Could you render a comic with IRAY ?
ColemanRugh
Posts: 511
in The Commons
What your alls average times rendering scenes with IRAY?
If you had to get a 22 page multi-panel comic done in a week could you render 50+ renders done with IRAY comp[ared with 3Delight?
Thanks ahead of time for folks feedback. I am learning 3Delight and still suck at it... so not sure if I should invest time in learning IRAY instead. Thanks!!
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no you have a decent nVidia GPU?
You could CPU render without an nVidia GPU but that would increase rendertimes. As to getting it all done in a week, it would really depend on the intensity and in some measure the render size, of your scenes - depending on the frames I've rendered it can be anything from a few minutes to a few hours. Some of the panels I've run (eye close up, single figure with no background required etc) is 20minutes or so, full on city street with a lot of characters probably 6 to 10hours.
If you have a decent nVidia card... maybe? I've got a GeForce 960, and a 1200x900 image averages about half an hour. Assuming these scenes are already set up and just need to be rendered, then probably. If you need to set up the scene (and shaders) ... depending on how much tweaking you have to do, you might be pushing it.
That said, it will be faster than 3DLight. When I was doing my webcomic, 18 panels a week was pushing it in terms of what I could reasonably do. Of course, I had a slower computer back then too.
Personally, I'd worry that an Iray/Photoreal comic would dance around the Uncanny Valley too much, but if you've got good shaders and well posed characters, that shouldn't be too much of an issue.
What does Uncanny Valley mean?
For 3DL the speed of the renders depends a lot on what lighting you are using. Just use a few point lights, and things can render in seconds. Add some UE2 lights to get a decent amount of ambient light, and those times will jump up to hours. Using the AoA advanced ambient light (or configuring UE2 to have similar settings to the AoA lights) will drag 3DL renders back to minutes in length. For me a typical full size 3DL render with multiple characters and hair/clothing will take 15-25 mins.
In answer to the question, if you want to do this I suggest you use the trick of rendering at 4X the target resolution to a lower percentage convergance, then resizing the resulting image to 25% to lose the grain. It's possible to save quite a lot of time that way and get very good results. Either that or invest in some very high end hardware.
Uncanny valley is when something CGI looks more real than real... or something like that.
Thank you very much everyone for your awesome help!!
I am transitioning from Poser to DAZ because I love the Genesis figures. I can render a hi rez comic update in Poser in one day. A 900 x 1200 pixel render at very high settings with a multicore computer in Poser takes only a few minutes at most to render.
My fear is that an IRAY render would take 30 minutes each render.... or more. I am a total newbie with DAZ so I have no clue what amount of time a total high res 3Delight render takes either.
Thank you all very much!!
see this post
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/56660/an-iray-toon-render
@acanthis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
Basically it's why Pixar makes scenery look like a photo and characters look like Hanna Barbara cartoons otherwise we wont get upset when they explode or something.
Thanks for the explanation. I've never heard the term "Unhappy Valley" before.
If you are rendering 900x1200 Superfly images in under 10 minutes then I think you are likely to find that your hardware will handle iRay. The best thing to do is to suck it and see.
I render 1920x1080 most of the time, but I only use a 16GB i7 laptop with an NVidia GT 750M. Depending upon whether the scene can fit entirely in the NVidia's memory (most of mine don't) the render time ranges from 10 minutes to 10 hours for 95% convergence, with the upper value usually the result of highly complex scenes with multiple characters and props. If you can accept some grain in the image you can often terminate an iRay render much sooner; 30 minutes may be more than enough.
I'm rendering animations with Iray, targetting for ~3-4 minutes per frame with two boxes rendering in parallel. And there are freaking many frames even in single shot :)
With my GTX 970 I can render an iRay outdoor scene in 4-5 mins, and an indoor one takes 15-30 mins. They are averages, as obviously the complexity of the scene will vary. If rendering CPU only those times go up by a factor of 10.
The wikipedia article has it best, but it's when something looks real... but not quite. That "Not quite" can put people off of an otherwise beautiful image, because they know something isn't right... but they may not be able to quite articulate what. It's part of what makes corpses and zombies so disturbing, and is also a factor in why some people find clowns scary (it's not the only factor, but it's one of them)
When I watched the Harlock anime - which was all CGI - I kept hitting it a lot. What was worse, the characters would dip in and out of the valley within the same scene, which made the whole thing even more disconcerting. It's why generally stay on the "not real" side of the Uncanney valley in my artwork, as opposed to trying to cross it.
The tricky part of the Uncanny Valley is that the parameters are slightly different for each person. A lot of renders I've seen praised as looking like photographs I've actually winced at... because they just weren't quite there for me (almost always the eyes). And while it was the early days of CGI in movies, I very clearly remember being more bothered by the animation in "The Spirits Within" movie than a friend of mine who was not only praising it, but insisting that in 20 to 30 years, all movies would be CGI done with Motion Capture.
And too many horror movies with them in the starring role of bad guy...
