30 odd hours and 65% into a render
gerterasmus
Posts: 287
in The Commons
and my laptop decides to close DAZ. UGH!
At least I can now fix the things that I noticed at about 20 hours that was wrong.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Ahh, I feel your pain. I had that happen on with me it was a power outage and I didn't have a battery backup at the time! Don't you just hate it when you are so far into a render and then you see mistakes? Yep, been there, done that, too! Luckily, some of those things can be fixed with postwork, although, not all.
Yep. Like realising 19 hours into the new render that you wanted to add a lamp to the image. LMAO!
Please don't tell me that was 30 hours using a Titan.
But that is a seriously long time, hope it was worth it.:)
It's on an Intel Core i5-5200U, 8Gb Ram and NVIDIA GEFORCE 820M. No idea if that's good or bad. Image has lots of textured glass and reflective surfaces.
Does Iray allow you to pick up where you left off?
Luxrender allows you to do this if the computer crashed or power went out. It's a hum-dinger.
...well, if it is a quad core I5 it is non hyperthreading meaning it has only 4 processor threads to apply to rendering. Also yes, reflectivity is a real killer in rendering.
What render engine are you using, 3DL or Iray? Also which Daz version, 4.8 or 4.9? Also what OS, Win 7, 8.1 or 10?
If it is Iray and the scene is an interior setting using the emissive shader for light sources, then yes, that can really slow things down as well. Most likely it sounds as if the process first went into CPU mode, as the 820M has only 2 GB of video memory, then went into "swap mode" when it exceeded system memory (remember that at least 1 GB is prioritised for Windows as well as basic system level processes, so you effectively have around 7 GB of available memory). Swap mode uses the virtual memory partition on your hard drive, so that could be another factor, you may want to check how much is allocated for this and increase it. Some people have also experienced issues with WIn 10. For example, one person here upgraded to win 10 and her dual Titans actually rendered slower than they did on 7, she ended up rolling back and they work fine again.
I have an i7 (hyperhtreading which has 8 processor threads) with 12 GB memory and it gopes int ot swap mode form time to time as I tend to create fairly involved scenes. . However my longest Iray renders I've dealt with have been in the 7 - 8 hour range and never crashed the Daz application. If anything, I would have more expected it to hear that the notebook itself shut down due to overheating as notebooks aren't known for having the best CPU/GPU cooling and rendering creates a lot of heat (my system can run in the 70 - 75º C range and it is in a large uncluttered case with 6 fans, one by the GPU and a massive CPU cooler).
The longest render I ever did ran sixteen and a half hours using 3DL with UE and GI on a 5 frame motion blur.
There is a save last render feature in DS, but I have no idea if that is available if DS shuts down. It is nice to use, though, if you want to stop a render part way through, save the render, and then restart where you left off. I never thought to try that after loading DS back up after my power outage event occurred. Might be something worth testing.
In Iray at least, D|S saves the in-progress render file in the same hidden temp folder as the output of tdlmake (if you're using 3Delight). I know this folder gets cleaned out when D|S does a clean shutdown — which means it's left alone when there's a crash — but I'm not sure if there's a similar mass delete when D|S starts.
I know the feeling. Got up this morning to find the power cord had knbocked out on an overnight render. Totally drained the battery. This was Carrara, so no hope of resuming it.
On my i5 Mac (AMD GPU, so CPU only), Iray renders can easily take a week, once you start adding a few lights and reflective surfaces. It's a real bummer when you spot some mistake 3 days into the render . . .
LuxRender supports AMD 5000 series GPU (or better) if you want to consider something elese that will utilzie your HW. Apple is not very Nvidia freindly right now with their lineup if you haven't noticed.
Uhhhhhhh... Windows 10. IRAY. ?
Can I join the club?
Just decided the render I have had DAZ working on for the last 30 or so hours was done. (it just passed the 1 day mark and I earlier had a restart after some 6-7 hours when I needed to raise the number of iterations) Apparently updating the nvidia drivers while DAZ is rendering is not good... I did that earlier and now got an error message about something nvidia related when I pressed cancel on the render to stop it, resulting in DAZ crashing and no chance for me to save. Restarting DAZ still gave me no option to save it as the "save last render" option was all greyed out. So that's that. Windows 10 and Iray here too btw, but on a desktop computer.
I'm actually not upset though, as now I will do some needed changes I simply wouldn't have bothered with otherwise.
30 hours? 30 hours??? I would lose my mind if a render took that long. I get irritated if it takes longer than 10 minutes. The longest I've ever waited is 28 minutes and I was cussing and muttering the entire time. You guys must have superhuman levels of patience.
I'm genuinely curious about this because I've seen people post crazy high render times before and I've never really known why they have such lengthy render times. What is it that's causing it to take that long? I keep thinking it might be an iray thing, but I saw people posting render times that high before iray was a part of DS. I also thought maybe it's a system specs thing, but I don't think that's it either. I might be wrong, but from the post above I don't think my system is really any better than the OP's. I'm puzzled O_o
I think part of having long renders times depends on the computer setup. Most of us with longer render times don't have the high speed ultra snazy nVidia cards with umpteen million CUDA cores to render with so we muddle along with running CPU only. Part of it has to do with what we put in our scenes. Some things just take up more resources and take longer to render. My Longest render to date was 4 days, but I was also render something 6000 px by 4800 px because I was rendering large enough to print a poster. Other than that, my Winter Cabin render had a lot of things in it that caused longer render times. And, that was after I had to buy more memory because, before that, I had so many resource heavy objects in there that I kept crashing DS because it ran out of memory and still had to delete everything that the camera didn't see just to render it. I had been using 16 GB and that was fine until that scene and then I upped it to 32 GB.
