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...I had a 3DL render job take 16 h 30m but I was also using UE with 5 frames of motion blur and the character had two instances of Mairy/3Dream's Bolina Hair. which is long and loaded with transmaps.
Exactly.
I can attest to render times being drastically different at different render qualities! Since you couldn't see any difference, I'll keep my Render Quality at around 1.5, then. That is what I settled upon as a compromise between render time and quality. It could drop all the way back to 1, then. I'm doing a "Forgotten Tunnel" scene with 2 G3F figures at about 1440 x 960 (whatever 16:9 makes it with 1440 horizontal pixels) and it should finish within about 2 hours at Render Quality 1.5. Not rendering scenes with water helps a lot, but I'm a fan of water...... I turned the stones off and simply added one single large stone from another set to fit the scene idea.
I found that gray areas (like reduced light shadows) take a lot of rendering effort and have started to make more black spaces that don't seem to have to render. Props, etc, I now turn off for rendering in the properties menu, not just the top right Scene Window as something wanted to render even though the eye was shut and it didn't show up in editing.
Next up is separating the background from foreground items and then PP to put them back later. I change POV of the scene often, so I'm going to have to experiment to see if that makes a big difference in natural appearance.
3DL is certainly under serious consideration for scenes where the texture of the figures isn't that noticeable. I still want to get Bryce and DS communicating properly as it renders quite nicely and quickly, even with a lot of texture detail. DS sees and sends to Bryce, but not the other way around and suggestions on other threads haven't worked for me. I found Bryce and water to really work well on the laptop, but if a figure or prop wasn't posed just right, I had to go back to DS and start all over and re-import from scratch. It's a Bridge issue where Bryce doesn't see anything newer than DS 3.x and registry changes haven't helped, nor has uninstalling DS and reinstalling it so it goes in after Bryce.
The desktop that died has an nvidia GPU, a middle low end one, but one that allowed me to use MS Flight Similator with all the visual eye candy active with no delay or jitter - MSFS, yes, I'm telling on the age of that computer. Except for the fact that water slows rendering down so much, I'm impressed that the laptop does render as fast as it does with 2 G3F and a handful of props in the scene.
How would I resize textures? I've made a lot of presets for the characters and wardrobe and some props which get frequent use. As a fan of older things in various condition, I made a ratty paint job for an antique sedan I got, and am working on perfecting a material pattern for spotty rust instead of a general rusty body, but would like to see if it is possible to add a few dents here and there for the ones in really poor condition. Keeping it its original shiny finish and changing colors is easy, adding wear and tear isn't that easy. I'm not sure about resizing textures, though............
Don't forget to factor scale conversions into the equation...light parameters are based on area and when you change the area by a factor of 10,000 you start to get seemingly 'unreal' numbers.
If you mean ideas for other renders you want to play with you can actually cancel an iray render, create a new scene and render that scene, then resume the first one whern the second is done. You can do that with several iray renders if you like, lining them up in a queue and resume them when you want. You need to have enough RAM of course. I've only tested this with CPU rendering though, don't know if will work with GPU rendering.
Just remember that all canceled renders will get lost as soon as you shut down DS (at least I'm not aware of a way to save them and reopen them).
SLOW is the handicap, though. Whether or not it is hard is not really the question at all. Iray IS SLOW. If you do not have an Nvidia GPU, you are handicapping yourself with Iray. Period. Sure, there are indeed instances where 3DL can still take longer, but look at the scene kyoto kid described...that's kind of unusual there. How long would that same scene take with Iray on the same CPU??? Days? I shudder to even think about how long it might take.
Iray is cool and all, but it has SERIOUS drawbacks that alienate many people. All of which have been described in detail elsewhere.
Anyway,
At this time, there is not a handy texture resizer script built for Daz. Somebody was talking about one, but I don't know if it is planned for release. I happen to think it would be a real game changer and I happily drop cash for such a script if it did the process automatically, and let you swap easily. Until then, you will have to do it manually. There are programs out there that can resize pictures in batches. However, you will need to replace the textures yourself in Daz at the surface tab. It will take a while. But once you save your characters or scenes as presets or whatever, you will have an optimized set ready to go next time, and I promise you will be happier with your render speed. Key textures I would downsize: hair, hair, and hair. Take that hair down! There really is no need for 4000 pixel hair textures, IMO. Even if you think you went too low, you can always tile the hair (for most hairs, it should work.) Some shaders/presets offer tiling, they don't even need to be hair specific. Shoot, downsizing your hair textures will probably give you a massive boost by itself!
Oh, there is one more tip I can offer, the downsampling technique. Double the size of your scene from what you want your final render to be. Let it render to around 50-60%, stop it, and then use any image editor to resize the pic to the size you wanted. The resize process can blend in the grainy parts, resulting in a picture that would equal the original size rendered to 100%. It is often much faster to render a larger image to the 50-60% range than it is to render the smaller image to 100%. More details here: http://buerobewegt.com/quicktip-rendering-even-faster-in-iray/
This should help you, too. Since you don't have to worry about exceeding GPU memory since you don't have one, downsampling could help a lot. Give it a try.
..well that scene would never happen in Iray as it doesn't have motion blur.
If you are doing large format for gallery quality prints. keeping the everything, including hair, at its set resolution is important.
Re-sizing texture size in a 2D programme is tedious and can possibly result in accidental overwriting of the original texture file We really need this capability inside the Daz Programme.
...not sure which programmes do the batch thingie. It's saving the new files to the original folder which is where mistakes can happen, if you slip up you can easily end up overwriting the original texture file with the new one. Believe me, during a long work session, that kind of error is easy to make.
