Can't Render, Won't Buy
marble
Posts: 7,500
Is it time for DAZ to make some kind of statement that Luxrender is no longer a viable render engine for their product line?
I'm finding that I'm returning more and more purchases because they just don't render using Reality and Lux. Used to be that Reality would convert 3Delight materials and, after some tweaking, realistic results could be had with reasonable render times. Lately I've bought interesting products that look good in the promo only to find that I can't render them - Reality just can't handle the conversion even when 3Delight material versions are included.
Today I finally got around to trying a product called The Washroom. I diligently spent an hour setting up the 3Delight versions of the mats in Reality and ran the render. After an hour, I had a tiny square of rendered scene in the bottom left corner of the render. Probably about 2 percent. By comparison, Stonemason's Contemporary Living, with far more objects and lots of glass and shady corners, is almost perfect after an hour.
I had to stop buying products produced in collaboration with David Brinnen bacause of similar issues to those I'm having with The Washroom. Just not compatible with Luxrender. Recently, I've had issues with clothing too and Sales Support are clearly getting suspicious of my refund requests. This time they suggested I seek support from Spheric Labs because I keep mentioning Luxrender. Clearly they confused Luxrender with Luxus (by Spheric Labs). I use Reality.
I feel I am being forced to either invest in a PC with a beefy GPU (I have an iMac which can't be upgraded), go back to 3Delight or give up on this hobby. Vendors will not test in Luxrender just as many do not test on a Mac. It used to be a pretty safe bet that products would work anyway (both with Lux and Mac) but not these days.
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Comments
The problem you describe is most likely related to Reality, check with Paolo at their forums.
My guess is that the conversion to LuxMaterials fails or make bad decisions.
I stopped using Luxus and Reality when Iray came around. I render with Iray much faster on my "non nVidia" Mac than with LuxRender, and on the Mac where I put in an nVidia card, it's really fast.
Well, I have had long conversations with Paolo over the years - I use the same username over there. Your guess is my guess too and I would use Iray if I could get an indoor scene to render inside an hour (which I usually can - or could - with Luxrender in CPU acclerated mode). But my Iray experience with indoor scenes is a grainy image after an overnight render. I've never let one go for longer because I can't tolerate 3 day renders.
Have you tried applying some of the default materials that come - I believe - with reality, just to see if the mesh itself works? If so then you can try reworking those materials where the defaults don't give the ideal result. I don't have Reality to test.
Hi Richard. Yes, I have lots of experience with Reality and am pretty good at tweaking the materials to suit Luxrender. So, for example, Reality often sets a default material of "Glossy" when it should be Metal or Glass. I change them in the Reality Materials Editor - which is a learning curve in itself and has been a big part of the discussions over at the Reality forums.
The problem is that materials are getting more sophisticated with the advent of IRay. I suspect that not much effort put into the 3Delight versions. I'm currently running an IRay render (CPU only) of The Washroom and, after almost an hour it is still very grainy and the Iray progress has reached 7.7% - not very impressive. Nevertheless, it looks much further ahead than the Luxrender version would have been after an hour. But that is only for this products. Some work like a dream in Luxrender - especially anything by Stonemason or Jack Tomalin. Most figure skins are quick via Reality too as are most of the older clothing. Some of the newer - Iray focused - clothing is a problem now.
You and I had a similar discussion about IRay when I bought and tried a GTX970 in my spare PC. Again, I could not get decent render speeds for an indoor scene, even following your advice. My long term plans are to sell my iMac and build a new PC - hopefully with a NVidia Pascal card (or a GTX980 if the price has come down significantly). Then I will give IRay my full attention.
Marble try to let your Iray render run a bit longer. The Convergence % is not linear. The First 10% takes quite long then it gets much much quicker until 90 % then it gets slower again more nad more as you converge against 100%.
Normaly renders in the 50% - 90% range look really good allready and it is very possible that getting there is not taking another hour.
Just wondering... are you trying to render Iray indoor scenery using the default render settings? Please remember to take a look under Render Settings/Tone Mapping... the default film speed is 100. A good indoor render is going to require either a massive amount of light, or a more "real world" choice for film speed... especially if there are no big windows letting light through. If you are familiar with Reality then you must also be familiar with camera and exposure settings. Try an indoor render with a film speed of 400 and see the difference in both quality and speed.
Chuck ;)
What helped me was something I learned from a book about 3D lighting. There it said that you could get a better result by placing a mesh light (like a plane) directly in the window, to simulate sunlight. It worked very good on some sets which wouldn't light properly even with using HDRI and Sunlight.
The other option would be to really crank up the light's lumens, which usually speeds up renders quite a bit.
If you do have "glass" windows that are not seen in the render, you can also save render time by making the glass invisible.
