Question about render settings...
Wonderland
Posts: 7,133
So, I started with DS a little over two years ago but there's still so much I don't know...
For most of the time I was using CPU only computers and maxed out the time and bumped up convergence to 99.8 and eventually the image would be finished and converged.
Then when I got a Windows 10 machine with a 1080 ti, I set the convergence to 99.8 and left everything alone thinking it would render beautifully in minutes. Not so. It would render pretty quickly but it was no where near converged! So then I bumped up Render Quality and Max Samples to random higher numbers and the renders would, once again, take forever, even on portraits or just one character, hair, clothes, no background scene both with lights or HDRIs. Now, because I had what looked like artifacts on a shoulder in a closeup, someone suggested I go to the advanced setting and turn up the medium and high thresholds to 4096...
What are the best render settings to get a fully converged image at 2400x2000 sometimes portrait, sometimes full body or even a full scene? And why does it take so long with a 1080 ti?
And I haven't found a way to save render settings, they go back to default every time I start a new scene. Is there a way to save those settings? Thanks.
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I take it that you have the recent GPU drivers installed. Do you have any filters or samplers activated? Also, did you use Spectral Rendering?
Also, in Advanced Render settings, make sure that you have CPU unchecked, it's sometimes slower if you have both checked.
On th other hand if you leave CPU unchecked and the scene is too large for gpu alone the complete DS will crash
I'm not sure that's the case. I occassionaly get a render dropping back to the cpu, even though it's unchecked in the render settings. The only time it tends to happen is if I've been doing a lot of small test renders and the vram doesn't get released after each one, it eventually fills up and suddenly one render will just use the cpu instead.
DS doesn't crash, but it takes forever to respond when I click "cancel" on the render. It does cancel the render eventually though.
But what numbers do you use in progressive rendering? For quality, max samples, etc..? And if you find setting you like, how do you save them?
To save the settings, just start with a new blank scene, then set everything the way you'd like it to open every time you start DS, or load a new scene - that includes all your render settings, default camera, default hdri, or anything else. Once you've done that, save the scene with a name like "my-default", then go to Edit>Preferences>Startup, click on the square that says Load File: and Browse to your file and select it as the startup file. Daz Studio will now open up with your default scene every time.
Well I had it several times happen that I got a GC error when DS tried to fall back to use CPU with all screens resetting and the current render gone to hell. Usually DS wouldn't response anymore either and I had to close it. Never happened when I had both boxed checked.
For test renders I use max time on 900 sec and a small size like 800 on the larger side. The thing that might help you is change the pixel filter radius (in filtering) to 1 or some eve say 0.95. With the standert of 1.5 I always have the feeling my render is out of focus.
Every other setting I leave to standart.
When I make the renders for my comic I user 2500 pixes for the alrger sider and reset the max time to standart.
Things that will lead to longer render times and leaving the render in an "unfinished state: High poly counts (like several persons or fiber mesh hair), dark scenes, bloom filter. hight number on subdivisions on your props and figures
For really large high qualitiy renders I use up to 8000 pixes on the longer side, max out render time and samples, those will run for 8 hours or longer depending on what I render
My screen itself renders fairly quickly so I can at least see pretty much how it's going to render so I don't have to do small test renders unless I'm posting it. I guess I've been using a lot of subdivision and smoothing on hair plus sometimes shaders that I guess slows things down. I'm doing a scene now with Zenogirl (no hair) a robot and sci-fi scene interior that is going way faster than a portrait with hair!
I use the render settings that come with Fabianas HDRI products over at Renderosity. They are great and also fast. I have no complaints at all.
Well, I spoke too fast. Only at 20% after an hour and six minutes. But it looks done. Don't see much grain... I had to put subdivision on the robot.
Render time depends a lot on the content in the scene, lighting etc.. Some of my renders are finished (= no grains) in a few minutes, others take up to an hour. And that's with 10 year old hardware and a GTX 1070.
As for saving render settings it's simple: File > Save As > Render settings Preset.
I don't think that is true by leaving the CPU unchecked and the scene Memory is still larger than what your card will hold. then it should still dump back to CPU even if its not checked.I believe and I maybe wrong that having the pc check or the gpu check is more or less what you choose for your default render.. But iRAY GPU should still dump back to CPU if you over tax your gpu ram . I never had a crash from leaving the CPU unchecked.
Sometimes you can speed up how your view ports respond and sometimes your renders if they are using a lot of instances in them. . by switching from Speed to memory under the optimization option. I had crashes because of not having that set right from speed to memory when tons of instances are being used.
