How to get four Genesis 8 figures (with hair) IRAY rendered on a GTX 980 with only 4gb of vram?
Flortale
Posts: 611
Any thoughts on how to get four Genesis 8 figures (with nice hair) IRAY rendered on a GTX 980 with only 4gb of vram? Where vram is defined as video card memory.
If I go over 4gb, I believe it switches to the CPU which can take forever to render.
Post edited by Flortale on
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Comments
Depending on the scene, you can render them on sperate layers. then combine them in gimp, photoshop, or other image program. It will render much faster too.
You can try scene optimizer but I have my doubts. You might get 3 but 4...
Have you tried dropping the texturesize? Even at close-up range you can brutally destroy the resolution on some of the hair textures without a shred of difference. At a distance (which I'm guessing is the case since you have 4 characters), I'd bet money you could almost remove all but opacity and not notice. Same goes for characters. Put one in your scene with the hair, then start reducing the texture size and rendering until you notice a difference.
Doesn't DAZ do this out of the box?
Under advanced I set texture compression to 512 and high threshold to 1024. Still, I will give your idea a try. I'll manually reduce the hair texture size and see what happens.
It sucks I have to rely on 3rd party software just to manage texture sizes correctly, but I'll give it a try.
This is probably what I'll end up doing, thank you.
That's compression, not resizing.
See if you can see any difference if you:
I see. Hmm, does DAZ have any kind of auto sizing feature or do you think they purposely don't perform texture size reduction in hopes of people spending more money on NVIDIA cards with lots of memory?
Okay!
Depends exactly what you need to achieve; there are 32 figures in that scene; they all use the same textures and hair. They fit in a 980ti, if only just, which has 6GB.
The shaders were tweaked a little to get a different look; I manually reduced the texture sizes.
If you decide to go with the same skin textures, look for ones that don't have obviously distinguishing characterists - all having moles in the same places is annoying :) However if positioning them so the moles don't show for all but one character may be possible - but that will depend how many images you need to produce and camera angles you need.
I have doubts you'll get that to work without making a lot of concessions. You will need to remove a lot of textures from the models. Get rid of any and all normal maps. Maybe even kill the bump maps. Resize all of the textures you keep. Get rid of any textures you cannot see, like if their mouths are closed, get rid of the mouth and teeth textures. Keep the clothing simple as possible. Some clothing items take more data than the figures themselves. The same with hair. Using older items can help here, because older and simpler items can take up less space.
Use an HDRI, or render them without a background and edit them into one in post. And unless you really need it, you can do the same with the models, too. If they are not touching each other, you don't have to render all four at once. In a real pinch you could use the same textures on more than one model if possible.
But can you render an image larger than 622 by 373 pixels? By reusing textures on everyone, you are mostly limited by geometry here.
If fell to CPU when I doubled the size of the image. There are other factors, not just geometry, otherwise it wouldn't have dropped to CPU. I'll be trying something else out as I need a few figures in a scene and it will be interesting for future reference.
I managed to render 20 Genesis 3 figures in 4GB of VRAM. I used Generation 3 skins (ie V3, M3 etc) in combination with this product: https://www.daz3d.com/legacy-uvs-for-genesis-3-special-edition-victoria-3, and these low resolution skins saved a lot of memory. However using Scene Optimizer to reduce skin resolutions of Genesis 3 or 8 figures will have the same effect. As others have said you need to strip out the unneeded specular etc maps, and switch figures to base resolution if they are not fully in the foreground.
Genesis 3 and 8 a 4 x 4K textures (stacks even)......now this is a 4K face, a 4 K torso, 4K legs and 4K arms....if you render out a UHD image you do not need that AT ALL since most of those beautiful skin details wont render anuway due to the limited resolution. I bought me the supercool script Scene Optimizer and when I use a figure a lot I always build 2, 1 and even 512 texture sets for it. Sometimes I use the script on buildings and landscapes too.....Stonemasons work can be a tad framerate cripling at times (not his fault he has no clue what part of a large set I'm using)......so I remove all textures from building that are only seen as shadows anyway and the rest gets processed as well. It should be nice of Iray/DAZ supported generated LOD's but since it doesn't you'll have to be creative! In my opinion Scene Optimizer is wearth it's weight in gold. It saves you upgrading to a bigger memory card and helps to populate scenes......by the way, cardboard cutouts can also do the trick for large crowds (or so I'm told).
Greets, Ed.