I don't think that the tonemapping in IRay can be much different to Luxrender. I used similar settings.
1. I created a 1m Plane Primitive and applied the Iray emmisive shader. Multiplied the default luminosity by 10.
2. Set to Scene Only because I'm not using the dome.
3. Started the render which was washed-out by overexposure. Popped out the tonemapping side-panel and adjusted the ISO, F-Stop, etc. until it looked right.
In my experience Iray is really fast for exactly architectural indoor scenes ( they targeted and marketed Iray for architects in the beginning)...
Do light the WHOLE room correct - not just your render/camera view !
And you should get a very fast indoor scene render
Thank you for this but I am having trouble understanding the first point: what values and what geometry, where? In Reality, when I added spheres, etc, to act as lights (convert to light option) it slowed the render down drastically. I was told this was because the geometry has lots of faces, each of which counts as a separate light and is calculated as such. So I avoided this practise.
In Reality, I usually have the indoor lights at no higher than 100W (I am not used to working in Lumens and the tutorials are a bit vague on this point.
What does the architectural sampler do? At the moment (by default) both Arch and Caustic are off.
In the parameters settings for the photometric lights you will find a "Light Geometry" dropdown list... there you can select cube, sphere, tube, circle, or rectangle. The size of the geometry can be set just below that.
Ahh - thanks. Didn't know that :)
Iray is optimized to layer and BLEND lights (this is actually one of their selling points to architects/designers- it will render in the same speed dosent matter how many lights are in the scene and not slow down. It is opposite - Iray slows down when there are parts in your room (also out of view) which are under/or overexposured! that's why tonemapping should be the LAST which you adjust.. try to make the room perfect with the standard camera values adding lights to your scene FIRST (in full 3d space)!
1500lumens (DAZ standard) is about the power of a 100W incandesecent bulb.
The whole development of Iray seems to go to Virtual Reality (360c) solutions targeted to Architectural and Design visualisation in real time. Using accurate lights and materials (simulations).. that's what they optimize iray for. As soon as we use non phyiscal values or out of world exposures/tonemapping - iray slows down because of this.
copy paste: The Iray Photoreal architectural sampler can be used to improve the convergence speed of difficult scenes, as such complicated lighting scenarios can then be handled much more efficiently with this sampler. A common scene type that profits from this specialized sampler is indoor architectural visualization, especially if it is mostly illuminated by indirect lighting. One specific example would be a room that is illuminated by light sources placed in neighboring rooms or by outdoor lighting (such as the Sun and Sky model) shining through a small window.
http://www.migenius.com/doc/realityserver/latest/resources/general/iray/manual/concept/architectural_sampler.html
Don't see why. I render in Luxrender 90% of the time and don't have the issues you are having. Whenever I feel there might be a material conversion issue, I just go back into DS and strip everything out of the mesh, then reload it in reality and add them manually. Only done this a couple of times and it never really made a difference, so I don't believe it has anything to do with the materials
AndyGrimm - thank you for taking the trouble to explain. I will experiment more and see if I can improve matters.
I've just had DAZ Support advising me to contact Spheric Labs again - of course, none of this has anything to do with Spheric Labs or Luxus.
FSMCDesigns - I think you must be lucky in your choice of purchases. There was a long discussion when the Reality Forum was at RDNA and some very experienced users were replicating the problems I was having with the David Brinnen sets. I've since come across more products. Of course, it all comes down to tolerance. I don't want to wait more than an hour - two at the outsde - for a room render. I usually have a story line with 30 or more scenes. Waiting 12 or more hours per render would make this hobby non-viable for me.
WHen I started learning Iray I found it best to ignor what I learned of Reality and Luxrender.
AndyGrimm, if you are still looking in ... is it better to enclose the room as much as possible or should I make walls and ceilings invisible where possible? I notice some vendors put the whole set inside a blackout box whereas I've read that render engines don't calculate rays that can project to infinity.
Otherwise, does anyone know of a more recent DAZ/Iray tutorial than the ones that appeared (thinking of the SickleYield one) shortly after IRau was introduced.
Full tutorials, no. But you may find these useful
http://dordiales.deviantart.com/art/Tutorial-Iray-02-581877697
http://dordiales.deviantart.com/art/Tutorial-Iray-578591695
http://dordiales.deviantart.com/art/Iray-Uber-Base-Skin-583452555
Also, for your Iray render settings, disable the noise filter which should make your renders go twice as fast and also do not use the architural sampler unless your doing indoors and really want the hyper realistic looking lighting as it takes twice as long to render then not having it enabled.
When adjusting your exposure, just adjust the exposure setting. Lower numerical values means more light and higher numbers mean less light
Enable the causics sampler when your using glass and water or gem stones.
Since Iray in fully integrated into Daz Studio, if you need to do little fixes you can spot render to a new window (tool tab settings) just that small area that needs fixing and Iray will render super fast then if you redo the whole thing.
