any tips for making Iray renders/animations faster?
Toobis
Posts: 932
in The Commons
Its unlikely anyone can help but its worth a shot:
So while my graphics card is decent (GeForce GTX 1060) it still takes ages to do animations in Iray. Is there any options to decrease the settings of the Iray renders or use any sort of technique that might speed the process up a little? or a lot?! I'm prepared to decrease the quality of the Iray renders a little if it means they'll be a bit faster. Thx.
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Drop the Max Samples, say to 100, and do a test render on one frame and see how it looks. If it looks bad then increase the samples. If it looks good try lowering the samples and test until it looks bad then go back to the samples where it starts to look good. Use that and save to image sequence. As the renders progress have a look now and again to make sure all the renders look consistent and stop the sequence if they don't, change the samples and start again. I keep checking the renders as it saves waiting until all the images are done and then finding out that there are some that needed more samples to look good. I use IrfanView to look at them and if you use the right and left arrow keys it runs through the images in order and lets you see if the animation is working, it is a bit jerky but works.
lower the resolution.
increase the resolution to double what you what, render to lower quality then reduce the image size by half.
lots of cash to buy stuff.
reduce texture sizes; remove items not needed. Remove textures from items some distance from the camera.
I mostly render backgrounds first then add the character inserting the BG in environment as a backdrop and rendering with a ground plane, makes a huge difference
Is dropping max samples the only thing I can do? will lowering anything else help?
how do I lower resolution pls.
Just to clarify on your question.
Iray renders is straighforward.
Animations: do you mean the animation, or the rendering of said animation?
meant rendering of animations.
If you are rendering animations I greatly encourage you to download the 4.11 Studio Beta. Aplying the post filter denoiser after 50 or 100 iterations wield good results and might get all your frames down to that numbers.
uh?!? K i have no idea how that works it sounds too complicated for me.
There is a whole universe out there called "compositing", and I think it's what just about every professional studio on the planet does when rendering movies. You render your animation/image in pieces ("layers"), and in the end you blend them together for the final image/movie.
So for example if you have a character moving against a background, you might be able to render the background once as a single image, then just render the character separately doing the animation part, and in the end just merge them together. That way you don't have to render the background every time.
There are infinite variations on this, and tons of other benefits you can get from it (stuff like allowing you to use much less powerful computers and still do things faster, and allowing you to do stuff like real time motion blur and depth of field).
mmmm interesting. Not sure I understand the background render seperate part though. If you are only going to be throwing the final animation render and background render both together in the end anyway for the final completed version then whats the point? obviously I am missing something.
Usually backgrounds take a long time to render. But if you're just rendering a character with no background it will usually go very fast.
So if you have a background that takes 10 minutes to render, and the character alone takes 2 minutes, that's 12 minutes for a frame. But if you do the 10 minute background once, then all of your animation frames only render in 2 minutes (character only).
So for 1,000 frames, normally it would take 1,000 x 12 = 12,000 minutes (1 week) to render the animation. If you composite, it takes 1,000 x 2 = 2,000 minutes (1.5 days), plus whatever time it takes to prepare the scene and then composite them together.
you only have to render one frame for the background
if you want other camera angles render some for those too
I seeee so you render image of the background alone then load that render image on a basic plane background. Then you can do the character.
under environment tab add a background image
you can use the shadowplane then from iray
Compositing isn't done much any more except by bad animators. Shadows come out wrong as do reflections. Nothing says you can't do it but people can tell.
Basically a 1060 isn't going to do animation in a reasonable amount of time at a decent quality that's just reality.
when you master that maybe try rendering a very big image 2x1 ratio 8K x 4K for example using the spherical lens and put it on your iray dome
then you can rotate your camera
only rotate though not pan or zoom as imagine it fixed on a tripod at the center of the point you rendered the 360 degree image, if you do any camera movement other than rotate on all axis the figure will slide
Yeh I may try the larger one.
Also is there nothing else I can reduce in the settings tab for Iray animation renders that'll help besides reducing max samples (which doesn't seem to make any difference I might add)
but I am a bad animator
Forgot to ask as you said 1060 is low down on the capibilities scale what would be the bare minimum for at least reasonable render times for iray?
Below is a list of benchmark render times and other info for many GPU's rendering a benchmark scene. It should give you an indication of relative times. The answer to your question is totally dependent on what you mean by "reasonable" and how much you're willing to spend. A 1060 may be perfectly fine, depending on what you're doing and what you're expecting. For example, a 1060 renders the benchmark scene in a little more than twice as long as a 1080ti (4.5 min vs 2 min). Does that matter to you?
