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You all have given me hope that I can achieve what I want in the final image in a reasonable time so long as I:
1. learn more about render settings 2. quit using max HD objects unless absolutely needed 3. Be patient when purchasing 4. Do your research ... including starting a thread for help here in the Commons.
Last night I tried out Oso3D's path length suggestion, without any other tweaks. The result was a completed IRay render in 51min 04sec at 95% convergence. This same scene took nearly 3 hours in IRay. This was wwithout HD or UHD resolution objects BTW. Result was not bad, ok for post process comic panel, but definitely lacking in the "photoreal" arena when compared to the IRay -1 path length setting. I did not have black eye problems because had set up the character with "Macro Eyes" and a strong catchlight spot at the camera (specularity only). Some extra effort might improve the look.
Thanks again.
This is an example with the G3F. I used cutout opacity on everything and turned off refraction and translucence as you suggested. The first picture is with max path -1 and takes 94s. The second picture is with max path 3 and takes 71s. The gain is (94-71)/94*100 that's about 24%. But you can see very bad shadows too on any surface with cutout opacity. Unless there's something I didn't get in what you say, it doesn't seem a great deal to me.
EDIT. And if I take max path to 5 then it fixes the wrong shadows (mostly) but it also takes the same time as -1 so there's no point.
Never mind. Again. :( I need to learn to stop posting when I'm this sick.
I've managed to get good results rendering in Photoreal with just 8 samples in 11 seconds instead 5000 samples and severak mins, although image needs reconstruction, but nothing PS can't handle.
But for real speed use Interactive mode.
...for myself, the aim is getting the best render quality without having to resort to a lot of "clean up" postwork which, like the OP mentions, I am not all that good at either.
ebergerly was asking questions about 3DL render quality in DAZ Studio earlier... here's a render using Stonemason's Streets of Old London. Basically loading the set, adjusting the camera angle and you're ready. Using progressive render on, it was rendered in 6 minutes 46 seconds on my old AMD FX-8350 8 core CPU. 32 Meg of Ram so no problems loading the set since it's not a GPU with low memory. I don't have a big Nvidia GPU... it's older - ASUS 780ti 3GB so I wouldn't bother. I could spend more time rendering some of the stuff that would take more time like the atmosphere camera in regular 3DL (that does take longer to render), but this was enough for now. Here's the product with nicer promo renders https://www.daz3d.com/the-streets-of-old-london
Max path is the same as reflective bounce in 3Delight, a setting of -1 is effectively infinite.
What, perchance, is an "iRay only renderer"?
Someone who only renders in Iray?
Not quite, at least using standard 3Delight settings - only ray-trace interactions (refraction and reflection) count as bounces, while in Iray every intraction (as far as I know) counts towards path length - which is why the values generally need to be higher. I think even bounce lights in 3Delight, if enabled, don't use up ray depth, though that could be wrong.
I'm just being difficult, it would seem. Sometimes its hard for me to avoid. My apologies.
The situation with Nvidia cards is unfortunate indeed, but it might change after the release of a new series of cards, which is expected later this year. If the outcry is strong enough, crypto mining could be somehow restricted/banned on consumer cards. Or maybe even the lower end card could provide good iray performance.
...the only way for a lower end card to give better Iray GPU rendering performance is if it has a significant amount of VRAM. 4 GB is bare minimum, 6 GB better, 8 preferred, 11GB+ best. You can have 10,000 cores on a 4 GB card but once the VRAM is exceeded you are down to however many processor threads your CPU has.
What Cryptominers are taking advantage of are the CUDA Cores/Stream Processors. That is what boosts mining speed. To restrict them would mean restricting us as well for the only way to do so would be severely cut back the number of stream processors/cores to a level that would make it uneconomical for that purpose. Of course this would severely impact us and the gaming community as well.
This too shall pass.
When I bought my first PC, a Compaq 386 Deskpro, RAM was $500 a meg. Eventually they ramped up production and the price became tolerable. I think NVIDIA will ramp up production if they believe demand for GPUs will be permanent. It may take a while though, since NVIDIA is feeling no pain at this time.