The best way to speed up my iray renders is to push your MAX iterations way down to like a 100 first and stated adding 50 at a time until the render clear ups. the darker the scene the harder it is to filter out the fireflies and you will properly need to have your max iterations around 6000 but expect it to take a hour or more.
A lot depends for render times, But texture size properly plays the biggest roll in your renders a 8k or 4 k texture is going to take much longer to render that a 1k or less thats why scene optimizer is great for reducing textures
But like Taoz stated there is a lot of variables to what makes render times long.
I have rarely had a render finish in under an hour with a 1080 ti! I started a render at about 11:30 AM and it looked done in about an hour, but then I went out and came back after midnight and the computer had put itself to sleep and when I woke it up, it still wasn't done! It finished pretty shortly after that and a lot lighter than I expected.
So some things I've figured out over time - mostly just details for understanding how things affect quality versus render time. These may not help, and when you hit a real snag with render times you're likely to have to spend a lot of time figuring out what specifically is causing it. I had to run through a long list of possibilities today and while I was able to increase my rendering speed to something more acceptable - I'm still trying to figure out more of what's going on. It can be alllll kinds of things.
Render quality essentially sets how many consistent rays are required for a given pixel to be considered 'converged'. Setting up above 1 will help to smooth out or eliminate grain if it is an issue, but your render times will be just about linearly multiplied by whatever you set it to - a setting of 5 will take 5 times as long.
Resolution will also linearly multiply your render times, although you have to keep in mind that your resolution is multiplied in two dimensions - 4K (3840x2160) is 4 times the resolution of 1080p since it's twice as wide and twice as high, so it will multiply your render time by 4. This is because you're directly multiplying the number of rays involved in a render pass.
Subdivision levels have some impact on render time, but have a much larger impact on scene prep time and on memory requirements - which, of course, if they push your memory requirements past what your card offers it'll get dumped on the CPU which will probably make your renders run a lot slower unless you have a LOT of cores. Thing is, every subdivision level on the model multiplies the number of faces on the model by 4 from the *previous* level. At 0 subdivisions, you've got the base number of faces, at level 1 it's 4 times as many, at level 2 it's 16 times, at level 3 it's 64 times, at level 4 it's 256 times, and at level 5 it's 1024 times as many faces. That's a pretty massive increase, and the gains aren't worth it for most people - level 1 looks pretty good, level 2 is nicer, level 3 a little nicer still, but past that it's extremely hard to notice any difference whatsoever unless you're doing very high resolution renders. Chances are you can keep subdivisions down to 3 or lower, probably 1 or 2 unless you've got a lot of fine detail you want visible. Smoothing also counts for this, so good to consider how much the smoothing really offers your scene.
The same goes for every mesh in your scene - any other characters you've got in there, the hair, any clothing, accessories, props, everything. Poly count is a huge deal for scene prep and memory usage, so good to keep a wary eye toward every little thing you're using. As others have said and as you pointed out, fiber mesh hair items are expensive to render, so only use them if you *really* want the extra detail. If you don't need their eyebrows or anything to look like extra realistic hair - just use the texture that has the eyebrows on it already, or LIE eyebrows if you want some custom ones (not too many of those around, but there are some).
HD morphs use maps that are extremely high resolution and they only really work with increased subdivision levels, so it can help to use few or no HD morphs unless you really want that tiny bit of extra detail.
Poor lighting does affect it - but it's not just whether the lighting is dark or bright. Dark scenes in and of themselves can render fairly quickly, depending on scene complexity and settings. Highly contrasted lighting on the other hand (bright areas mixed with dark areas) has a fairly big impact, and will tend to cause more grain in an image because stray light rays due to errors and other quirks will tend to wind up in darker sections of the image. This does present a bit of an issue, because good quality images should generally have strong contrast - some areas of dark shading and some areas of bright highlights - but it should just take a bit of practice and learning from others to get past that.
Large mesh lights have a significant impact, since every single point on the surface of the mesh is emitting light rays in every direction, so using multiple small mesh lights or multiple point lights to make up a larger light source can significantly speed up renders compared to large mesh lights - although a large panel of light can provide extremely nice soft shading so it can still be an attractive option for high resolution renders if you want photo studio quality and don't mind it slowing things down.
If you're using environment maps for lighting, you can try adjusting the environment light resolution. It generally won't provide a huge amount of help unless it's up too high for some reason.
