speed of still and animation rendering between Octane and iRAY? If iRAY is able to render a scene as fast as OcDS then I'll install DS 4.8. Maybe someone who's used both the 4.8 Beta and OcDS (either 1.2 or 2.1) might know? It's not too complicated to compare the rendering speed of exactly the same scene using different render engines.
I haven't tried OCDS with 4.8, but have used Iray quite a bit. In fact, I got a new computer about 2 months ago and haven't re-installed OCDS because Iray is sooooo much more stable (haven't upgraded to version 2 of the plugin either). Compared to the Carrara version of the Octane plugin, animating with Iray is quite a bit slower. It takes longer to "re-load" each frame for rendering, and rendering in general seems slower. Rendering with Iray in DS will also use more CPU than Octane. When rendering with Octane my CPU usage is the same as when not rendering, with Iray CPU usage is at around 25% (not a big deal unless your trying to do something CPU intensive at the same time).
I really like Iray, and it's an outstanding addition to DS, but it is different than Octane, and some things I like better in one VS the other. Like any product, you really need to evaluate it for yourself to make sure it does what you need. Iray in DS is much more stable for me than the Octane plugin (though the Octane plugin for Carrara is extremely stable), so that alone makes it a great replacement for OCDS. If a stable, usable version of OCDS is ever released, I would probably upgrade mine to version 2 because of the great feature set Octane provides. However, for now, Iray is a great alternative.
You could install 4.8 in a different directory and use both 4.7 and 4.8, or get the beta which by design installs to a different directory to allow the use of the standard version and beta at the same time. IMHO learning Iray is a good thing even if you plan to primarily use OCDS. The full integration with DS means that there will be more Iray specific products and enhancements available that may prove extremely usefull in the future.
Thanks for the feedback. It's a shame that the iRAY animation rendering isn't as fast as Octane. I love the stability part but the speed part is also important.
It depends on what quality you are aiming for (though I guess that it still won't beat Octane).
If you let Iray run though all 5000 iterations, it will take a long time to complete an image. But for smaller images, it's often sufficient to stop the render after 250-300 iterations, which will cut down the time per frame to one or two minutes.
https://vimeo.com/127391140 is a test render stopping at 250 iterations, but the quality is still sufficient for the size (the dark ring around the eyes is part of the skin texture).
You can get even faster times - check this thread: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/56070/#817427
In Octane I usually render in HD (1920x1080) at 500 maxsamples. What would be the equivalent of that in iRAY?
I find those settings offer the best mix of size/pixels vs render speed for a good quality animation that looks good on a 60” screen and can be projected in quite a large space. Most of my animations are composites combining still, animation and film footage so the animation parts take less time to render. There are many ways to speed things up but I was interested in a (close enough) 1 to 1 comparison between iRAY and OcDS.
Bump.... curious about iRAY for animation as well.
Plus, I am hearing over on the OTOY-Daz forums that the latest version of Octane does not even "work for animation" (not sure what that means).
Davide
Dustrider, I only have OrDS 1.2 but I just copied the folder in plugins and the dll's etc named octane in my DAZ folder over to my beta public build and it works
no icons
but under windows tabs can open and open viewport from the setting window
I am keeping DS4.7 all the same and have 4.8 in the public build folder
500 samples would be enough .. I made some nice tests with 500 samples for 720 HD for bigger you need 1000 at last , it also depends of the material surface you use .. light emitters will need more, HDRI light need less
how better you set your material surfaces how faster it will render it means how more closer settings to actual PBR how faster it calculate
In Octane I used 300 samples for animation and was good enough for 720
Hey guys, I've just rendered a living room with a victoria 6 with clothes and hair and makeup doing the dace aniblock from animate 2 , Iterations limited at 10 and got a aprox . of 10 minutes / 10 frames . The model and the rest of the objects are really grainy ... so this can't be a good setup for any animations. I'm just a noob when it comes to this, but even for me it's obvious that it won't work. If anyone comes with a good quality vs rendering time/frame could you please tell me ? 250 / frame I think means a lot of rendering time for my gtx 750 ti :)) Oh, and 50 iterations dosen't even come close to the quality of the posted video.
Well... the size of your image is one of the key points. Ten iterations is definitely not enough.
At around 1024x748 size, I've seen somewhat okay results around 150.
I'd suggest you do a still frame test render, and see at what iteration number the quality is acceptable.
Also, if your scene is very dark, it will renders slower. What light set are you using?
On a related topic, have you checked "OptiX" in render settings?
Alex video was rendered I think 4K per frame
you need at last 400-500
Yeah, I meant 50 iterations/ frame, miss typed 10 by mistake.I'll give it a try with 300 / frame tonight , just curious to see how much of a difference will be compared to 3delight... I've done some stills , and even without the Iray shaders it's just amazing :D . Thanks for the reply.
