Anyone Used Circulare Natural Environment?

miladyderyni_173d399f47

It's an interior, in spite of the name, SF environment, I bought at release in April 2023. I think it was originally a D+ monthly or weekly freebie. I've never used it until now and it freezes DS (using. 4.21 beta). This usually happens only with high poly sets and I think this is one, judging by the wireframe view. (I don't know how to find poly counts.) I recall that at one time there were D+ forum complaints about a spate of D+ freebies that were very high poly.

Can someone confirm the poly count? Is there a workaround or should I just find another set? 

https://www.daz3d.com/circulare-natural-environment

ZippyGuitar

It renders just fine for me, although I didn't let the render finish. I did get let it get to 880 iterations. I did not experience any crashes or issues at all and I only tested the set not adding figures or other props. The render stated 76 MB Geometry and only 45 MB for Texture Memory. I'm using DAZ Studio 4.11

FirstBastion

The download is only 35 mb,  so it can't really be intensive on resources,  neither textures or geometry. .

 

It unzips to 214mb.  Most of that is in the data folder, couple mb for the textures folder.

 

I'll do a quick render and see.

FirstBastion

The total scene is just under 700,000 polies,  and my meager gtx980 has it rendered to 100 iterations in 2 minutes using DS 4.10. it does have a lot of reflective surfaces.

miladyderyni_173d399f47

FirstBastion said:

The total scene is just under 700,000 polies,  and my meager gtx980 has it rendered to 100 iterations in 2 minutes using DS 4.10. it does have a lot of reflective surfaces.

Thanks so much for checking it out. It might be just that my laptop is pretty old, about 9 years. (i7-6500U CPU, 12GB RAM, GPU 0 = Intel HD graphics 520, GPU 1 = NVIDIA GeForce 940M) I am going to give it another try after restarting.

The picture I am working on has 2 G8 characters and a couple plants (instanced) added. I have been able to do some spot renders (took 12+ minutes) and they looked overly lit. I noticed in Surfaces that there are a lot of parts that are named as "____ Light" & are emissive. 

Is there anything I can do to cut down on all the reflective surfaces?

 

FirstBastion

Given the age of your laptop,  you may want to consider dropping back to an earlier version of DazStudio.  Some DS versions run better on some older hardware configurations. 4.10,  4.12, 4.16

I simply rendered the scene out of the box,  with nothing added and it looked normal brightness.

I suggest you try a first render with a new scene just the enviroment, then incrementally add more content on each render,  starting with the plants,  then add the cahracters one at a time,  so you can determine what is causing the resource hit. And chaeck if your character subsets are adding lights to the scene.

 

miladyderyni_173d399f47

FirstBastion said:

Given the age of your laptop,  you may want to consider dropping back to an earlier version of DazStudio.  Some DS versions run better on some older hardware configurations. 4.10,  4.12, 4.16

I simply rendered the scene out of the box,  with nothing added and it looked normal brightness.

I suggest you try a first render with a new scene just the enviroment, then incrementally add more content on each render,  starting with the plants,  then add the cahracters one at a time,  so you can determine what is causing the resource hit. And chaeck if your character subsets are adding lights to the scene.

 

I have at least DS 4.11 installed & will use that to try incrementally. I hadn't thought about lights from the other parts but it's possible, since the 2 characters were created & saved separately then merged.

Thanks again!

miladyderyni_173d399f47

@FirstBastion

Using DS4.11 has really helped. I was able to get to 100 iterations in just a little lnger than it took your system. Rendering with the plants and their instances took about 20 minutes and it went to CPU, which is fine by me. My first test render took a lot longer, so I tried dropping the Max Samples by quite a bit, to 500. I think that was too few samples, as the render looks grainy. I haven't added in either character yet, but  I did load them to check if there were lights saved, which there weren't.

I've never had much trouble using 4.21 on this computer, so it never occured to me that might be a large part of the problem here.

(I tried to attach my render, but our very rural area has the slowest DSL known to humankind. Maybe I can get it to upload tomorrow)

FirstBastion

Sometimes,  these kinds of investigations, teach us about the tools,  and what works for the given situation. It is nice to hear that you have it working.  Sometimes,  small resized 800 pixel or less jpegs upload faster.

memcneil70

If you can't get a decent render with your characters in it, could you change your characters into billboards and add them into the scene that way? Would that save your system's resources?

miladyderyni_173d399f47

memcneil70 said:

If you can't get a decent render with your characters in it, could you change your characters into billboards and add them into the scene that way? Would that save your system's resources?

It might, but I have no idea how to make billboards.  If there are some very, very simple tutorials I  might try it out. This weekend, I am taking a break from my art, because I have work & family stuff. Will be doing more next week.

FirstBastion

Another option is to render background, mid ground and foreground in separate renders, save as png to retain alpha transparency, so for example,  setup your shot,  lock your camera,  then render just the room, then render the plants with most the room remove except floor and ceiling, then render your characters with the plants removed,  and only the ceiling.  Then assemble layers in photoshop program. Each of the individual passes also take less time to render,  because each take of the reduced scene has less calculations.

memcneil70

miladyderyni_173d399f47 said:

memcneil70 said:

If you can't get a decent render with your characters in it, could you change your characters into billboards and add them into the scene that way? Would that save your system's resources?

It might, but I have no idea how to make billboards.  If there are some very, very simple tutorials I  might try it out. This weekend, I am taking a break from my art, because I have work & family stuff. Will be doing more next week.

 I have found two You Tube videos by Jay Versalis on billboards, but they were part of the Season Pass series, so I don't know if I can link them. If @Richard Haseltine or @Jay Vesalis knows the answer, that would be great. One them does require two products by Code66 available on Daz3d store. When the weekend is over and you are back to your project, these maybe a possibility.

MelanieL

memcneil70 said:

miladyderyni_173d399f47 said:

memcneil70 said:

If you can't get a decent render with your characters in it, could you change your characters into billboards and add them into the scene that way? Would that save your system's resources?

It might, but I have no idea how to make billboards.  If there are some very, very simple tutorials I  might try it out. This weekend, I am taking a break from my art, because I have work & family stuff. Will be doing more next week.

 I have found two You Tube videos by Jay Versalis on billboards, but they were part of the Season Pass series, so I don't know if I can link them. If @Richard Haseltine or @Jay Vesalis knows the answer, that would be great. One them does require two products by Code66 available on Daz3d store. When the weekend is over and you are back to your project, these maybe a possibility.

I don't know if they are the ones originally in the Season Pass series, but Jay has two videos apparently freely available on his youtube channel: just scroll down a bit.