I don't usually do small size images except when running render tests. I am looking to do extremely large format renders for printing and framing so quality of detail is very important.
Fortunately it appears that the latest version of Iray in the latest Beta release is more efficient, in that (as I mentioned) even in CPU mode render performance has improved noticeably. Still need to get that memory upgrade to avoid having the process go into swap mode.
I don't feel handicapped at all sorry but most of my 3dl renders took hours and often went overnight, the advantages of Iray is that I actually spend less time. I find Iray a lot easier to light and the fact that you quickly get an overall view of how things will look means you don't waste hours waiting for renders only to realise that you really don't like the overall effect. If you don't have the hardware you don't have the hardware, so you need to work with what you have, personally I find the end results are more important than how long it took to get there. Yes I would love a nvidia card but the chances of me getting one that would actually be of any use are pretty non existent so I work with what I have and use what ever render engine I want.
If there are areas that need longer to render I find its pretty quick to finish the whole render and do an area render of that piece and put it together in photoshop.
Using Iray with CPU only the first one took 43 hours, Sun and Sky only; the second has two extra items and I added a Spotlight as the Sun Node, Geometry - Disc and 550000 lumens and took just over 15 hours.
Click on image for full size.
Click on image for full size.
...3DL also has a progressive render mode just like Iray, good to use for tests so you don't have to wait for the proces to complete.
I've actually cancelled a render and saved what it had done up to then. You have the option to save it before closing the render window. I didn't know you could go back to one that was cancelled (unless you don't close the window - never thought of that). I'm limited to CPU rendering at this time, anyway so that's good advice. I saw something about batch rendering, I believe and will have to look further. I lost an 8 hour+ render the other night due to Windows 10 rebooting for an update. The later versions don't allow you to decide to reboot when you want. Time to go back to Linux and Wine........
...that's just one of the reasons why I am sticking with W7. The only Edition of 10 that lets you fully manage updating like in past versions is Enterprise and for a single user who doesn't also own a business, that is an expensive solution.
I'll have to check into downsizing hair texture, then.The link has some good things to consider and I'm giving it a try shortly. That may help me get my water renders down to a halfway acceptable time.
I'll probably find it after asking: Is there a way in DS to reduce textures? I haven't gotten under the hood too much texture wise. I find hair does seem to take a lot of time to render while the rest of the scene looks pretty good.
I don't feel so slow then at some of my render times even though you most likely have more horsepower under the hood than my current laptop. I've been playing with lighting now and have found it making a tremendous difference in render times. One render went way overboard with brightness and washed the scene out, even adjusting EV didn't salvage it, so I'm looking for the happy middle point.
My W7 computer is a sloth...... I may give it new life with Linux some day, but it still wouldn't handle DS. The one I use for DS is made to handle business software and connect to projectors for business and portable media playing uses. I sure can't justify Enterprise Edition either!
I'm happy that the suggestions and advice here have helped speed things up quite a bit rendering wise.
...mine isn't bad, just that it doesn't have a GPU with enough memory to render with. Of course I have no desktop gadgets and turned off the Aero 3D interface on day one. I also stay offline when working to preserve as much in processor/memory resources as I can. Will be a lot nicer when I get that 24 GB tri channel memory kit.
I use a W7, i5 laptop with 16GB of memory and Intel 4000 graphics so not that much oomph :)
...seeing your work, how long do they take to render?
So I tested out the new DS public beta tonight, version 4.9.3.117, and I have to say its much faster for me. Now mind you results will vary as I belive part of the speed increase is due to the scaling but I tested it by rerendering this image - http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/210111 - and on the official built it took 11m 8s where as in the beta it was only 5m 24s to reach 99% convergence at render quality 3.
I did not test it for single card or CPU but I would still recommend giving it a go since it can be installed along side the official build with out over writing it. Any speed increase is a good one.
...as I mentioned above, there is a difference for CPU rendering as well.
I used the same scene changed none of the settings and got the following results
4.8 general release: 1h, 29m, 29s
4.9.3.117 Beta: 51m 44s
...same here could never afford PS and not into the concept of "software by subscription".
Also not on Connect as I don't like being online when I am working (another reason I do not like cloud based software). I only have 10.7 GB of physical memory to work with and a 1 GB GPU, so I need to conserve system resources.
Downloaded the Windows Resizer and will give it a try tomorrow, I'm still on W7.so hopefully it will work. It's doing it one file at a time which is where things become get tedious, especially in a busy scene that uses lots of textures, and that is when mistakes can happen.
That can vary quite a bit from 30 minutes to 2 days ( I've had a couple go longer than that but I was doing either another render in 4.8 or Bryce in the background at the same time : )
These 4 are :- 25 minutes, 27 minutes, 27 minutes and 32 minutes. The last one is including a Fiberhair bat and Bloom filter on. All the lighting is dome and scene with the Skydome that came with The Cemetry, which seemes to be a half dome, with emissive light and cutout at '0', emissive eyes and moon object.
Gimp has a plugin to batch resize images.
Try Texture Atlas in DAZ Studio to reduce your textures: https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207530243-How-to-Add-the-Texture-Atlas-Icon-to-Studio
Ah, I missed that. Good to know there is an improvement there too.
I try to save the CPU as much as possible for what I want the computer to do. I'm using the rendering laptop right now hoping that ay updates will take place and I plan to reboot before firing up DS. The replacement computer will certainly have horsepower for graphics, whenever I get it - which will not likely be any time soon.
However playing around with the many suggestions has helped to bring speed up dramatically.