Poll: Grainy Iray render love?
RenderPretender
Posts: 1,041
Just curious:
I'm using a fairly new, inexpensive laptop with what I think is an integrated nVIDIA card, and I was curious as to whether I could render in Iray with it. I tried a single-character studio piece with some out of the box lighting, and let it run for an hour, which is about all that is practical for me. Lo and behold, on the CPU and left alone, the latop produced a piece that, though a bit grainy, was really pleasing to my eye, and seemed to resemble something you might see as in a dream, or your mind's eye. I'm curious as to:
1. whether anyone else sees moderately grainy/noisy renders as a creative objective;
2. whether anyone else works with conventionally "underpowered" equipment and tries to maximize results with it; and
3. what techniques you use to achieve that goal, such as Iray settings/tricks (economy of use), limiting image resolution/display size, favorite lighting.
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Comments
I just set everything up before bed and leave it on hole I sleep. That way I wake up to a lovely piece of art and I get a really great reason to get out of bed and check.
My computer certainly isn't top of the line. I have a 4GB graphics card and I render large scenes almost always(both image size and generally the scene itself). I find I run out of memory rather fast (for rendering anyway), so what I do is create a scene and then break it down into foreground and background scenes and composite in Photoshop. Personally, I find that a lot of fun and I have a better control over adding effects between the foreground/background. Other times the entire scene fits all in one GPU rendering process and I just don't understand how that happens...when it does happen. It boggles my mind. I just know it's going to crash by watching the analysis window and then POOF it renders on the GPU. I don't mind CPU rendering but those will usually take 48 hours, sometimes more depending on the complexity of the scene. I'm not in any hurry to get that render finished.
Usually, I have some light graininess and I prefer it. I do so much postwork, a lot of it is cleared up or I might add to that graininess. Just depends on what I'm wanting. I never do closeup portrait shots so I don't need that absolute clarity a lot of people might want. I mess around quite a bit with the Iray render settings before I hit that render button. It's interesting seeing how things are altered while adjusting settings during Iray preview.
For your 1. question I find personally I like the renders more grainy but feel compelled to render out the grain because others state that grainy renders are bad. I think they look more realistically photographic.
I like both. I find grain though to be a disappointing result of certain lights which limit my lights I can use in Iray. Even in full sun certain lights will cause pixelation.
I have a few more work arounds for helping building & render large scenes in Iray first thing is I would turnoff .obj under the display tab that are not scene by the camera or that are used to create shadows or emissive lights, Also remove any textures & bumps and paint them with a match color under the surface tab that are not also not used as main focus points by the camera. (Matty Manaxx taught me that) I try to use images or HDRi for back ground instead of actual props, because they are much lighters on resources and of course you got to have Scene Optimizer , which can greatly reduces your foot print on your gpu resources. put those all together and you can render some prtty good size scenes fair well . unfortunately found rendering dark scenes with iray usually take more iterations and take s longer to cook the render to get rid of the graininess.
Underpowered laptop user here! Although I manage to fit a surprising amount on my 2gb GPU (and also it's a pretty crappy GPU, generally it only makes my renders go 1.5 times faster which really isn't that much)
I'm fine living with a bit of grain in my renders. Either I just keep it, or I find it easy enough to postwork out. (Photoshops camera raw filter has some great denoising). Another tip: if there's just one or two tiny spots that are still noisy but the rest of the image is clean you can spot render those bits and then copy them onto your main image in a program that handles layers.
Honestly, one of my favorite render styles partially came about partly as a solution to noise from quick renders.
This looks pretty nice imo :) but is base is secretly a rather grainy render. Denoising can kill some texture details, but if you're going for a painty look that's not really a downside.
Yeah, removing/hiding anything that doesn't compromise the scene is a must. Even with figures, I hide all body parts which are hidden under clothing. I remove all bump maps/displacement/normals if its in the background. Spot rendering is also a HUGE helper for adding in other stuff that might not fit or to fix some problem areas. I've had some large scenes render quite fast.
Having an AMD card I hated the grain. I tried every trick, but ended up mainly doing my best in Postwork. I eventually developed a taste for it, I think that it adds realism to my renders. I've recently got an NVidia and found myself adding grain to perfectly clear renders ;)
I love graininess as an artistic choice, sometimes it looks cool by accident as well. My iray is run off of a gtx 770 so im constantly having to compensate for memory issues. Composite work is a great way to get alot out of lesser spec computers.
That's awesome. Better than if it were crystal clear.
In general I do not like grainy images myself, but it can certainly be used as with the example image a few posts up.
I'm using a GTX1070, so not particularly underpowered, but it can still run into scenes where it exceeds the memory in which case I'll try to delete any and every object I can or hide body parts of figures that are covered by clothing (also my go to method for dealing with poke-through where it doesn't cause side effects).
I'm also not sure if it is true or not, but in my brief experience of using Daz it seems that HDRIs are much quicker for rendering than using other light sources.
I hate grain in the actual render, if I want it for artistic purposes, I'll add it in postwork. It's probably the most annoying thing about Iray.
..same here. To me it looks like a low quality film was used. I used to do photography with film stock that had very tight grain to get good crisp images as I also did enlargements. As SnowSultan mentions, If I want to mimic a specific type or quality of film (like Tri-X Pan or old Kodacolour). I'll add it with a filter in post.
When dealing with items that have a high degree of gloss or reflection I will actually place props & such behind and/or outside the render camera's view plane to have something to catch in the reflections (my "Girls at the Bus Stop Scene" has that for both the parabolic mirror at the corner, glass in the shelter windows, and bottle next to the rubbish bin).
I don't like grainy renders. If it is for artistic purposes, adding grain is easy enough. JCade's denoised render above is great - you can't tell it was noisy/grainy.
Another underpowered laptop user here. I hide/delete everything that can't be seen in the viewport (and would load it in wireframe if it was a really massive set, then switch to surface shaded when the bulk of it was gone). After that, I run Scene Optimiser on what's left. Most of the time this has no noticeable effect on detail. If I'm not aiming for realism then a bit of grain doesn't matter anyway as I'll be running the image through Dynamic Auto Painter for one of the tons of painterly effects it offers. One of the things I love about the program is that you can put a reasonably small image into it and it will give you a much larger one back. It doesn't resize the image - it takes the detail from it and uses it to repaint it in minutes from scratch with whatever effect you choose. It can be quite fascinating to watch.
If I don't want to use Scene Optimiser because I need all the detail I can get for some reason, but know that my machine would just choke on the entire image, I'll just slice it into nine pieces with the Spot Render tool (using the Rule of Thirds overlay to guide me so that I know I won't miss anything) and then put them all together in Photoshop afterwards. There are seldom any remaining bits of noise after this and I prefer to dispatch any with much smaller blasts of the Spot Render tool (my forgetful self wishes there was somewhere we could put 'new window' as the spot render default!), but Topaz Denoise has it's uses.
...not so much an under powered notebook user but an under powered desktop user (where Iray is concerned) Only about 11 GB memory (after Windows & utilities) and a 4 GB GPU card (I also tend to do large scenes as well).
What a great thread, all. Thanks for all the gorgeous examples, as well as tips and tricks! Glad I asked!