I would set my max samples to 15000 and time to around 30000 with a 98% convergence so that the render does not finish too soon. Its better to let it run until it looks good to you. Also set render quality to two.
For your environment settings, when using the dome or sun and sky you can rotate your dome to move the sun without chaning the time of day or rotating your set.. Alternativly, you can also use a light or an object as a sun intead and move it.
Thanks for the excellent links and tips, Mattymanx. There seems to be some disagreement between you and AndyGrimm about switching on the Architectural Sampler. For the record, 90% of my scenes are indoors and 50% (ish) would have windows or glass doors. The big disadvantage (apart from having no capable GPU) is the inability to render as a separate process - this is part of my workflow with Lux: start a render and get on with the next scene.
I posted last sommer (learning while doing) some iray tips for lights and camera here... http://de.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/59100/using-other-light-sources-in-iray/p1 ...
Meanwhile and after i rendered some hundreds iray material marbles and test scenes....
Avoid Zeros and Ones as parameters! there is no material with roughness zero or glossiness 1 - water dosent have a refraction weight 1 ...using such values result in "wrong physic" and often also slows down the render speed.
Unfortunately some of the standard DAZ iray shaders are bad examples! (glossines 1 and refraction weight 1)...Image one (DAZ water shader).. (no shadows on the surface!) and a correction (image two= the surface cast shadows now)
A closed room with enough light and correct wall materials should render fast. the architectural sampler does what it says - it improves a difficult indoor scene with windows and indirect light (also speed).. but it slows down a simple scene.
I'm sorry to say I can't shed any light on your rendering issues with Reality or Lux, I test my scenes in Octane and ForbiddenWhispers does the 3D delight/Iray side of things. However, I can tell you why I put a blackout box around my interior models. There is some issue with 3Ddelights render engine where withtout the blackout the very corners of the rooms were lighting up, as if there was a gap - which there wasn't, but it was happening. The blackout box fixes that. I didn't come up with that solution, that was just what was suggested. I've not seen anything similar happen in Octane, or any of the Iray renders I've seen. If Reality and Lux are CPU based then I can understand how there might be some issues with noise. Trying to light interior scenes in Bryce using Bryce's TA renderer (which is similar to Octane and Iray's engine) you need to use very large light sources (area) to overcome noise issues and even then long render times are normal. Which is of course undesireable. To overcome this, my strategy has been to drop in 2D light emitters off camera to fill in for ambient light which would be scattered off the smaller light sources. Much as photographres use those great big reflective discs - this works OK but they can show up in reflections... so how well this works depends on the scene.
if you render with a quad or better CPU just start a second instance of DAZ and set up a scene there while rendering the other ....
And just as a side note even the cheapest entry cuda card is 2 - 4 times as fast as a older i7 CPU ... ( i use a 710 entry labtop GTX with only 96 cudas.. just tested... 3 times faster then the CPU.
Its ok, I should have stated that I am still learning so my info is just what little I know atm. I have no doubt that Andy know more since he has been using it longer
Thank you again AndyGrimm - I'll certainly follow your link and yout further tips.
David Brinnen, I'm pleased you have added your comments as I had mentioned that your sets have been a particular problem for me with Reality/Luxrender. At the time, I did try the same scenes with both 3Delight and Iray (CPU) and the render times were much as I would expect. So Luxrender seems to be the real problem.
What I fail to understand is why I can get such quick renders with Jack Tomalin and Stonemason sets - as I said, the Stonemason Contemporary Living product has so much content and such a lot of glass but renders almost noise-free within an hour in Luxrender. I'm talking Luxrender in CPU mode of course.
By the way, I have seen that odd thing with light coming in at the corners. And I do mean in Luxrender although I don't remember whether it was with your sets.
Unfortunately I can't add a card to my iMac. One day I plan to sell the iMac and build a new PC (much as I dislike Windows). If that happens I'll certainly go for a decent GPU although I probably couldn't afford more than a GTX970. I wouldn't have thought a cheap entry level card would have the requisite 4GB VRAM, however.
I don't think it is possible to start two instances of DAZ Studio on a Mac. Certainly hasn't worked when I have tried it.
This can be achieved in DS by simply opening a second instance of DS. I often have 2 DS's running, one to render in iRay, whilst building a scene in the second. Naturally if your machine has limited memory this solution is less useful.
Edit: Oops, just seen this has already been said. I am not sure why you can not open a second instance in MAC OS. I did a quick google search, and at least one person says that it is possible:
http://osxdaily.com/2011/05/11/multiple-instances-application-mac/
I hadn't thought of starting from the command line which is embarrasing since I used to run courses on Unix command line many years ago. All the pretty GUIs make an old man lazy.