Large Scene - Help
Costello
Posts: 97
I created a large scale scene of Victorian era London. It looks good and renders well (and reasonably quickly), but adding or subtracting elements from the scene is mind bogglingly slow. I try to remove a character from the scene and it takes a day or so of DAZ pondering before it works, if at all. My question...
Is there anything I can do, in Settings or otherwise, to speed up the process? I am using a pretty fast computer MacPro 2013. The overall file size is 150 MB. Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me.
I'm attaching one of the renderings, just because I'm pretty happy with what I've put together so far.
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I can't even imagine my computer being able to handle all of that. You might want to think about splitting your set up into groups. Groups are a great way to quickly and easily hide sections of your scene to free up resources so that DS doesn't have to think as hard about what it's doing. You can 'turn off' the sections you aren't working with and only have the section you want to modify turned on.
To do groups, select all of the parts you want in one group in the Scene tab. Go to Create>New Group from the Create menu. I just usually choose the default options. Do this so that you can easily split your scene up like in East, South, North and West or any configuration that makes sense to you. This way if you want to make changes in South, you can turn off East, North and West and free up your memory resources while you are working. You can even set things up to be off in the viewport, but to be visible in the render by selecting that option under the Parameters tab.
I hope that helps.
Or you can render the entire scene in layers. Save the front layer (Closest to the camera), the middle ground, and the background in different scenes and render each, then put them together in a composite in Gimp or Photosop, but that may require re-doing your scene or using the undelete button ALOT as you go.
Thanks! I'll try the grouping idea.
Grouping and layer rendering are great ideas, but depending on your scene, you might end up with mismatched shadows and reflections. If you're using Iray, another option (and this works with interior scenes as well) is to render in "slices" using Iray Section Plane Nodes, and then, as with the grouping and layering methods, combine the sliced renders in external image editing software. The downside to this method is that the planes don't affect HDRI environments, so you may need to turn Draw Dome and Draw Ground off under the Render Settings tab while creating the scene slices, and then render your environment separately as the background layer. To use the nodes: click on Create and load two (2) Iray Section Plane Nodes. Under Parameters, rotate the first plane on the Z axis to 90, and the second on the Z axis to -90. For interior scenes, under the Properties tab with the node selected, turn Clip Lights to On. To properly place the nodes, change the drawstyle to NVIDIA Iray, and use perspective view. You won't see anything in your scene until you move the nodes: drag node 1 by the Y axis arrow until you begin to see a slice of your scene. Drag node 2 in the opposite direction until the plane nodes encompass enough scene geometry that your system can handle the load. Note: as with all of these methods, it's best to lock your camera's transforms under the Parameter tab so you don't accidently move it. ;) Hope this is helpful.
I like to use Save As > Scene Subset. I'll save 75% of a massive scene as a subset, then delete it from the main scene.
I navigate, add figures, pose, etc. When ready, I simply Merge > Subset and render.
That way Daz responds quickly while I'm working with the scene.
Note that the size of the scene file is misleading — all it contains is the settings for all the objects in the scene, and pointers to the data files that make up the object geometry, and to the texture files that are applied to the objects. It's a description of how to build the scene. The actual geometry and textures are external files, and they're almost always much larger in total than the scene file.
Did you create the scene by loading extra copies of building objects? There's a much more resource-efficient way of doing large scenes, by using instances. These are virtual copies, they still use up some memory, but a lot less than complete extra copies of an object. The only drawback with instances is that they're all the same object; you can move, rotate and scale each of your instances independently, but any changes to the textures or morph dial settings on the original object will also affect all the instances.
Thanks all! The advice has helped and I have been able to reduce the scene size by sifting it with sub-scenes and have been adding some instances. It is becoming much more manageable.
Did you make formal props (native .duf files) out of evrything? I've found that if I create new props out of imported geometry, and then load this newly created native content into the scene, it's much faster than just importing .objs directly into the finished scene.
- Greg
Yes, that's important too — if you import an .obj then create a proper D|S-format prop out of it, that prop is made of parts stored properly in the /data/ folder, just like things you buy in the DAZ store. If you import the .obj then just save the scene, the prop is saved in a sort of half-and-half format that isn't as efficient as a proper prop. It takes a while to get it all worked out, but the ideal is to have a small scene file, calling on all the external geometry and texture files stored in the proper formats in the /data/ and /runtime/textures/ folders.
Another timesaver if you're loading in lots of objects and using Iray rendering — the materials of .obj files are compatible with the old 3Delight rendering, not Iray, so you would have to convert all the materials on each imported object. If you've created proper D|S-format props, you can save them with Iray materials already applied.