Un-Biased Reneder Thread - Post Your Renders!! (Reality/Lux, Luxus/Lux, Octane Render, and others?)

thd777 · February 2015

Kyoto Kid said:
PhilW said:
Kyoto Kid said:
..yeah but I would not be able to render the scene I posted earlier in 3GB of VRAM. That scene would require at least 6GB with all the reflectivity and transparency maps and it is fairly representative of the type of work I do..

I think you are missing the point of Out Of Core - only the geometry needs to be held in VRAM. Textures will be loaded preferentially into VRAM too, but if that exceeds the available space, it will be held in normal memory. So if you have 2GB VRAM and 8GB normal RAM, you will be able to use the whole lot to render your scenes, with only a small performance hit - better than not being able to render it at all. And in general, it is the maps and not the geometry that takes up the greater part of a typical scene, so it opens up what you can do with Octane hugely.

...however as stated, it is a slower process than pure GPU rendering. This is part of the reason why Lux dumped further development on their Hybrid rendering as the small speed advantage over pure CPU rendering was outweighed by stability and complexity issues.

For myself, dumping 400 - 500$ into a render engine (for which the plugins for the software I am using are still in Beta status) makes little sense when I already have Reality4, (the upgrade for which cost me only 19$, already supports pure GPU rendering, and has excellent customer support) and for 30$ more I can purchase Luxus for Carrara.

For me 400 - 500$ is a huge amount of funds which (at least for my purpose) would be better put towards purchasing say, ZBrush or a perpetual personal licence for Photoshop.

If you read through my post a couple of posts back, you can see that in my first tests the out of core rendering was only about 5% slower than with everything in vram. So it is still very very fast. The speed will of course depend on how much is out of core.
Overall you can certainly not beat the Lux/Reality combo in terms of affordability to performance ratio.
I am using both, but since I have started with octane I am hooked on the workflow. It is sooooo much better than the make a change, export, start lux , stop, repeat .... method.
But I am also lucky to be able to afford a high end system, that helps of course. I just got a third GPU (GTX 980. Pretty good deal at $800). Funny thing, the GPUs in my box now cost as much as the rest of the system... :)
Ciao
TD

thd777 · February 2015

Kyoto Kid said:
dustrider said:
Kyoto Kid said:
..yeah but I would not be able to render the scene I posted earlier in 3GB of VRAM. That scene would require at least 6GB with all the reflectivity and transparency maps and it is fairly representative of the type of work I do..

I'm guessing you mean this scene: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/48860/P418 ??

...nope, this one:

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/765456/

This scene peaked at 10.9 GB in 3DL.

The one with the two girls tops out at about 9 GB in 3DL and kicks up a "high memory usage" warning when submitting to LuxRender for CPU rendering. It also includes several the textures that make use of the LIE (the freckles on one of the girls, the graffiti on the shelter, and the brick road surface) which Reality converts for LuxRender. Reality4/LuxRender 1.3.1 also support the Daz SSS shaders.

The amount of memory used in DS doesn't really tell you how much you would need to render with the GPU in Octane. For example my scene above uses 8 Gb in DS but only ~3.5 in Octane. This can be reduce by using the texture reduction tools in OcDS.

Regarding LIE: That works in Octane too. The dirt on the girl and her clothes in my image above were done in Octane after applying the dirt layer with LIE in DS.

Oh, and please do not think that I am picking on you or trying to convince you. I am just trying to provide some first hand insight into those systems I have experience with. Octane is an expensive way to do things. Only you can decide what's right for you and what is within your means.
Ciao
TD

kyoto kid · February 2015

...I pretty much built what would be considered a "midrange" system: 12 GB memory in tri channel mode, 2.8GHz i7, and Nvidia Fermi GPU with1 GB RAM (which at the time was a lot) .

I recently came into possession of two Radeon 7950 HDs however only use one as VRAM doesn't stack for rendering purposes so no reason to tax the PSU further. It is sufficient for experimentation with Lux's GPU mode which is still in its "infancy" at this time. As I understand Lux 2.0 is to have much improved GPU rendering capabilities. Since Lux is OpenCL based, I will stay with AMD GPUs as they have more up-to-date drivers than Nvidia.