I moved this comment to http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/87211/daz-studio-nvidia-iray-interactive-mode-animation-tests
Here is my first draw test animation with iray from May.29.2015 almost a year ago, rendered using interactive mode as it was a draw test and my old card was not that powerful for rendering animations, 1560 frames rendered with my old GTX 760 MCI , 3 frames per minute full HD
Not bad for Direct Light in Interactive mode
Here one more , just messing around with the environment nothing special
3D environment by Jack Tomalin
rendering time 4.5 hours in photo real mode with 2 x Titan X SC 1277Mhz & i7 5ghz
I moved this comment to http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/87211/daz-studio-nvidia-iray-interactive-mode-animation-tests
Interactive mode don't render all shaders optimal like no sss and no volume , there is only Direct light but for testing and draw is good
when you keep the iray viewport open before you click the render for animation it will only send updates to the card for each frame and not full scene each time what will result in much faster rendering of all frames
I made video about that on my youtube channel a little time ago
I moved this comment to http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/87211/daz-studio-nvidia-iray-interactive-mode-animation-tests
Off topic, but what i7 CPU did you get to 5 Ghz and what kind of cooling are you using? I'd love to know your voltages, temps at load, and power draw, if you've got a chance and the info is handy. If not, don't sweat the extra stuff...just especially curious about the CPU and cooling. Thanks.
i7 4Ghz overclocked 19% to 5Ghz water cooled, I use Corsair Hydro Series™ H80i V2 Water / Liquid CPU Cooler. with 140 mm extra thick radiator 2 fans . CPU have nothing to do with rendering when using GPU , all it does only it load the scene to the GPU so faster CPU will only load faster the scene to your card but not improve rendering, so if you have 4 cores or 10 it does not matter for iray software , 4 cores i7 are optimal to run 4 x Titans X with iray .
CPU Voltage max 1.344 per core max power mode on full load temp. 50-52 C , power draw from 16w to max 95 w depends of the mode , Auto , Silent or Performance etc since I use Asus motherboard software to control all cooling system in my rig depends of what I need .. , temp for cards 35-37 C per each GPU on full load .
CPU and each GPU have own closed water cooling system independent from each other as normally I just use half of the rig power if not rendering so half of the radiator fans are off . so far that is my best rig ever with the lowest temp I ever had . But going to build external card case this year when the additional 2 x 1080 arrive so all my 4 cards going outside the main rig so I have more space on top for for my CPU new cooling Corsair Hydro Series H100i V2 Extreme Performance Water / Liquid CPU Cooler. 240mm , right now the place is occupied by GPU radiators
Thanks for the detailed reply. Right, I had been aware that the CPU doesn't affect the render times in IRay or octane. I just haven't been able to get my CPU stable at 4.7, although I've been unwilling to take my voltages that high. Are you using a 6700k or a 4790k?
I am using 4790K , I tried higher speed but it was overheating too quick with 135W power consumption , with the 240mm radiator I can do that better , when rendering animations it load faster the frame updates to the card when overclocked and does have the time to slightly cool off between frames . For one render not worthy but for a lot of renders the extra speed save a lot of time , the same with the GPU , if you set the Maxium Power under Nvidia Panel it will render faster the sequences since the clock will be in stand by mode all the time, again not worthy for 1 render .
CPU does affect Render speeds in Iray.
And while Mec4D has managed to make overclocking work, it is still not recommended by Daz 3D as it has a very serious chance of making your CPU unstable and crashing software.
Yes it does if you render only with CPU, on the other hand CPU slow down rendering time when selected together with GPU and that is a fact at last when in combination with GTX cards, faster CPU load the scene faster to the card and that is but after that it get back to idle and there are no activity while rendering
overclocking is not recomended if you don't know your system limits so only for advanced users .
As a clarification, having multiple devices increases load time because the scene has to be loaded to each device. However having the CPU rendering in addition to GPU's decreses actual render time. Having multiple devices may increase your overall time, which includes both, but that definitely will depend on the scene you are rendering, what percentage of the total time each component is and your actual hardware.
A slow small video card with limited number of CUDA cores may not be worth adding to a render, and the same applies to a slow limited core CPU, because the speed increase of the render may not offset the additional render speed of the device. This can be especially true if you are not rendering photoreal to high convergence percentage.
Complex photoreal renders to a high convergence will generally benefit from having every device that can hold hte scene, rendering it, presuming that you are not using hte computer for other things while rendering and speed of render is your goal. :)
I moved this comment to http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/87211/daz-studio-nvidia-iray-interactive-mode-animation-tests