BTW, take the listed prices with a grain of salt, and check them yourself. They change on a daily basis
yeh those prices are pretty surprising frankly :O but I think I will save that chart its useful.
Had to ask: is there nothing else I can reduce in the settings tab for Iray animation renders that'll help besides reducing max samples (which doesn't seem to make any difference I might add)
I go 50 samples myself and slide convergence way down, also I use either dome only or add a distant light and make that my sun element in sky only
Wow!!!.... so much WRONG in so short a post.
Compositing in Avengers infinity war
To be fair you need compositing for absolute control of the final look
and depth of your CG shots particularly with live footage
mixed with CG elements.
Compositing is not really to save overall render time
In fact rendering several passes can often take longer but the control in post production
justifies it.
The OP needs to invest in better hardware or use a render farm
if he wants IRay to produce faster renders.
Did you not like the numbers I used in my example? Of course there are ways in which compositing can drastically improve overall production times. Rendering a very complex background (3D outdoor vegetation, for example) can take forever. But if you do it once, and make that image a backplate, you can cut your rendering time drastically.
Of course, like anything in the real world, it's never an "either/or" proposition. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, depending on what you're doing. Sure, sometimes the major benefit is control. Again, it's never an "either/or" simple answer.
If you've ever tried rendering animations with stuff like motion blur, and then compared it to doing motion blur via post-production compositing, you know that it can result in HUGE time savings, since it can be done in virtually real time with VFX software. Same thing with Depth of Field. The reason is that you're not calculating in 3D, you're calculating in 2D pixels.
This
get you Free Magic BG/FX panes here https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/299011/ivy-s-magic-pane-prop#latest
I can only speak for my self... When I do animation, 99% of the time I move/pan/tilt/zoom the camera, as I find static shots boring. Since I don't combine real world footage with 3D, might as well render everything in one pass, doing backgrounds separately and editing together in a video editor will be a time consuming process, although I can see the benefit of having more control over the end result;)
You make some very excellent points sir
The actual raw render passes are much faster.
Perhaps my perspective is a bit coloured my Many hours spent
in post effects and color grading so I am
thinking in terms of the total time to produce the final "delivery" version
of a shot not just the rendering in the primary render engine.
Actually there are many "Shots" where there is no Depth of field,particles of other VFX etc where there is no
benefit in rendering separate passes
But I do mostly Sci-fi which always has some need for post comping.
Actually Daz studio is Not very well suited for serious post
compositing IMHO.
For example I find no way in Daz studio(3DL or Iray) to have
a background object invisible in the render camera
yet visible on the reflective surface of some single object that
is being rendered in its own pass.
Exactly my thoughts!
Hmm that would be possible for sure, atleast in 3DL AWE has a lot of features I've not had the time to look into yet. But take a simple scenario where you want emissive surfaces to reflect in the eyes of a character, simply make them invisible to the camera (a one click solution) and they will still contribute to the global illumination and so on. Yeah, not gaining time but more control;)
This is sort of what I'm doing at the moment. I create my DAZ animation, and then "render" it by screen recording the Viewport, thus acheiving real time export, one minute of animation is turned in to a movie in one minute.
Then I import the video in to Hitfilm (free video editor for Mac and Win) where I green screen out the background of the DAZ animation (the default blue color of the Viewport). Now I have my DAZ character animation on a transparent background.
Then I begin working with layers in Hitfilm. So for example, I might layer a video of a real world face on top of the DAZ character, making the character much more life-like. You can track the movement of the DAZ face in Hitfilm, and then set the new face you are putting on top to follow that track. And then perhaps I put a video background behind the character. Finally I adjust the colors of the various layers to try to create the illusion that these multiple video layers are all part of the same scene.
So I'm using the lowest quality (but fastest) method to export out of DAZ. However, when I combine the DAZ character with all the other elements in Hitfilm it winds up looking pretty decent. Well, that is, it seems satisfactory at the moment, given that I've only been using DAZ for about ten days.
One possible solution to iRay render times that I'm considering is to set up a 2nd machine specifically for renders. You know, whatever 2nd machine you can get your hands on. Sure, the render will still take many hours or even days, but so what, you can use that time to craft your next DAZ masterpiece. I haven't done this yet, so not sure how good this theory is.
Heh nice one, very creative:) OpenGL is hard to beat
Edit: You don't have to do scren recordings, just go to the rendersettings pane and choose Basic OpenGL as rendering engine, then select render to movie (or image series)!