I don't make the kind of income to afford a high end system or software and must make do with what I have. In the years before I was able to scrape up the resources for (and learn how to build) my current system, I used to do all my 3D work on a duo core 32 bit notebook with 4GB memory and an Intel integrated chipset. For myself, just upgrading the memory on my current system to 24GB will be a big enough expense (even though memory prices have fallen) as I also need to upgrade the OS to support the higher amount of memory.

...yeah, one of the "Starving 3D Artists" here.

-----

...as to the memory differential between Daz and Octane, that would mean either scene of mine would require a minimum 4GB VRAM. meaning a 6GB GPU (as I haven't seen any 5GB ones out there) if I don't want to sacrifice texture quality. Wasn't aware that the LIE carried over.

DustRider · February 2015

Kyoto Kid said:
...as to the memory differential between Daz and Octane, that would mean either scene of mine would require a minimum 4GB VRAM. meaning a 6GB GPU (as I haven't seen any 5GB ones out there) if I don't want to sacrifice texture quality. Wasn't aware that the LIE carried over.

Like thd777, I'm not trying to convince you to use Octane, or pick on you in any way. But I've got to ask "Why?". I'm not quite sure I understand the reasoning behind this statement, because with out of core textures you could easily render the scene on a 4Gb card, and most likely render it on a 2Gb card, and quite possibly on a 1Gb card, without reducing texture resolution at all.

OK, so time to post a link to a pretty amazing render - since this is a render thread :)
Here is an example of a scene done with the Octane plugin for Poser, approximately 18 figures were used (the creator wasn't 100% sure of the number), and further the page he states that the scene is up to 32 figures/characters - all done on a 3Gb card (with out of core textures)!! http://maskdemon.deviantart.com/art/render-Out-of-Core-Textures-system-ram-not-vram-512307016

DustRider · February 2015

thd777 said:
I have been experimenting with out of core rendering. My primary render GPU is a 780ti with 3Gb and while this works out most of the time nicely with some careful texture management I do run occasionally into a case where I do need more memory. Thus I was happy to see the implementation of out-of-core rendering (i.e. using the main ram for extra textures) in 2.21.1 standalone. One can of course load things directly into Octane standalone via .obj import, but I find it easier to use OcDS for the scene setup. Hence I experimented a bit with .ocs export from OcDS and rendering in Octane 2.21. For .ocs export the scene needs to be first loaded in GPU memory as far as I can tell (I does not work if one does not do that) and thus we cannot directly set up a large scene and export. Instead I set the scene up in several parts (three in the example below, the two figures and the scenery), set up materials, and saved each part in the correct position relative to each other as .ocs. Then I fired up Octane Standalone 2.21.1 and loaded the scenery and imported the other .ocs files into this scene. One needs then to connect the geometry from the additional .ocs files to the first Render Target (via the Geometry Root node) so that everything appears in one image. To make this easier and allow for small adjustments in the placement, I exported the figures as .obj from DS and re-imported them to DS prior to setting up the Octane materials in OcDS and saving as .ocs. That way they appear as a single mesh in OcDS, making it easier to move them via the Placement node and to connect them to the render target (only one connection for each figure rather than one for each submesh). Might sound like a lot of work, but is actually quite quick. Then I enabled out of core rendering and allocated 8 Gb of ram to Octane. And boom it went with out issues. This scene used 2.5 Gb on my GPU and a bit over 1 Gb of main ram. It does render slower which is not surprising due to the need to move textures in and out of the GPU, but for this particular example it was only about 5% slower than the same scene with one character which fit into my GPU. I did not notice any differences in stability. Below is the finished render. It is still a work in progress, so materials are not fully tuned. But it worked! Hopefully this feature will at some point be available directly via OcDS. It is very useful if you need to squeeze just a bit more into a scene... :D
Ciao
TD

Fantastic render! Thanks for stopping in, posting the image, and sharing your work flow. A great way to take advantage of out of core textures using the DS plugin!

