Render advice
plarff
Posts: 282
Hi all
I've done the attached render a few times but it stays grainy.
I also noticed it gave below error in log file.
"WARNING: dzneuraymgr.cpp(307): Iray ERROR - module:category(IRAY:RENDER): 1.0 IRAY rend error: Degraining filter cannot be combined with "black pixel filter".
2018-02-02 23:34:11.017 Iray INFO - module:category(IRAY:RENDER): 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00460 iterations after 7188.719s."
Here's my Render settings in a nutshell. I do have lighting in the scene and not really using the headlamp of the camera. I have Depth of vield on.
Res: 1980x1114
Filter options: Noise degrain Radius 3.0 / Noise degrain Blur 18
Max samples 800
Render Quality set to off
It took 2hrs 26s ... What do i need to change to get it better looking?
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I tell you what people, if you give me some helpfull advice, i'll let Mr Brewer over there give you a handshake.. how about it?
Res: 1980x1114
Filter options: Noise degrain Radius 3.0 / Noise degrain Blur 18 Turn this off and turn Firefly Filter on and set to 100
Max samples 800 This is too low set it to 15000 or so.
Render Quality set to off Set this to On and leave the Quality and Converged Ratio at defaults.
Looks like Mr Brewer owes someone a handshake... thx, will give your advice a try.
OK definately an improvement but no cigar yet. I'll up the Max samples up the Firefly settings also.
Turning the Firefly setting up wont make a difference :)
Look at the bottom of the Log File after the render has finished and see what the stop state is,i.e. iterations, convergence and time.
@plarff
You could also try adding more light, and use Tone Mapping to get the final look you want (darker?).
Yeah i noticed the settings and if i remember correctly they weren't coming near any of my 15000 / Max Samples, more like 532 and Max time was like 7000 even though i leave mine on 72000.
I do not want a darker setting, just more clarity that is it. Latest attached is basically with Res of 3840x2160, Render Quality set to 3.0 and left all other settings as per Fishtale's suggestion earlier on. I could not see much of change to be honest.
I've also attached an image that I would like to emulate the quality of, surely i can achieve this type of quality also?
Are you sure you have DOF set right? Try turning it off and see if there is any difference. Also try putting something outside the window to darken it. I found that bright areas like that tend to throw the render times off.
Not sure my DOF is set right, basically winging it. I'll put someting outisde as you suggest. I was going to add a cityscape in the window area in Photoshop later.
@plarff
You don't seem to understand my comment about using Tone Mapping to darken an image. The comment was add more light AND Tone Map to darken the image (i.e. get it to appear how you want). Your origianl image was fairly dark.
To that point, look at the difference between your image and the one you want to emulate (i.e. clarity). The image to emulate is much brighter.
Clearly i did not. I see what you saying. I take it Tone Mapping is part of the Render settings?
I take it Tone Map will stop it from washing out after i lighten or brighten my lighting?
OP, when you render do you set the Viewport to NVIDIA Iray?
Also, have you applied Iray Uber base under shader presets?
Another tip would be to set a portal light in front of the top section of the window (for tutorial on portals check youtube).
RA
@plarff "Clearly i did not. I see what you saying. I take it Tone Mapping is part of the Render settings? I take it Tone Map will stop it from washing out after i lighten or brighten my lighting?"
No problem. There are a lot of settings for Iray. Here's a screenshot. Iray likes more light than less for more speed and less noise. However brightening with Tone mapping is not actually adding (or removing) light. It is effectively post-processing to get an effect you like.
@fastbike1
I know that is the general answer to speed up a render but more light doesn't necessarily mean faster or better renders. See this series of renders in my render thread which has the render speeds for each render.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2904886/#Comment_2904886
First off, thank you to y'all for helping me with this quest for quality.
I will apply your latest suggestions next. Below is another render only at 23% ( 1h45m ) which is long but by adding more lights on the scene and moving away from the windows ( the camera ) it looks better.
I have not applied the tone mapping and did not put another light source just above teh window. Will be my next test.
Fishtales i'll have a look at your thread regarding speed also. There is a need for that speed.
EDIT: Just had a look and my Tone Mapping was/is set to on, using default settings. Which of those should i adjust looking at my latest image?
That depends on whether you're familar with the manual controls on a camera. If you are, use the dials for Shutter Speed, F/Stop and Film ISO. If not, use the Exposure Value dial (the EV is a combined value that mixes all three dials together).
Note; use SMALL changes to the EV until you're familiar with how it works — camera controls are based on doubling or halving the light entering the camera, and the EV reflects this. It's very easy to zip the EV way up or down and end up with an all-black or burned-out-white render accidentally.
Have you turned off the camera headlamp? It looks like it is still on.
For this shot i did switch it on, normally i have it on Auto so if there are other lights which there are in my scene it should then not be used.
THx will give it a whirl... I am very happy with the quality so far even though it only rendered 23% but the speed is now the issue. For my last render as you can see it's is a bit washed out but as i have indicated to Fishtales i used the Headlamp to test.
I'll be applying below...
"When you're in a dimly-lit setting, your camera's lens opening needs to be sufficiently wide to let in as much of that light as possible. The larger that opening, the more light the camera takes in during the shot. Photographers refer to the size of the lens opening as the aperture or focal length.
In your camera lens, the aperture is measured in f-stop values, written as f numbers in a slash notation. Common f-stops include f/8, f/11 and f/16. The larger number in the f-stop, the smaller the aperture. Thus, f/22 is a much smaller opening in the lens than f/4.
In low light, you'll want to aim for smaller f-stop numbers like f/4. If you plan to do a lot of low light photography, consider purchasing a lens known for having a wide maximum aperture. Some of these numbers go as low as f/1.4 and f/2.0.