Restricting max path length for the raytraces under Optimization could potentially help by killing rays sooner so it'll go through more of them faster, but it's likely to reduce the lighting accuracy and I couldn't provide you with usable values for it since I never use it.
The shaders seem like a very likely culprit, though. Since you're trying to render the Zelara models, I can say that they have given me the slowest renders I've ever had to deal with, and the model itself isn't hugely different from other G8 models, aside from having some unique morphs and materials. So unless something is up with my system since just a couple days ago, I'm not sure what else it could be. Even when I've removed everything from the scene but the Zelara model - at high settings, the renders are painfully slow. I'm somebody who's crazy and is willing to put up with insanely long renders to get super high quality images, so I don't mind that for a promo-quality shot, but I'd definitely recommend keeping the settings down with her unless you need an especially detailed image. Lower subdivision levels, lowest acceptable resolution, quality at just 1 or 2, convergence at 95% unless you really want to spend the extra time waiting for the last pixels to settle or the grain to disappear.
I don't even know how it would work with her in a complex scene. She's demanding, for sure.
Sounds strange. Here's an 800x1000 render with a plain G8F, Basic Wear 2 and Toulouse hair (all included in G8F Starter Essentials so you should have them). Takes about 70 seconds to render on my system. Settings are default DS Iray settings with convergence changed to 99.8. Try to render the same scene on your system with the same settings and see how long it takes.
That's interesting @Toaz. I have an iMac and thought it would be much, much, slower on my machine. It is, but it still only took 260 seconds.
Sorry for jumping in but I'm following this thread because render times are something I really struggle with.
I just switched from Mac to a PC with a 1080ti, and was curious how my new system performed. This benchmark was useful. If I did it right, my render time was 26 seconds. I also tested it in on the ready-to-render scene Day at the Beach (G2 Starter Essentials) and left all the cameras/defaults in place. That render took 25 seconds.
.Mine took about 21 seconds, great test ..
That must be GPU rendering also? The GPU render took 70 seconds on my system btw, not 110 (I calculated a minute as 100 seconds instead of 60).
I tried to render the same scene using CPU only, that took over 23 minutes before it finished.
shiny surfaces, reflective, and surfaces with subsurface scattering will increase times a lot.
took 35 seconds on my nvidia 970 GPU and CPU both checked
Yes, GPU only. I’m going to play around with different settings to see how they affect the render times. Thank you for suggesting this ... it’s a great way of checking things out without spending hours for each test to complete. So far I’ve found that my favourite HDRI extends the render time to 10 minutes and 20 seconds. The quality of the render does seem better though.
Note that if you already have a render (or several) of a scene open in the background, the scene will render faster because of caching which makes it skip some of the initial calculations and operations. It's especially noticable with small and quick rendering scenes like this one where the total rendering time may be greatly reduced.
E.g. when I render this scene the first time it takes about 70 seconds, but if I leave the first render window open and render again it only takes about 27 seconds, and all subsequent renders will take 27 seconds as long as there is at one or more windows from previous renders of that scene open. If I then close all render windows before I do a new render it will take 70 seconds again.
So to do reliable render time comparison tests, always close all render windows before you do a new render, so it starts from scratch.
This is very helpful, thanks. I have all the culprits... HD morphs, contrasting lighting, subdivision, smoothing, lots of reflections, shiny surfaces, , fibermesh brows sometimes, detailed hair with subdivision and smoothing, high res, high render quality, high max samples, 99.8% convergence... If I'm going to use IRay, I want all those high end perks, otherwise I could just use Poser and V4... Even though I usually do a lot of artistic postwork after, I really try to get as much detail in, in the render, and good contrasting lighting. For some reason, the high contrast lighting in the Zenogirl render actual flattened out, the longer it rendered. I had no idea it would still be rendering over 12 hours later when I got home but the computer had been asleep a good portion of that time. I do think it's strange that the computer would go to sleep in the middle of a render though and sometimes wonder if the screensaver slows down renders..
@Wonderland "I have all the culprits... HD morphs, contrasting lighting, subdivision, smoothing, lots of reflections, shiny surfaces, , fibermesh brows sometimes, detailed hair with subdivision and smoothing, high res, high render quality, high max samples, 99.8% convergence"
A lot of that detail isn't needed for all renders. High subdivision levels (>2) are rarely evident for renders that aren't (very) closeups. Same with hair (try loading 2 copies and see if that getts want you want).
The screensaver definately slows down the render. I've turned mine off, and I've also turned off the computer going to sleep.