thd777 · February 2015

Here is another one I just finished. Actually it is two renders from scene scene. That's one other reason love Octane: One can very quickly explore different views and produce multiple renders from the same scene.
Ciao
TD

This one is part of my new Wasteland series of renders.

linvanchene · February 2015

For those interested:
Andw tested how much speed loss you have with Out of Core Textures in OR 2.21.1

PMC(8/8) PT(8/8)
*Octane 2.16 1.28 1.66
*Octane 2.21.1,
out-of-core disabled 1.29 1.63
*Octane 2.21.1,
2500Mb textures
in system RAM 1.05 1.41
Source: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=44704&start=60

The unit of the numbers is MS per Second. (MS = Mega samples = Million samples per second)
The numbers of course will be different depending on the specific scene but we can take it as a rough estimate.

The reaction to this by other OctaneRender users is:

So, performance hit is just about 20%, which is fine

This means loosely interpreted:

IF a standard 3Delight render takes 10 hours
a standard OctaneRender would take 1 hour (estimate 1 GPU is about 10 times faster than 1 CPU)
an out of core OctaneRender would take 1 hour 12 minutes. (estimate 20% longer render time with out of core)

Now keep in mind that you can use 2 or even 3 GPU.

2 GPU out of core would take about 36 minutes. (2 GPU means half the render time of 1 GPU)
3 GPU out of core would take about 24 minutes. (3 GPU means 3 times faster render time then 1 GPU)

Now you can make that same calculation again for an animation.

If an animation rendered in 3Delight with 1 CPU would take 10 weeks
the same animation rendered in OR with 3 GPU and out of core would take about 3 days!

Maybe you can see now how in comparison to the overall speed gain you get with GPU the speed loss due to out of core rendering is "fine". :P

PhilW · February 2015

thd777 said:
Here is another one I just finished. Actually it is two renders from scene scene. That's one other reason love Octane: One can very quickly explore different views and produce multiple renders from the same scene.
Ciao
TD
This one is part of my new Wasteland series of renders.

Great images - nice skin!

WendyLuvsCatz · February 2015

I rendered a video yesterday with 21 dressed haired figures in the medieval tavern but not of boasting quality I am afraid, will suffice as part of my next JaguarElla video as a very grainy shot, doing a not much better single image it is taking forever to clean up.
stuck it here as not good enough even by my sloppy standards for this thread

TangoAlpha · February 2015

erik leeman said:
I did that forest scene (same environment, but with a different girl and without the jeep) in Reality / LUX render before, and if my memory doesn't fail me it took about 19 or 20 GB of RAM to have it rendered. That was a bit of a worry because my PC 'only' has 24 GB on board.
Again, to this day it surprises me every time how much I can shovel into a scene with Octane without breaking things.
Cheers!

Erik

What is that environment Erik? It looks pretty amazing ...

FirstBastion · February 2015

looks to be this

http://www.daz3d.com/rubble-3-modern-ruins

erik leeman · February 2015

Tim_A said:
What is that environment Erik? It looks pretty amazing ...

Thanks, it's not a ready-made environment you can buy in one go.
Essentially it's two instances of Predatron's Rocky Outcrop,
http://www.daz3d.com/rocky-outcrop
surrounded by trees by Dinoraul from Rendo, all kinds of bushes, and smaller plants from Andrey Pestryakov, Predatron, and Flink from Rendo.

If I open the scene in DAZ Studio, the Octane plugin tells me it has loaded 1516 MB of textures, 127 of which are 8 (32) bit RGB.
I'm still using v1.2 of the plugin, so there's room for 144 of them.

Here's a DAZ Studio screenshot of that scene as seen from above.
As you can see there's trees behind the camera, as well as to the sides out of the frame.
That was necessary to get the light inside the frame to look like a true forest would look.
I often (most of the time) use objects outside the actual frame to influence the lighting, it has quite an impact with unbiased rendering.

Cheers!

Erik

erik leeman · February 2015

FirstBastion said:
looks to be this
http://www.daz3d.com/rubble-3-modern-ruins

Of course I've used that too (some time ago), but mine was a bit different ; )

Cheers!