Increasing the aperture isn't without its downside, though. The wider the lens opening, the smaller the portion of the image that's in focus. This is known as the depth of field (DOF) for the photograph. In lower light, a lower DOF works fine if you have a single subject. In this case, that single subject will be in focus while everything else is out of focus. The challenge comes when you have multiple objects in the shot at different distances from the camera. In that case, you'll have to choose which objects you most want in focus for the shot and sacrifice the rest to the lower DOF."
Focal Length isn't the same as aperture, as the first paragraph of the quote says (they do seem related, though - at least in my camera if I zoom in (increased focal length) the lowest available f-stop increases). Remember that in DS incerasing f-stop in Render Settings does not decrease the depth of field, you have to use the setting in the camera parameters for that (and increasing ISO does not increase noise, nor does slowing the shutter add motion blur),
The denoiser filter doesn't work in DS no matter what you try. That's why you get errors in the log. The above suggestions all help to improve the quality of your renders. But I believe your problem is different.
Iray is very slow to converge to a decent quality. So if you don't want to wait forever for your renders the best option you have is to denoise in GIMP or Photoshop. Another trick is to render at double resolution then resize the image down. This is similar to a denoiser but of course requires more vram.
EDIT. From what I can see in the log it seems to me that DAZ Studio 4.11 may have some denoiser available. The bad side is that with Iray 2017.1.x it will no longer support Fermi cards, so old and low-level cards may be out.
I bought a GTX1060 recently so im all good regardign latest technology.
When you say increase resolution, do i then turn down my Max samples or Render Quality whichever i use to compensate for the speed or slowness of the render?
Let's say im using resolution of 3000x1140 with Max samples of 1000 ( or RQ set to 3) then upping the Resolution to 4000x2140 for instance and lower Max Sample to 450 ( RQ set to 1.5) will that speed be the same as to what it is currently but denoise as desired?
I just cannot see how some of these artist on DAZ or Virtual Novel guys can create these HQ renders and have to wait for days for it to render to find it looking horrible.
I do not believe everyone has the latest GPU's also. It has to be settings and tweaking them.
I did below render with Max Samples of around 600 and Resolution of 3840x2160 and it took around 30min or so. No added lights, just the normal default scene.
I also did a hallway scene in Blender which took 1h16min to do and looks pretty good, can be better for sure. Resolution is 3000x2000
This has now become my nemsis getting the two guys shaking hands in pure HQ quality bliss something i have to accomplish. Thank you all for sticking in there trying to help me once again.
@plarff "I'll be applying below..."
You want to be careful with internet info. The first para "Photographers refer to the size of the lens opening as the aperture or focal length." is utterly wrong. Lens opening is aperture. Focal length is an inherent property of the lens and is either fixed at a single value (a Prime lens) or is variable (a Zoom or Telephoto lens). Focal length and aperture are two distinctly different properties of lens construction.
@Richard Haseltine "at least in my camera if I zoom in (increased focal length) the lowest available f-stop increases)."
That's a property of your specific lens. Some zoom lens have the same maximum aperature throughout the zoom range. Other zooms (typically less expensive) have a variable maximum aperture throughout the range. A typical example is a lens designated as 70-200 F 4.5-5.6. Focal length on the lens is variable between 70mm and 200mm. Maximum aperture is 4.5 at 70mm and 5.6 at 200mm
@Padone "Iray is very slow to converge to a decent quality."
That is your experience, but not everyone's.
@plarff "I bought a GTX1060 recently so im all good regardign latest technology. When you say increase resolution, do i then turn down my Max samples or Render Quality whichever i use to compensate for the speed or slowness of the render?"
Where to begin. . . .
The 1060 is a marginal GPU. It has the latest Nvidia core design and components, but is pretty low end for performance. Ultimately you will have to decide if quality or speed is more important.
Speed is related to hardware, scene composition, and render settings. Quality is related to render settings, scene composition and your perceptions. Lighting is a factor in both of theses areas.
Comparisons to Blender are irrelevant. The render engines between Blender and Iray are different and are optimized for different hardware (e.g. CPU/GPU).
An understanding of photographic lighting is very helpful. Understanding the meaning/implementation of the various Iray settings can be gained through much experimentation or through some fortunate combination of Studio documentation and Nvidia technical documentation. Neither of which are easy to find.
Finally, I recommend being cautious about taking forum advice rendering advice for granted, including mine. You might consider looking through someone's gallery to help decide how reliable the info might be.
It's not a matter of different people having different results, it's different scenes. I've had simple scenes giving good-enough-looking renders in only a few hundred iterations, and more complicated scenes still being fuzzy after the default two hour run. And just as often, it's been the other way round. There is no One True Recipe™ for getting a fast-rendering scene, it depends on lots of different factors. The speed and power of your computer and graphics card (compared to others) is only one of them.
Im kinda dreading working with the scenen now as it takes forever to load and then to render looking fairly ok but not great.... I will soldier on
Not at all. What I mean is, if your final render is full-hd, then render it quad-hd, then resize the image down to full-hd with GIMP or Photoshop. This is a quick way to get something similar to a denoiser. Try it, you will see it works great. But this method requires more vram so a real denoiser is better.
Not at all. What I mean is, given the same scene and equivalent materials and lights, Iray is slower to converge than other rendering engines. I did some Iray vs Cycles tests with the same HDRI map for lighting and simple materials. Cycles converges much faster.
EDIT. And of course I did the tests without using the integrated denoiser in Cycles, just to be fair, otherwise Iray would be no match at all.
I started a new scene basically different office that i got.
Now i thought i am past this but my environment is not lighting anything and my indoor ILPK light settings is doing nothihg also. What am i missing?
As you can see in Aux viewport no dome scene lighting...
thank you