...well, received a job opening notice from Monster for a GPU Development Position at Nvidia (and they are located in Portland where I live). Don't have the skills or credentials though.
However as I brought up on another thread, I read an article that mentioned most of their current development and expansion is shifting towards AI and deep learning, as well as autonomous vehicles.
Was just trying out some older light sets for 3DL to find something that worked well (have many that I haven't tried before). Most of them were either just terrible for characters (compared to iray), or very slow, or both. One took 25 minutes just calculating shadows etc. before it started rendering. A disaster if you have to experiment with the lighting. This is one of the things I really like with Iray - it starts rendering very quickly no matter what you have in the scene. With 3DL it depends a lot on what type of objects you're using - some hairs for example takes forever to render, while other renders fast. With Iray there's no difference.
There's a well known bug with UE2 and transmapped stuff(hair, plants). The solution is to use the AoA advanced lights with the possibility to flag surfaces to use lower number of shadow samples, or use the IBL- Master by Parris with which hair and plants render very fast as he and 3DL solved the bug, a typical DS render of a character standing in the middle of nowhere against some random background takes about a minute, or use the RR3 Reflective light by Marshian which gives very nice color bleed/bounce light much faster than the UE2.
ETA: The one that took 25 min to start rendering, was the AoA SS shader involved in that scene? It is a shadermixer network with a built in "bug", it always calculates opacity for every material zone even if there are no opacity maps, so it is really slooow. I very rarely use it even if it looks good. There are workarounds but easiest way is to convert to UberSurface:)
Sounds like the lights were using Deep Shadow Maps changing that to Ray tracing gets a better look and you don't have to wait for the Shadow maps to be calculated.
I already have IBL-Master, just haven't checked it out yet, mostly because my impression is that it's a bit complex to use. Was looking for something that's both simple and good.
It's this one:
https://www.daz3d.com/catalog/product/view/id/17533
This. I've seen some renders done with that Iray toon shading suite, and it doesn't even come close to the quality that you can get out of VSS and PWtoon.
Ok so it was UE2 in combination with the area light shader, both pretty slow:) You could try rendering in progressive mode, it is generally much faster when dealing with a lot of heavy ray tracing. Also converting the hair to UberSurface gives you the option to turn off occlusion for the hair which will speed things up.
IBLM is very easy to use. You can load IRay HDRIs and then switch to 3DL and the same HDRI will be loaded automagically. Check out first page in the IBLM commercial thread for tips and readme. It has been updated recently to fix a bug, so you should re install it if you haven't already;)
That's very true! And AoA is good for indoor stuff but it's very possible to use IBLM as well, just takes some parameter tweaking and chosing the right HDR for the job.
Yes they are a thing of the past for sure, raytraced shadows are much faster in general.
...actually I found IBL Master to be fairly easy to understand and less troublesome than setting up UE. Been using it ever since. There is an online and PDF guide that details the different setting parameters. Just be careful with some HDRs that have their own "Sun" (ie. don't put a distant light in for your sun or you'll get double shadows).
How do I convert the hair to Ubersurface?
OK, think I'll give it a try. Sounds like it's a good deal better and up to date than the older light sets.
OK, sounds good.
You just select the hair in the scene tab and go to the surface pane and select all of its surfaces, then find the content library/shader presets/omnifreaker/UberSurface and command click to bring up a menu where you can choose IGNORE to keep the maps. Then go to the surface pane and scroll down, you'll find occlusion, click on it to disable. Then you will probably have to enable bump and/or displacement if the hair uses those, as they are off by default. Maybe tweak the specular settings a bit. If you also disable raytracing the hair won't be seen by reflective surfaces, sometimes depending on the scene you can gain some rendering time that way too.
OK, will try that. Thanks!
OK, did a test using the above but it didn't help much on rendering time - reduced it from 52 min. to 48 min.. Portrait Lights 2 is a great set though IMO, so it may be worth the time anyway.
Great render! Seems to be a nice light set for sure. Still a bit baffled over the rendering time, I think 15 min would be more reasonable
. What are the area light shadow samples values and UE2 shading rate? Maybe by decreasing them a bit and increasing shadow rate you could speed up rendering without losing too much quality?