Erik

TangoAlpha · February 2015

Thanks Erik. Like I say it looks pretty amazing. :)

kyoto kid · February 2015

...well, throwing in the towel on this. Apparently materials in older scenes not appearing in the materials tab and issues with cameras in Reality4 have not been dealt with in the latest update. As I paid for this plugin, I feel I shouldn't be the one to figure out a fix for bugs in the software, so I uninstalled it. Perhaps when the day comes that I can afford Octane, and the GPU to support it I'll give it a try. Until then, it's back to 3DL.

WF3D · February 2015

I had not touched Reality in a long time, then decided to download and test the update announced yesterday. This was the result, and I am quite happy about how Reality works now!

Rendered at 94 S/p in about 14 hours.

PhilW · February 2015

WFeather - nice image, although I did chuckle a little when I saw 94 S/Px in 14 hours. Here is an image done with Octane Render for Carrara, around 500 S/Px in just over an hour. I know they are very different scenes, but it may give some idea of how fast Octane can be compared to Lux, and I am only running on a laptop, not a high end supersystem. There was a little postwork for color levels and to use a depth map to apply a little haze.

WF3D · February 2015

Thanks - unfortunately, Octane is definitely out of my price range, at least for now. To be honest, DS suits my needs overall, but I do like to experiment a little with Reality from time to time. If only Reality was faster and/or Octane much cheaper...

PhilW · February 2015

WFEATHER said:
Thanks - unfortunately, Octane is definitely out of my price range, at least for now. To be honest, DS suits my needs overall, but I do like to experiment a little with Reality from time to time. If only Reality was faster and/or Octane much cheaper...

I understand that LuxCore will be much faster, so when that is fully developed and Reality links to it - which I am sure it will at some stage - then that will boost rendering through Reality/Lux many-fold. I am sure that the future of rendering lies in that direction so any experience you pick up now will hold good for the future.

erik leeman · February 2015

Here's a DAZ Studio/Octane v1.2 screenshot showing some numbers that might be of interest to some of you following this thread.
It shows the amount of VRAM consumed by a single textured Genesis 2 Female figure, subdivided to level 3 (one step above the normal range) for rendering HD detail. She only has a partially transparent skullcap 'on' that's subdivided to level 2, no clothing.
Other than that there's a 32 bit colourdepth 4000x2000 px HDR sky dome, and some simple untextured planes in this scene.
Time required to render that to 4000 Spp was about 1 hour 22 minutes on my Geforce GTX 770.

Cheers,

Erik

Jonstark · February 2015

Nothing of great note here, actually it's kind of poorly constructed and not particularly eye-catching, but for me was my first experiment of getting Carrara hair into an Octane animation. There's also some volumetric lighting from the overhead spotlight that's practically invisible (could have made it thicker and more apparent but decided I wanted the carrara hair details to be the most apparent since that was the purpose of the scene) and also an animated fog primitive at V4's feet.

The carrara dynamic cloth I already knew worked fine in rendered animations with Octane, but the cloth sim is so fun and fast I couldn't resist. Anyway, not a stunning render or animation but in figuring out how to do this I know I can animate hair, cloth, primitives, volumetrics etc into Octane.

Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75PP_mI6SHE

Rashad Carter · February 2015

Jonstark said:
Nothing of great note here, actually it's kind of poorly constructed and not particularly eye-catching, but for me was my first experiment of getting Carrara hair into an Octane animation. There's also some volumetric lighting from the overhead spotlight that's practically invisible (could have made it thicker and more apparent but decided I wanted the carrara hair details to be the most apparent since that was the purpose of the scene) and also an animated fog primitive at V4's feet.
The carrara dynamic cloth I already knew worked fine in rendered animations with Octane, but the cloth sim is so fun and fast I couldn't resist. Anyway, not a stunning render or animation but in figuring out how to do this I know I can animate hair, cloth, primitives, volumetrics etc into Octane.

Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75PP_mI6SHE

um..WowoW!!!!

I thought Carrara hair wasn't yest supported. And volumetrics too? I'm lost for words. Am I understanding all of this correctly, volumes and hair now work in Octane? Is this in 2.21 or something?