I just go do other things when DS is taking a long time to render. Luckily, I have DS on my laptop so I can setup scenes on there if I want and then render later on my desktop when it is freed up. No big deal. I can also do other nonDS stuff on my desktop while DS is rendering, too, so I don't worry about it much.
I had to slap more memory into my laptop just to keep render times sane
I'm in that club too, but I can wait up to an hour or so. In fact I'm now in the habit of stopping renders when they look good and spot rendering the problem area/s, and pasting it in. A little area can hold up the whole render for a long time but can be spot rendered relatively quickly. Window/Panes/Tool Settings/[Spot Render] New Window.
depends on what you expect and on your final product. Lots of reflections, light sources, displacements, normals, shadows, and multiple high poly assets I build equal a lot more calculation than a render without those things and I can render in 10 minutes something simple for an idea but if I want to make something complex and that's how I prefer to work I cant at this time, not with Iray because I Nvidia doesn't make a GPU with the RAM I need for under $4,000 and not with a CPU PBR because I have way too much going on. If I rendered at 1920x1200 I could probably cut a few hours off, but I dont, I render at upwards of 3840x2400 for print So while you might consider this twice the resolution it's actually four times, so my renders will have to take that into consideration. If a render is going to take a few hours I set it to go off when I'm going to sleep. Even 10 minutes watching a render is watching paint dry to me.
Well, I had a rather intricate displacement map on the glass in this image. Ususally my renders take about 15 hours to complete.
Yep, things like that will do it, too. Things with a lot displacement, glass, reflection, shadows, etc. But, it looks SO good when done! And, Gerterasmus, that is REAL good! Well worth the 15 hour investment!
Thank you, @Knittingmommy
Yeah--any longer than 10-15 minutes rendering and I'd totally lose my sh*t and start ranting like Kanye West. Average renders for me are usually under 10 minutes but then again I use renders as a reference for drawing and not as a finished product, so I am obviosuly not as concerend about sub surface scatter settings or other settings to make the render ultra-realistic that can add to the time. But what are you guys rendering that could take four days non-stop--some kind of epic Ben Hur chariot race with an entire colisseum full of Genesis figures? A re-created battle scene from the movie 300? I'd lose my freaking mind.
so your not allone, complicated stuff takes, a long time
or equipment that requires a hill of money
Well, I have my laptop for retouching photos and photo manipulation. DAZ is just a pass time.
Only if you keep the render window open.
No, it doesn't have to be any epic scenes. Attached is a render I was working on for the January new user contest. Looks simple enough, doesn't it? If memory serves me right the render is less than 1% converged and that was after a whole night of rendering. Based on those numbers I got to the conclusion it would take about a month to get it rendered... Needless to say, I didn't try that. I put the girls in an outdoors scene instead and it significantly shortened the render time, even though I think it still took a full day to render (can't remember).
I remember that, Isidorn. Not sure what you had going on in there, but something was causing the long render time. Did you ever go back and try to render each element separately to see what was taking the longest time? Although, I have to day, I did like your final scene.
-
I really have no idea why that scene would take that long. Could be a fibermesh hair in there, but the rest looks not very heavy duty, even with the emitting light/s you seem to be using. Render settings too high? This has got me stumped.
Thanks Knittingmommy!
I never returned to it after I got the contest entry done, though it sounds like it could be interesting to disect the scene as you suggest. But that will be for a day when I don't have a number of renders in my head that I want to do.
As for time thieves, I'm fairly sure I had render quality set to 2 for that render, as I like to do that for my "serious" renders. It will obviously add time to the render. Having only really used Iray I don't really mind long render times, especially if they keep within 24 hours. I just let it render while I sleep/am at work/do other stuff. When something renders fast I gladly accept it as a pleasant surprise. Speaking of which, in contrast to the marathon time renders, the "busiest" scene I've ever made (it had my computer constantly crying about lack of memory while I was setting it up) rendered in 15-20 minutes. See attachment.
The biggest difference between these two renders I think, would be that most, if not everything, in this was older things I just used the Iray uber shader on and the environment/lights are just a HDRI, while the schoolgirls render had many newer products with their own proper Iray materials, and of course was an indoor scene.
Reflections make my 980ti cry; cpu only I'd be sobbing like a baby too. (Especially if there is subsurf in there too - some characters have it, and some don't.
I stopped two identical renders as soon as they went over 90% convergence; the only difference between the two was the skin on one character had scatter and transmit, and the other scatter only; they were a custom skin I'm doing so this was litterally the only difference. I loaded up two instances of Daz, and started a render first and stopped it for both Daz instances so there isn't time taken transfering the textures and geometry. They were very simple scene; figure (no hair), swimsuit and an HDRI lighting.
Finished Rendering - 90.49% & 90.57
Total Rendering Time: 1 minutes 7.27 seconds & 7.52 seconds
Finished Rendering - 90.51% & 90.6
Total Rendering Time: 1 minutes 17.91 seconds & 17.24 seconds
As an aside:
As I closed down the renders and then Daz studio instances, GPUz showed memory usage dropping.
1963 > 1620 >
Whilst Daz Studios were still open 668MB was still showing in use, and closing one went from: 668 > 333MB