Wigs. Is it my imagination, or are they taking much longer to render?
JOdel
Posts: 6,316
So, okay. Rendering wigs is always going to take time. This much I know. But lately, the wigs I've tried to use in a scene are taking *much* longer than wigs have ever taken before. Even longer than some of SAV's wigs (which always took a long time). And most of them are fairly recently released wigs.
Case in point: Abraham Hair. Came as a part of the Floyd 8 bundle. Has Iray and 3DL materials. I use 3DL. I had the 3DL materials applied. I was using a light set that I've used any number of times before. The figure with the wig was in middle distance. How long would you expect it to take to render?
It took over 36 hours. There were a couple of other wigs in the scene, and the program didn't much like them either, but it rendered them, and didn't take a small eternity to do it, either. (I'm fairly sure that both were AprilYSH's work.)
Case 2. Another scene. Another figure in middle distance (G3M). 3DL, light set that I've used for years. That scene didn't seem to like *any* wig that I put on that figure. I tried, in turn, Jonas Hair, Lyall Hair, and Royce Hair. It would get down to the wig and stall out. Jonas Hair wouldn't even render in the color that I had appied. I applied black and the edge of it that it did render was dark blonde. It wasn't the lights. I've been using thoase lights for the past 4-5 years.
There were a couple of other figures in the scene which had originally bee given G8 wigs. I had to revert them to things from Genesis 1 before they would render. NONE of these wigs was fiber hair. Only Abraham Hair was anything other than normal transmapped hair. What is going on here?
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Comments
Subdivision? Maybe something weird with the 3DL mats?
No idea. At least one of the wigs I'd used in a test render of the figure with no problems at all. But I've done much more complex scenes and had them render without a problem.
The Abraham hair I can see giving me problems since the transmapped strands are really narrow and there are a *lot* of them. But taking over 36 hours to render it in middle distance is excessive.
Since you don't share any information about what shaders you used on the hair, or what lighting or rendersettings, it's pretty much impossible to help
One of the most obvious thing you could try is to disable ambient occlusion for all the hairs in your scene, especially if they are fairly complex and have multiple transmapped layers.
ETA Also check if the hair is using SSS or translucency, if so just turn them off;)
I'm using mainly Iray these days. But when I first came to daz studio I did some tests with 3DL and the only way I found to make it fast was to resize textures and disable raytracing features all together. This was specially true for hair. So I used shadow maps and ambience illumination without raytracing and the results were not bad, though not photoreal of course. Now there's the awe shader that I have no experience with but should render faster.
The main advantage that I found with 3DL over Iray is that it takes much less memory and it also supports motion blur and micro-displacement for hd displacement maps, that are features not implemented in Iray. 3DL is also damn fast if used without raytracing.
Yes, yes, yes, This is a problem in general that I've noticed too,
Many Current Hair sets take forever and a day to render with 3d Delight these days, And I mean they are really hogging the render time like nothing else, alot of them. (But all is well under IRAY.)
Older hair sets (Gens 5&6) don't have this issue, some tricks i've resorted to,
1) Svens solution above
2) Where possible make Mapless shaders out of Mats from older Hair sets and apply those setting, depending on the wigs construction, this may or may not yield good results.
3) Turn down Max ray trace depth down to 1 in the render settings/ Sampling, but then that effects everything in the scene.
4) Simply sticking to using older hair sets for 3d Delight period.
I would also suggest to Hair Vendors to just not include 3DL Mats at all, if they are unable to make them more efficient. Also to please test their 3d delight Mats for performance with a couple of different light sets also - as that is when it really kicks it in the nuts.
Sniggers wigs
of topic a bit but ....
its so true, DAZ people all baldies!
I actually used to use the old textured hair options that used to be included
because
I have Carrara and grow hair on those textures!
It works for LAMH too!
..even more off topic, awe now works with Garibaldi hair, and wowie is obviously working on a new hairshader for curvebased hair (GB, LAMH), not sure how it will work on poly- or transmapped hair though. It will use 3DL's internal Marschner BRDF ( R, TT and TRT ). Will probably render a bit faster than awe on that kind of stuff.
Quick test with GB hair with awe applied to it
..and an attempt to convert GB to .obj so I could make it conform, not an easy task I noticed
, also with aweSurface applied
Hmm yes I've noticed this too, with newer hair models. My conclusion: The shaders are the same, the renderer is the same, so it can't really be anything else than more complex topology and larger more detailed maps, can it. And I am appreciating vendors taking the time to include 3DL mats, even if their products render slow. You can always dumb down the mats yourself if needed, the DS default shader is pretty stable and renders quite a bit faster than AoA or UberSurface, and it can use both displacement and normal maps, even has a scattering function when the skin lighting model is selected. I've been using old Gen4 hairs and G1 hairs for years and years, face it, if you go for even a little bit of realism, many of them look just terrible=))) But render fast, no doubt=))) We seem to have a lose-lose situation
IMO, with these heavier hair models and 3DL, forget using UE2 and OmUberarea lights and all that, old tech that renders forever. AoA lights are still very useful though. Try IBLM with Parris'(not so new anymore) lightshader, it works much better with transmapped hair than UE2 ever will. Or go for awe, it even comes with a IRayUber to awe conversion script. wowie has done a good job on creating highly optimized opacity filters, you can create light catergories, set different samples (shadow- diffuse- specular- global illumination SS- to name a few) for every single surface, thus optimize hair models to render pretty fast. And this product is still being developed, unlike the old shaders. And the best of all, wowie is giving it away for free
Well these are my two cents, while sipping my morning coffee
Did a test in 3DL with the Abraham hair, DS 4.10 default settings and a single distant light, close up render 855x915. Old quad core 2.4 mHz CPU:
Hair alone: 34 minutes
Hair on Floyd (not HD): 21 minutes
The longer time with the hair alone is probably because it also renders the inside of the hair.
So it must be something with your lights or something else.
Sometimes I remove the translucency settings from the hair materials. They take more time to render and don't really look any better in my opinion. Also you can check out Mattymanx's resource saver product, there's a lot of useful info in the promo pictures. If a figure isn't right in front of the camera, you may be able to remove some of the hair transparency. Rendering layers of transparency slows a lot of cards down.
Subdivision, I think.
Image 1 render time 55 mins, using default high resolution on Abraham hair:
Image 2 render time 6 mins, using base resolution on the hair:
AoA advanced Ambient & Distant lights used. All settings 'out-of-the-box' except for the change in hair resolution.
Rendered on an i5 laptop with 8GB ram.
The base resolution looks good enough for me!
That's quite a difference, I would have expected SubD to double the rendertime
double on both axis; a quad becomes 4 quads - or 16 at 2 levels of sub d
Surely subdivision quadruples polygon count at each level so a factor of 4 is to be expected? And with only 8GB of ram, at high resolution my system was probably swapping to disk.
Yup, except that 3DL doesn't support SubD level 2 or more.
Thank you. That weill probably be a help. Go to base resolution in future. Turning off the shadows also helped, but that left the hair looking pretty flat. So I turned them back on again.
I'm on an iMac, and the light set used was the one from Flipmode's Eteernal Sands skybox product -- so an older light set from some years ago, which I know works well with 3DL. There were a few linear points around at light sources in the room as well. Otherwise I was using whatever render settings are default in 4.10.
Cant say i ever found SubD levels of 1 or 2 makes huge difference to my render times, just view port performance - if there is alot going on in the scene.
Wasnt aware it was getting cranked up to 3 or4 by anything, but Ill check that out - thanks.