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Don't use that one as an example...there are a number of problems with the set up of that render that would even slow down Cath's machine.
...yeah but Cath has 3 Titan-Xs which would bring the time down to a more reasonable level in comparison. I've set up interior scenes and while yes, they take longer to render, I never had one go beyond 7 hours (yet), and I do some pretty complex stuff as well as use a fair number of emissive lights depending on the setting.
Even my 4 core 2GHz machine wouldn't be that slow...if that scene were properly set up. It's basically set up to be slow to render. I wouldn't be surprised to find out, that in addition to everything else, the Caustic Sampler is on.
So my point about it being an example of what's needed hardware-wise still stands. Yes, while Cath's will be more reasonable...with that scene as is, she has posted as complex or more so, examples that practically were instantaneous (minutes instead of hours). Granted, that's with 'insane' hardware, though. That one is more about scene optimization than hardware...much more.
A lot of people seem to over estimate the demand on GPU memory because they look at how much ram a scene uses in DS. That is not a useful measure. Here is an example of a rather complex setup that I just finished. It contains the following elements:
4 Genesis 3 figures with clothing and full textures (plus 2 instances of one)
Urban Future 4 set
7 different vehicles (4 cars, 1 trike, 1 motorcycle, 1 flying drone)
1 Robot
1 cat
1 rat
many different props (vending machine, advertisement screens, rain system, puddles)
All of these are currently at standard resolution textures. I can render this scene on my GTX 1080 in ~2.5h (in 240*1096 pixel) and it uses 7.2Gb of vram. I could easily add more to the scene by reducing some textures and subD levels. Anyway, as one can see a monster GPUwith 12Gb or more vram is not always needed). Oh and this scene uses between 8 and 24.5Gb of ram when working with the scene or rendering via CPU.
Ciao
TD
Click for full size!
I agree, I have also seen people mixing up the RAM needed by DS to hold/render a scene with the GPU memory required by iRay, when in reality the two numbers can be radically different. For example I rendered a fairly complex harbour scene, with multiple boats, crates, barrels lying around, plus other props, as well as a number of characters scattered in the background (not Genesis figures I should say), and it fitted into less than 2GB of VRAM, and that is without me making any attempt to improve this by deleting off camera objects etc.
Yes, but how many of those items were multiples of the same item? Had textures of 2kx2k or lower?
It's the textures that are major memory hogs...and the more of them and higher resolution they are, the less (number of items) will fit in the scene. And using instances will lower that more, but cutting the amount of memory needed for the mesh, too.
This is where procedural shaders can come in really handy, with medium or long shots. No texture maps.
There was a lot of different props each with their own texture maps, and only a little use of instancing. However there were no modern characters, with their huge texture maps, plus supporting spec, bump etc maps, so that is where the memory is normally used up. My human characters were small details in the scene, and it would have been very unnecessary for them to have had all those detailed textures.
Yeah, that's going to make a huge difference as to how much you can fit. Textures eat up video memory like Taz eats everything...
Funny how threads like this keeps popping up. Unfortunately, even if the disucssions are interesting, nothing really changed.
The most interesting part, for me, of threads similar to this one is the lack of any DAZ official post.
So i post this question:
Will DAZ ever implement physically plausible shaders for 3delight in DAZ Studio, along with proper renderer options to enable raycaching? Just a simple yes or no is sufficient.
Unless it's an oversight of information left off the description, the latest Daz Original freebie "Sleds" only has Iray presets. http://www.daz3d.com/sleds
I hear you from personal experience. On my 2011 i5 iMac it would take 12+ hours to get a promo quality render out, during which time the machine was sluggish enough to make it unusable for other work. Multiply that by a dozen or so to get a decent set of promos to choose from (and add renders from 3Delight and Carrara), and that's two solid weeks of down time just for rendering. 4 weeks if I ended up having to redo them. (I've got more efficient since those days, but add some characters and hair and a pond and you're still talking about a day for a render on that machine)
So I gritted my teeth and got a Windows i7 with a 980Ti. Those day long renders now take 40 minutes to an hour, and it'll even act as a render node to Carrara, reducing render times there by well over half. Unfortunately I couldn't run to a decent monitor for it, so I still use the iMac (27") as my primary, and even more unfortunately it'll take at least another year to 18 months to pay off. But the benefits in terms of render time and productivity are enormous (and unfortunately again, the novel I was writing during the "downtime" has had to be shelved. Ho hum!)
Indeed, so is mine.
Put in a feature request.
Already did. Still no answer and no updates on the release notes. Along with proper Genesis 2 support with autofit in Carrara and a 64 bit Hexagon.
Like that is going to ever happen too.
...somewhere over the rainbow, dreams really do come true.
Thanks.
Yep. Unfortunately, not in DAZneyland.
Just checked the Submit Ticket. My bug report about Oren Nayar BSDF brick in the Shader Mixer and feature request for raycaching is now 2 years old. Still 'Open'.
So much for squashing bugs, heh.
..well, at least my character Leela beleives that.
There's a difference between bugs and feature requests.
