I guess 10 characters and dungeon props was too much to ask of my 8Gb GPU...
comixfana
Posts: 278
I've also used Scene Optimizer, it took1 hour and 33 minutes until I saw 1%, then it started moving; 12% after 1 hour and 40 minutes...still damn slow...
Post edited by comixfana on
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It's likely the render dropped out of GPU mode and is running CPU only. Try running GPU-Z while the render is going to be sure that GPU usage is 100%. If it won't fit in GPU memory, you may have to divide your characters into groups and layer the render in post.
Even with 11GB of VRAM, my character limit usually floats around 4-6 characters, so I'm not surprised at all that you hit the CPU only wall with 10 characters.
What I usually end up doing is doing multiple render passes with different groups of characters in each render and then 'merging' them in Photoshop. This can mess with shadows, so you'd need to plan accordingly. Sometimes I'll have a character on one 'end' of a group in both passes, if they are close together, to help with the shadows and overlapping thing. Then, when I overlay in photoshop, I might erase only part of that character on the upper layer, keeping the 'shadows' thing in mind as I do so.
This is where having a second computer set aside to do CPU only based renders for large scenes in Iray can be an interesting strategy. That way, you can do other projects on your main computer while that second computer crunches away all day long on that large scene of yours.
New daz user here. Are there any tricks to circumvent this kind of hardware restriction in case you wanna render a big and detailed scene?
render parts as png's with alphas and postwork assemble
How do I do that?
If you have lots of reflections, refractions, translucency, and such that's normal even with no characters. Just stop it when you yourself stop seeing visual improvements in the clarity of the render.
I am not surprised in the least, LOL
Pretty ambitious to think you could actually pull it off though.
It too 2 hours but it looks like it reverted to CPU mode only
Download the program and run it during renders. It gives you full details on the GPU usage, memory, load, etc. If you start it before starting the render, you should see both the cpu and gpu crank up as it gets going. If the GPU usage drops to 0 right after starting, but the cpu is still cranking, you exceeded VRAM and dropped to cpu. That's what you want to avoid.
By layering, I mean the same as others have advised. Divide your characters into separate scenes, maybe 3 or 4 each with the sets and props, render them separately as png files, then combine them in an image editor. If you can move the characters so that no more than 2 of them overlap each other, and limit interaction of shadows, this can be as easy as adding each render on top of the base and using an eraser brush to expose the characters the upper layer blocked. The Save As Scene Subset should help divide things up.
While you should get GPU-Z and CPU-Z you don't need either to tell if a render has dropped to CPU. If the system is nearly unresponsive during a render that is the CPU rendering. In a GPU only render you can usually do pretty much anything except play games.
^Doesn't the verbose render info window in DS tell you which device is doing the rendering? (I have to scroll back up to see the info near the top)
Makes sense :) looks like my limit is 5 characters, and I doubled it for that last render, so no wonder...
As a rule of thumb, you'll use 2Gb of vRAM per figure without doing anything fancy like outrider42 suggested above. Some hair models will crank that up a lot, but as a rule of thumb it isn't too far off. So with an 8 Gb card, 3-4 figures is a reasonable finger in the air limit.
To render more than that, you need to be inventive. One way is to set the scene up and hide all except the background and back 3 figures. Render. Save the render, and use that render as the background. Then hide the back 3 figures, make the next 3 visible and render. Then make that the background etc, repeating all steps until the last figures are rendered. The final render will be then have everything and all shadows correct - hopefully! If the light is strongly from one direction, you may well need to work the render sequence towards the light so the shadows are correctly shown. As I said, you'll need to be inventive any may have to have several attempts.
A second way might be to render each figure totally in isolation in the right place and layer the resulting images in the right order in a graphics package. I don't think a single solution will work in all cases. Anyway, you have a couple of cost free methods to try to start with.
Regards,
Richard
In a weird way, I’m kind of dreading the day I finally get a good Nvidia GPU, because then I’ll have to start seriously considering things like texture compression and scene optimization because then I’ll have something to compare my own render times against. I’ve been rendering CPU-only Iray since I started using DS, so I just accept that renders will take a long time, and that frees me up to do things like this without having to worry about dropping to CPU.
Buy lots of cpu power.
Buy eye-wateringly expensive commercial nvidia
Use a different render engine.
I use a Threadripper first gen 1950x; it is about 3 times slower than my 980ti.
I don't have to waste time optimising, which can actually take a lot of time, and I don't have RAM issues as my PC has 64GB. If i want to use the PC whilst rendering and it is using CPU, then I exclude a core from Studio so I can do other things.
That's genius! It reminds me of the "10 track bounce" I used to do with my old Fostex multitrack recorder! Save a partial scene, render it, use the render as a backdrop!
Do you really need the characters further away to have 4k textures, bump maps, specular maps, translucency maps, and subD 4 for HD?
A little time and effort put into reducing load will allow for more characters, it's easy to make material and shader presets do the work once you have set things up like low res image folders. It's how games put so many figures in the scene, LOD.
10 base characters (no hair/clothes) can be made to use just 500mb at render time, 7.5gb of clothes hair and scenery.
If you have Scene Optimizer then it does not take a lot of time to optimise a scene. Just start the script and reduce the textures that do not need to be so large. It should take 5-10 mins tops, and will speed up the render time. I have built a number of complex scenes with sometimes up to 15 figures (although most of my scenes have far less than that) and I have never needed to drop to CPU for the render.
Switch to 3dlight.
I have it and occasionally use it, but it can often be not enough.
I'm happy clicking the button to render and doing other stuff; maybe working on another scene, or just doing something else.
So, this thread got me thinking, so I made up a scene with about 12 people, including a bunch of trees, buildings, sky, atmosphere... that kind of stuff. I almost completely ran out of regular RAM just trying to render the thing. I can't imagine how that would fit on 8GB of VRAM... I have a pretty nice GPU, but it didn't stand a chance lol... To be fair, I tried rendering at 8K resolution, and I have a rediculous amount of grass, debris, and other things cluttering up the scene, but I still don't know how I'd fit 8 people on 8GB of RAM, especially if they are G3/8 peoples...
I had this problem before and found no good solution. I sacrificed quality in order to make bigger scenes by using reduced-resolution figures and low-poly game models. I also deleted morph channels I didn't need completely so G2 could be loaded as fast as M3RR.
Quick word search found no references to Canvases, soooo I will suggest them :D It's kind of an advanced use, and I am not great with them, but basically on the advanced rendering settings tab you can set up a scene as you want and then render it in pieces. Basically you can set it to render one figure at a time with their clothes, or smaller groups, etc. I am *not* an expert on the subject, but I know there have been threads on them here in the past, and I think there may even be some YouTube tutorials on the subject. So basically, I can point you to the solution, but I can't tell you how to use it XD
Check out Mattymanx's Resource Saver https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray
For what it's worth, my 1060 and I did 9 characters, with clothing and scene (etc) in ~2.5 hours...
You're gonna need to click it to see it properly... It's a Landscape thing, rather than portriat, so the forum is stretching it.
open in new window
which really should be the forum default likewise 800px rather than relying on posters to choose it in the second tab
Sorry about that. I'll get photoshop out once the current render is done.
your image can be whatever size but the url link needs to be 800px which it should do by default without people having to type it in and the next tab has to be new window which is not the default yet people are expected to know this somehow
I was not critising anyone but was having a go at the site