hardwood trail - forest drive
escrandall
Posts: 500
in The Commons
I have Harpwood Trail, It's very beautiful but don't use it often as it brings my computer to its knees. Have anyone tried the new Forest Drive add-on? Is anything being done to address responsiveness?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I don't know about the new set but Tango Alpha suggested a solution to viewport lag on the original a while ago. This works rather well.
Cheers,
Alex.
I have a problem with that scene:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/286151/harpwood-trail-forest-drive-does-not-render
Those are large scenes with a lot of instancing. Iray Instancing Optimization needs to be set to "Memory" rather than the default "Speed" for scens like this. This is the case regardless of your GPU VRAM.
If that doesn't work / help then your machine is probably not up to the task.
Believe me, the machine is not the culprit in my case, fast i7 and 32GB Ram. :)
And? So your computer is a beast. Does that mean it'll handle EVERYTHING with ease? No.
Here's a jpeg of what the scene looks like straight out of the box. Howie has set the instance preview to off so there is no viewport lag, even on my 3.5ghz I5 with motherboard graphics.
Cheers,
Alex.
With lots of instsncing even 64gb of RAM can be eaten up if you don’t change the optimization.
32 GB of GPU RAM or regular?
Yeah, I don't even bother with the Howie sceneries anymore. They look great and render beautifully on my rig by themselves, but then you add actual scenes to them, a person or two, some clothing, hair and maybe an object or two and it's a no go
You know, as much as I champion Iray... this is one place where 3DL can really help. ;)
yeah.. i need to quit buying scenes...not happening on my system with no nvidia card.
You don't need an Nvidia card. Howie has it setup for 3DL, too.
yeah, but it's 3DL, I never plan to use 3DL
I don't have Harpwood Trail- Forest drive YET, but I do have (and love) some of the other Harpwood environments.
One thing I've noticed quite recently is you can actually drop the texture compression thresholds a LOT, and since modern environments rely a lot more on geometry than transparency they will still look rather good.
I was just rendering Harpwood trail (the regular/initial one) and I had texture compression at 64/128. And it still looks gorgeous.
With all due respect, why not use the tools that best do the job?
I go for a certain look. I come from rendering in Vray and Maxwell which are unbiased renderers and that is the look I am going for. I have seen some amazing, realistic renders with 3DL, but that is not the norm and they came from users very skilled in getting the most out of the renderer because they were familiar with 3DL and how to make the bias work for them. I would rather focus on the materials and the scene and let the renderer's programmed math calculate the lighting and shadows for me. I also don't care for heavy postwork either
I started using DS only because I wanted to use Luxrender via Reality because I was tired of the look of the biased rendering in Poser. I stopped using Luxrender when Iray was introduced, mainly because of the interactive preview and how Iray is integrated into DS
I totally get what you're saying, not trying to change your mind in any way;) I've been testing the aweSurface for scripted 3Delight now for a couple of weeks, it does just that + it has all the advantages that come with a biased renderer + it handles displacement just like the vanilla 3Delight version. No more do you have to fake GI or light bounce. It's there for free just like in IRay. I just loaded Jackson's field the full version and made a quick conversion to awe and hit render (on my IMac2015/8Gb RAM) and I'm lookin at about 45 min for a full HD render. Don't know how long it takes for you with IRay(andGPU rendering) but if I were to render that scene with IRay I figure it'd take atleast 30h maybe more.
And while it renders I can perfectly well set up next scene in the beta;)
30 hours??
I rarely spend more than 30 minutes on an Iray render, and usually shoot for 10-15. OCCASIONALLY I've let renders run overnight, but only for serious promos with loads of refraction. (And I usually only do that if it's dumped to CPU)
Yeah well... call it an educated guess, I won't even try LOL!
Hmm I lied, it took a little over 1h to render. With some surface optimization I think I could reduce rendertime to 45 min. Still think that's pretty good for CPU rendering.
the ones with issues are using memory in the render optimisation not speed I assume
you should use memory with anthing instanced,
IMO it's DAZ's fault for not having a dialogue to set this if you have instances
When I submitted the product I did put a note in the "Read Me" concerning Iray and the need to use "Memory" optimization - not sure if it made it through to the final product. Anyway this is from the UltraScatter manual:
I thought I used to have the set that was lots of bushes and I think it was kind of a maze type garden with an iron gate. I might have returned it because it wouldn't render on my old computer, But now I don't see it in the store anymore. Has it been retired?
It is still there. Maybe you have “Hide items I own” checked on. Also it is a Carrara product and won’t show up in your Daz Studio library.
Oh, wow, I'll have to check, thanks!
I do have it, and it is for Carrara. OMG
, how did I miss that when I bought it! I never use Carrara and haven't even had it installed for years. How can I get it to work in DS so I don't have to install Carrara and learn how to use it again? Hope there is a way to do that. I just downloaded it again, and will reinstall Carrara 8.5 Pro (hoping there is a chance I can get it into DS).
Back when all I had was my iMac, 30 hours to render a big Iray environment wasn't unusual (rendering 15-20 promo images took a loooong time, lol)
no sadly that scene is too complex and relies on Carrara features to export in any way but you can use a spherical camera and set the zoom as low as you can with a 90°x axis and do 360 renders to use on the iray dome.
lots of slomovideo interpolation in this video as it takes quite a while to render so not many frames
normal speed version
That's disappointing. I was thinking maybe you could export it as an obj, but I guess not.
This render took just 4 hours and 9 minutes. Original was 2000 W x 1000 H. Had to resize and squish compression for forum which makes it look icky like it has too much sharpen but it doesn't. But it was just load and go. I didn't make any changes (because I don't know how). I couldn't even figure out how to get the folder to show up in that panel at the bottom.