K I guess Ill chime in. ATM, I am supporting both. And it took me a long time to get on board with iray. This came down to a couple reasons: I was oft disappointed at the way iray handles certain things (like displacement, planes for doing hair, and even emission sans bloom filter, and even having to use a bloom filter at all to get a good glow effect) and tbh I still am at times. I think it renders some things beautifully, such as glass. So Im on the fence, and for all the rendering it takes me (2 hours on a fancy promo) I kinna expect it to be awesome. Instead, it comes out grainy a lot of times and I have to postwork the crap out of it. That comes down to my machine and more specifically my gfx, and eventually, Ill get a new one. Right now I make do with what I got.
(Incidentally, to any PA's having trouble... displacement actually does work... its just not the medium gray we've all been taught. Really gotta mess with the gray to get it right and make a special displacement map just for iray)
I won't stop supporting 3DL... I don't see me ever doing that. I personally like 3DL still, even tho I am messing with iray more. But I can see why a fair amount of people might consider doing that. For one, its all about whether thats time well spent.... and if u have the majority using iray, its not equating to more money for you (and yea, I realize that goes two ways... losing sales coz you're not supporting both) For two, its about whether they can make what they're doing (Ie: subject matter) look great in both. It can be very disappointing when it looks awesome in one, but not so much in the other. Iray is... well... touchy. Even for someone doing clothing/hair type stuff, it acts weird at times. Diff lighting scenarios can really bung up an image too (I had one time where I had to change a light, coz the hair showed the planes rather than the transmap and I have no fairy freakin clue why lol) But sometimes, you can make something look soooo much better too. It just depends on what it is, and finding the sweet spot. And it depends on whether that vendor wants to spent 3948394893 hours trying to find it. For a lot of us, time is money... and spending too much time in one area, will lose us money in the long run.
OTOH, I can also see that not a lot of people use iray... and some have equally quit using 3DL. So I can understand why people are upset when products don't support both. I think its just one of those things... its hard to cater to everyone. I think most of us do try the best we can to do everything humanly possible. Just sometimes, its not possible.
Yes.
I filed a report on the Oren Nayar bug and i filed a feature request to expose raycaching in the renderer's option. Mustakettu actually submitted a similar bug report (the incorrect BSDF brick Oren Nayar) long before I did when DAZ was still using Mantis. Did get an answer from support - forwarded to the dev team, but to this day I've never seen both addressed. In DS 4.8 or 4.9
Do i need to resubmit those again? Or did those bug reports and feature request got lost somewhere?
Just a note - there's still no answer to my question.
I see it all the time - non-refractive, transparent corneas in Iray renders. Extremely evident in 3/4 or side views. Somehow there are recommendations floating around to use "thin-walled" materials for cornea, but it's just sooo wrong. Any photo of a human being will show it.
Of course a refractive cornea needs an "indented" iris to look best - but as far as I know, for G3M/F there are no official morph packs that include this type of morphs (otherwise why would people make and share freebie morphs of this sort).
Many thanks.I just purchased thishttp://www.daz3d.com/1stbastion-s-indie-scene-venue-bar and all of your products are a Godsend.
Thank you Richard Haseltine,mjc1016 for answering this one for me.
This thread is so long, there is no way I can take the time to read it all, so I apologize if any of what I say is a repeat of someone else's comments. As a content creator, I really try to supply 3Delight materials when it is feasible to do so. In fact, aside from my last two projects, I have always managed to supply materials for two render engines (at one time it was Poser and 3Delight, now it is 3Delight and Iray). However, my two latest environments have unique lighting setups that I simply was not able to recreate to my satisfaction in 3Delight. For that reason, I did not spend the time making 3Delight materials. That does not mean I have abandoned it, it just means that I could not find settings that made me feel proud to include them.
I want to offer a couple of tips that I have learned for Iray when setting up my promos. First, to increase the amount of ambient lighting for interior scenes, especially where there are no windows showing in the scene to let in light from "outside", you can clear the image map from the Render Setting environment and choose one of the lights in your scene (interior) and set it as the Sun node. This will instantly brighten the interior based on the strength and direction of that light. I like to use a Linear Point light in the center of the room (or in the center of the part of the scene in view of the camera) and turn off "Render Emitter" in the lights setting. This gives me a nice glow without showing the source, and any additional lights I put in the scene are enhanced by this.
The second tip is for speed and memory conservation. If you cannot see it in the scene, delete it! Don't just hide it, but delete it completely, save your scene, and reopen it. This will clear the textures from memory as well. There might be another way to clear them, but for me this works perfectly. I have seen render times cut in half or even more just by getting rid of extraneous stuff in the scene. When I put out a product, I load the scene up completely so that you don't have to decorate. But when you get your camera shot set up, get rid of my extra junk. All it does is eat memory, increase calculations and add time. By doing this, I also prevent CPU rendering from kicking in sometimes.
Anyway, I hope nobody is too disappointed when one of my sets does not have 3Delight materials. If I don't include them, there is usually a reason and it doesn't mean I will always omit them.
Brian (Slosh)(SloshWerks)
Understood and explanation appreciated, Brian. Still all I do (and will continue to do) is 3Delight renders. Iray just annoys me too much. Besides, I render fantasy scenes mostly, they aren't realistic by definition, so 3Delight suits them just fine.
Perhaps one of the key issues here is with the expectation that 3Delight renders should look the same as Iray. As many have stated, that is just not going to happen with the tools we have right now.
If the general focus instead is to try to get the best result from each render engine with the understanding that they will look very different... maybe that could help both crowds?
What do you guys think?
~Charlene
Bluebird 3D