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
If I might be allowed a simple observation without sounding like an IRay hater, it is this: why not try Reality/Luxrender just for indoor scenes? I bought a GTX970 recently for the sole purpose of using IRay. I soon discovered the problem with indoor scenes and, as most of my scenes are indoors, I returned the GTX970 to Amazon for a refund (got the refund, no problem).
Most of my indoor scenes, with a couple of clothed figures, take about an hour. I often utilise an older Windows 10 PC (16GB RAM with a 2011vintage i7 CPU) as a Luxrender network node so I have the render running on my iMac and PC at the same time (the PC was the one I temporarily upgraded with the GTX970 before returning it). For example, I have Stonemason's lovely Contemporary Living home which has acres of glass but renders beautifully and quickly in Luxrender CPU+boost mode.
Reality is still on sale - isn't it worth a try?
...as I mentioned, type of lighting can also make a difference. For example, been working on an outdoor night scene. Fairly simple, one character, one prop, Stonemason's Darkside of the City, and a building for his Utopia Cityscpe Blocks. Set the Sun-Sky and ewnvironment intensity to get the basic moonlit effect I wanted. Ran a test render and it took about 6 minutes. Added only two emissive objects off camera, and it's been sitting at 91.98% convergence for a while with the total render time so far of 2 hrs and 20 minutes and a few fireflies in the hair that haven't cleared.up yet.
I have it, but got used to IRAY as I was waiting for something to be fixed iirc.
They all do the same job; and all requre time be spent learning how to use them. I'm at the stage with IRAY that I get pretty much what I want, and will on occasions render much larger image size then reduce it later to get rid of grain; it worked in Luxrender too.
You're used to Reality, which means you get results you want quicker.
I've found it pays to check what props, assets, lights etc are off camera, and hide whatever you can get away with not being there. I rendered a scene a few days ago that took 36 hours to reach 20% convergence on my laptop. There was just one G3M, a bunch of lights & props in a large room. Yesterday I hid everything that was out of sight of the camera (which included a load of glass and metal reflective surfaces). When I retried the render, it reached 60% after just 2 hours!
So are you saying there is no issue with render times for indoor scenes in IRay? That was the point I was getting at - not that one is better than the other overall.
This is the new version of the render that crashed and got me to join this thread.
1 day, 8 hours, 35 minutes and 66k+ iterations with 95,72% converged. Render quality set to 2 and size is 1187x1920. Everything on the set not seen in the picture was deleted.
Products used (and postworked version) can be found in my gallery
7% after 10 hours here. Everything is hidden which isn't directly in sight. My first guess was the 4gb gpu ram wasn't enough and it was running on the cpu but from the system workload it should be running on the gpu. Looks like 12 emissive lights are to much if one wants reasonable progress.
I didn't take it as that, I was pointing out that you tried Iray, but you were more experienced with something else; certain aspects all renderes find aspects that take longer. Iray certainly takes longer to render when there is lots of glossy surfaces, and subsurface can also add something. But also experience counts for something too.
Thought I'd attempt a comparison with similar materials, etc., using Luxrender via Reality. I didn't spend any significant time setting up the clothes and materials or hiding non-visible content - just dropped the figure into the scene and rendered. This is the same dimensions (1187 x 1920) and has one mesh light and one IBL for the view outside the window. No postwork, no network render slave. Stopped at 24 minutes as can be seen in the Luxrender stats.
Just thrown away 10 hours of rendering (got to 35%) when I spotted the good old "High Heels Foot Pose Error" (that's the kind of thing I never spot in small test renders)
Ho hum!
Assuming your using Iray, wouldn't you just let it finish and spot render the small problem part (the feet), and then composite it in? I'm aware that Lux can't do spot renders.
As for removing out of scene objects. I guess removing out of sight stuff removes the interactions that in-scene elements have with objects not in view with respect to reflections and light bounces etc. The problem is not so much the out-of-view stuff consuming resources due to their presence, but the off scene stuff adding to render calculations when they interact with in-view objects, due to reflections, radiosity etc. Notwithstanding that often you need these interactions or your scene will not look right and reflections will not reflect anything but the DS void.
Yes, spot renders and quick previews would be welcome additions to Luxrender.
The problem I have with that, is getting the same resolution for the part I need to spot render as for the full render.
The spot render, in theory, should render the same as if it was part of the whole scene with respect to dimensions, resolution, etc. But I have noticed that using "spot render to new scene", the result in not exactly in the same position and not always exactly the same dimensions as it would be in the full scene. Although it doesn't take much work to fix those problems.
The figure had to be repositioned, since her feet were below ground after the pose was corrected, so that would have made the spot render at least 20% of the frame. Plus I took the opportunity, since I'd stopped the render, to change a few other things.
I must have broken something though, cos I left the render running all day while I was out, and after 11 hours it's only reached 2%! Bugger! At that rate it'll take weeks! (no the machine didn't sleep - I have a little app called "Caffeine" that prevents it). :(
...this is why I always set up and pose the characters separately, run test renders with a simple background (which take a lot less time), then when everything looks right, insert them into the scene. Used to working in Bryce where you have to pre-pose your characters before importing them.
Sounds like the/one of the GPUs stopped working, maybe still open render(s) have blocked to much VRAM.
Did you have a look in the logfile?
I just finished a render, 40 hrs. I have CPU only and 16 GB of memory. 24 hours isn't unusual for a few of my renders. I don't worry about it and just go do something else while it works in the background.
This is the 40 hour one. One spot, an HDRI and Emissive shader on the candle flames.
Dinner at Mog Ruith
Click on image for full size.
I am joining this club today.........Had a render running for 15hours now and it is at 3%.
Sadly I may have to cancel it, because I will need this computer for work today and can't leave it runnin :(
Rawn
I run 8gig on my laptop, 4gig was not doing it.
Also, I run renders at night after I go to sleep.
Usually done by morning.
Cancel it, can resume it.
I cancelled it....and good thing I did.....made a BIG mistake *snicker*
The reason it took so long is......the shot was supposed to be around 3000px wide........but somehow the render got set to 10,000px wide....so BIG difference LOL
Rawn
LOL
Being a total amatuer it's a relief seeing things like this happening to the professionals too.
Yes it really sucks when you have a 20 hr render and realize afterwards that it was the wrong size. Has happened to me several times.
Yeah...happens to everyone...we are all human....even PA's :P
15% after 46 hours on the restart. It's not gonna be promo quality, but I may let it get to a decent level out of sheer bloody mindedness. The only other thing I'd be using DS for is another pigging render...
Still no wiser why the first run was so much quicker. The log doesn't show anything - same number of lights, same numbers etc. No usable GPU on this Mac, so CPU-only. There's 24 GB system RAM, and DS is only using 12GB according to activity monitor CPU usage is at 407% (i5 @ 3.2 GHz)
I think the main problem is that you only have 8GB RAM.
I run into this problem a few days ago. I create a scene with 2 G2F and 1 G3F (incl. clothing and items) and a Hallway and suddenly DAZ closes because "not enough RAM."
I wonder because I did scenes with 5 Genesis Figures (incl. clothing, items and Buildings) before on my old Laptop with ony 4GB RAM and it worked well but now with double RAM and a better NVIDIA it doesn`t work with only 3 Figures.
In the next few days I`m going to fit in another 16GB RAM to have at last 24GB RAM and hope it is enough.
I think the longest render time I've had was in Carrara for one of the forum contests- the mountains took 4 days.