But it's all down to prep work. Fast renders (both 3DL and Iray) depend on several factors, but shaders/materials and lighting are probably the biggest two. Nailing down lighting in Iray will have a big impact on render times. So will making sure that all materials are optimized Iray materials (the automatic conversion may look good, in most cases, but it really doesn't improve render times...in fact it may be slower). On the 3DL side of things shaders are going to give the biggest increase. Dumping the scene to a RIB file and rendering in the standalone version of 3DL can offer a tremendous boost in speed, for several reasons...one of which is gaining access to some advanced features that Studio can't access easily, but proper shader management will be the biggest boost. If you don't need SSS, don't use a shader that has it. that lkind of thing.
My average non-comic scenes render in maybe 30 minutes on an nvidia 980 Ti. That's neither here nor there, because I am not rendering "comic style". My signature "tech noir" comic book style renders in maybe 5 minutes/page, so a whole book would render overnight. Why so quick? I'll get to that.
Are you trying to create a "photorealistic" comic book (an effort that seldom turns out well) or are you trying to generate something that looks much more like a conventional comic? In the latter case, IRAY is not suited to render a comic style directly (3dlight wasn't that well suited, either, and I think most "comic" or "anime" shaders look horrid).
What IRAY shines at (pun most definitely intended) is rendering scenes with simple, dramatic lighting (low-key lighting, chiaroscuro, side lighting, silhouette, etc) in a way that is ideal for feeding one of the many PhotoShop "comic book" actions. You don't even have to render particularly large, because the nature of the conversion process will allow scaling.
Consider carefully whether the things Iray buys you, i.e., 'photorealistic' renders, complete with light bounces, realistic shadows, etc., etc., are really what is needed in your comic.
Daz Studio 3Delight lends itself well to comicbook/graphicnovel images, you throw in a little stylized postwork and you can achieve high production value publish worthy output.
If I take the time to set up the lighting right I can get pretty good detail in a render between 7-20 minutes depending on the scene complexity.
Oh lord, Spirits Within practically defines Uncanny Valley. Sometimes it's the really subtle things, the hundreds of micro movements that real people do that we don't actively see. I saw a great article on things captured with certain cameras and techniques, like the micro-tremors and skin flushing in our bodies because of our heartbeat. We can't really see them, but we notice when they're not there.
http://www.cracked.com/article_23440_5-secret-worlds-now-visible-with-insane-technology.html
With still images it's easier to avoid, but people still trip up in the subtlest ways. Eyes are a big one. Some hand positions seem really unnatural. Another one is when the artist forgets to account for gravity and has a figure holding something or posed in a way that should be difficult and uncomfortable if not physically impossible.
I barely kept up with a single page a week using Iray, so I ... wouldn't suggest it.
That's assuming you are actually shooting for realism -- you could simplify lighting, avoid refraction and SSS, and speed things up a lot, but at that point why are you using iray...
The "valley" part of uncanny valley refers to a V-shaped graph which plots the reactions of subjects to images of a range of representations of human-like figures. People seem to have no problems with completely unrealistic representations, including crudely human robots (even C-3PO) and children's toys, but as these approach realism the tendency is to find them unbearably creepy, and this is where the valley begins. Interestingly, corpses of real people are at the bottom of this valley along with badly done attempts at CGI realism (the film "Beowulf" has been mentioned) and bad waxworks dummies.
However, well done CGI images and even very good waxwork models are on the other side of this valley and approach the level of positive reaction to representations of real human beings (i.e. we don't have a problem with photos and movies of people, which probably goes without saying). In other words, 3D renders don't necessarily elicit a bad reaction per se, but if you get them wrong in some way, they will. In my opinion this adverse reaction is much worse if the render is animated.
If you Google "uncanny valley graph" in image search you will see a lot of examples of the graph.
Interesting. I should probably have gone to "Donate-o-Pedia" first. That is definitely a problem with any photoreal renderer, though. You can end up with elements of it looking very realistic (metallic surfaces and glass, for example) but other elements looking very synthetic (skin and hair if the shaders are not quite right). Sometimes it takes a long time to balance that out and that does raise a question mark as to its suitability for comic books. Unless you specifically want that effect.
otoh I enjoy lighting with iRay and find it much easier to understand. Mesh lights were a real revelation the very first time I used them, and then HDR environments. The problem is getting a good real time preview of what the scene is going to look like as you work with it.
Anyway, I'm straying off the point and it's also very important not to venture into speculation.
Personally, I don't try to render straight to toon. I go with some harsh lighting, replace most textures with a solid color (but keep bump/displacement as needed) then run the render through a series of filters in GIMP. The final product matches my style.
I tried a lot of that and ended up deciding it's just way easier to use 3dl.
This is a scene I threw together and rendered in 3dl. No texture changes, one single distant light, 10 minutes to render @1620x1080, 2 minutes to apply GIMP filters.
Not bad...
Where did that instrument she's playing come from?
The outfit and the lute are in this V4 product
http://www.daz3d.com/the-songstress
Ok...they actually call this one a lute on the product page (I called something a lute the other day and was told, no, that's not a lute...).
Give my brother Paul's stuff a look over at DA. He does Star Trek comics using reality and Iray and you can see the quailty and he will be more than happy to talk to you about render times and settings if you like. I saw that you were switching over your comic characters over to Genesis over at DA and have to say you are doing an amazing job with them.
Great work!!
Thanks all for the help and feedback!