Beware newer IRay scenes and assets
tring01
Posts: 305
Just commenting that I've noticed a trend lately of indepent developers selling more and more complex (and gorgeous) scenery assets for IRay. The problem I've had with about six scenes that I've bought over the last few months is that they're unusable unless you have a super top end PC to render them. When IRay first apeared the scenes I bought rendered in a few minutes even with my older GPU with only 2 gigs of RAM. I've run test renders lately on new IRay optimized scenes that ran the full 2 hours and didn't even make it to 50% complete. Just the basic scene preload! I thought the first one was a fluke, but I've now experienced this with three other scenes I picked up on sale just a week or so ago.
Sadly, since an ultra hight level new machine is not in my budget, I'm being forced back to using 3Delight only.
Just a casual warning. If some new IRay scene catches your eye - the kind that looks too gorgeous to believe - be wary. Likely you need a workstation grade machine to render it. And Daz does't give refunds (not to my knowledge anyway).
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
There's a 30-day refund at Daz.
They offer a 30 day return and refund.
Edit: Beat by the Duck. Cross posting rules!
... Yeah. Seriously, Daz has one of the most liberal refund policies of any place I've ever seen.
Also, Daz will often refund the price difference if an item goes on sale during that 30 days. I think, technically, you're supposed to return the item and then buy it again at the sale price, but since I've only done this once, they graciously refunded me the price difference as store credit (which was my suggestion).
I recall when iRay was first launched one of the DAZ guys was saying how he recommended a card of at least 4GB for iRay usage. I am sure that many of the PAs check to see how much GPU RAM is needed to render their sets, but whether they are aiming to be under 2GB or under 4GB (or higher) will vary from vendor to vendor.
Thanks! I will have to let the Daz folks know that the next time I put in a ticket for something like this. Last time I did I was given store credit. Guess I wasn't talking to the right person.
The default refund is store credit. If you want a different method you have to specifically ask in your request.
If you have to request a refund in the future, be sure to state that you'd like the refund applied to the card or other source to which the original purchase was made. It seems to default to store credit if you don't specify.
Thanks. Actually, store credit is probably fine for me too. I had no idea Daz allows returns of products just because I didn't like them for some reason. The only reason I've returned things in the past was because I accidentally ordered something twice. I've just submitted a few new return requests.
Did I miss this policy posting? Is it on their website somewhere and I just didn't see it? For most retailers a liberal return policy is a strong selling point. Ah well. Hopefully all ends well. Life goes on.
As an aside, I heavily *heavily* recommend people pick up decimator to reduce the number of polys on the screen. Hiding/deleting elements not used in the render is a great way to reduce the VRAM usage too.
If you are on a system with an integrated graphics port as well, you can switch your main monitor to it such that it frees up more VRAM for your render :)
Yeah, you can return stuff for ANY reason. Any at all.
And store credit is just easiest, I think, because they can handle it themselves. Otherwise they have to go through your CC/Paypal stuff and process it formally.
People don't turn off/hide people body parts under clothes, or take out things that aren't in the scene. If it isn't in the viewport, get rid of it!
Decimating or removing geometry will save some VRAM, but for most scenes the bulk of the memory is being used by texture maps, so reducing geometry means your chipping away at the smaller proportion. If you hide a characters hip, but part of the chest is still seen, then all of the torso maps are being loaded in, so the actual gain is quite small (in relative terms at least).
Having said that, if the same piece of complex geometry appears very many times in the scene, for example a tree, or a blade of grass, but they share the same texture map (s), then likely geometry is taking up a fair amount of the memory. In this case the best solution is to ensure the identical geometry are instances, not just duplicates.
Instances are the way to go with repetative geometry...
Overall, geometry is 'cheap' in Iray...what you see is what you get, memory wise. Textures, when being used get decompressed and use about 3 bytes per pixel, so if you have 4K texture maps, each one will use about 50 MB of memory (doesn't matter if it's greyscale or full color).
You don't have to stop your render at 2 hrs. You can set how long you want it to run in the render settings. I have mine set at 10hrs and sometimes it's barely enough, but at least you get decent renders.
I should have added, that if you start using complex objects, like a figure, with heavy sub-division, ie:3 or more, then these are going to use up a lot of VRAM for their geometry.
There's also an instancing setting in Iray, with values of either Speed or Memory. Here's a page that (roughly) describes it, though their terms are not what D|S uses.
http://www.migenius.com/doc/realityserver/4.3/resources/general/iray/manual/concept/instancing.html
Off means Speed (at the expense of memory), On means Memory (at the expense of speed).
I've noticed one thing in common with all these products that crush my GPU is reflective surfaces. Speficially, polished marble and glass. I stay the heck away from any scene with those kind of elments now. One scene was a simple box apartment scene, but it had lots of polished reflective surfaces and glass. It absolutely crushed my GPU. I tried to change all the shaders to non-reflective, but it didn't seem to help. Still have no idea what's up with that product.
I've ran into scenes lately that are just one piece. Very difficult to hide undesirable parts and sometimes even to get a camera in to take a pic. Wish more sets were modular with hideable ceilings doors and furniture.
I wonder if changing the texture compression settings within the Iray renderer would change anything...
Not a lot. Unless the textures are smaller than the low limit, they are all being compressed. But compression has limits, and big images still take up a lot of memory. And when a single figure (with clothes and hair) can have 50-70 image maps......that's a LOT of VRAM, even with compression.
I've ended up returning two like this lately - monolithic, walls part of the floor, appaent lights just part of the texture, and other similar issues.
Yeah it's sooooo much better when it's separated.
You can use the geometry editor but that's some work. I really appreciate the detail more complex scenes - the ones that don't have it look at least 10 years old.
I admit I may have to return a recently purchased set. It renders so nicely but I cannot maneuver around in the set because it is all welded together. Even the chairs and furniture making it so tough to get a render and to pose figures. It is a beautiful sci-fi set but I find it really hard to pose my figures inside since I have to move it rather than my figures to get the image centered and since I can't drop the walls or move furniture it is tough to position the figures inside it since the rooms are pretty small and furniture one size. Yes I can use geometry editor if I can manage to grab the model. But that seems a lot of work.
Did you try changing the focal length settings to see if the camera will fit? I had issues like that for some corridor Sci-Fi scenes and it was awful trying to properly compose a scene. The focal length worked to a certain extent, but not the angle I actually wanted.
One of the big problems I have with navigating heavy sets in DAZ3d is that the wireframe modes are almost unusable to me. TBH, I haven't fiddled with them to see if I can get different color settings, but the few times I've tried to use them I've ended up with a big glowy viewport with almost no discernable detail.
You could change some of the shaders on those textures to see if that helps. A 4k texture on a small piece of glass is overkill, especially from far away.
Speaking of, is there a texture optimizer for Daz? It would be nice to have one that could make the textures smaller for just the scene you are on, rather than a permenent reduction. Or a product that could create textures of different sizes that you can choose from. I bring up games a lot, but that's because that's where I come from. There is a texture optimizer for Skyrim that lets you resize all the texture files in the whole game. This is very handy for mods, since many have monster size textures that run up vram. Not only does it increase performance, but it is very hard to spot the difference. If this doesn't exist already, it sure would be a cool product idea.
Thanks. I'll have to try that. In general there is only so far I'm willing to adapt my process for content. I wish pa's wouldn't make such unwieldy difficult to use sets...
I appreciate the warning. Cheers!
I love those big complicated resource hungry scenes. It might be good if there was an indication in the product description of how much memory the default full scene uses. Or would that be a problem because of variables?