Rashad Carter · February 2015

PhilW said:
WFeather - nice image, although I did chuckle a little when I saw 94 S/Px in 14 hours. Here is an image done with Octane Render for Carrara, around 500 S/Px in just over an hour. I know they are very different scenes, but it may give some idea of how fast Octane can be compared to Lux, and I am only running on a laptop, not a high end supersystem. There was a little postwork for color levels and to use a depth map to apply a little haze.

Looks real, Phil. Might you explain in a little more detail about the haze effect you created with masking. Is that done within Octane or in post?

Jonstark · February 2015

Rashad Carter said:
Jonstark said:
Nothing of great note here, actually it's kind of poorly constructed and not particularly eye-catching, but for me was my first experiment of getting Carrara hair into an Octane animation. There's also some volumetric lighting from the overhead spotlight that's practically invisible (could have made it thicker and more apparent but decided I wanted the carrara hair details to be the most apparent since that was the purpose of the scene) and also an animated fog primitive at V4's feet.
The carrara dynamic cloth I already knew worked fine in rendered animations with Octane, but the cloth sim is so fun and fast I couldn't resist. Anyway, not a stunning render or animation but in figuring out how to do this I know I can animate hair, cloth, primitives, volumetrics etc into Octane.

Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75PP_mI6SHE

um..WowoW!!!!

I thought Carrara hair wasn't yest supported. And volumetrics too? I'm lost for words. Am I understanding all of this correctly, volumes and hair now work in Octane? Is this in 2.21 or something?

Yikes, my description was very badly worded, sorry! I used PD howler to take a multipass animation done in Carrara that grabbed the volumetrics, the primitives, and the hair and shadows, then took that into PD howler to composite with the Octane animation, since hair and volumetrics set in Carrara doesn't (currently) import/render into the Octane render. So it's 2 animations that are the same movements etc of the figure, one using the multipass and done in Carrara so as to get the hair and the fog and the shadows the hair will cast, and one that is strictly Octane, combined.

It was actually very easy and fast to do, and to my eye looks effective, though I could certainly do some fine tuning. The hardest part for me was I had never used or even opened PD howler until yesterday, and I am mostly ignorant of how to do postwork and the various terminology (I stumble my way around Gimp and that's about it), so figuring out how to use Howler was my biggest block (actually not knowing the terminology of what a swap image animation render was, for example, was probably my biggest block). Took several hours of messing around before I realized how to do it, once I did it was put together in seconds, so not hard at all (except that I never used that particular tool before, so took me much longer than it should have to puzzle out the 'how')

PhilW · February 2015

Jon - that is looking very impressive and thanks for the explanation. I am not that familiar with video compositing but any program that does compositing should be able to do this (Fusion 7 comes to mind as it is free).

PhilW · February 2015

Rashad Carter said:
PhilW said:
WFeather - nice image, although I did chuckle a little when I saw 94 S/Px in 14 hours. Here is an image done with Octane Render for Carrara, around 500 S/Px in just over an hour. I know they are very different scenes, but it may give some idea of how fast Octane can be compared to Lux, and I am only running on a laptop, not a high end supersystem. There was a little postwork for color levels and to use a depth map to apply a little haze.

Looks real, Phil. Might you explain in a little more detail about the haze effect you created with masking. Is that done within Octane or in post?

Thanks, Rashad. The haze effect was done in post. I rendered a depth pass in Carrara using the MultiPass options, it was very quick as there is no need to enable indirect lighting or anything else that will slow the render down. Load the Octane render and the depth pass into Photoshop (other image editors are available...) and copy and paste the depth pass into the Octane rendered image so that you have them as layers in the same document.

If you turn the layer mode to Screen on the Depth layer, you will see a fog effect but it will most likely be too strong, so I reduced the layer opacity and also adjusted the colour of the Depth (or now fog/haze) layer to give a pale bluish hue. The issue now is that the sky is too flat and I wanted to restore the colours in the sky, so I used another copy of the Depth map to select just the sky areas and used that selection on a duplicate of the original Octane render to act as a layer mask. Moving that layer to the top of the stack and reducing opacity gave me the effect I wanted.

I then flattened the image and played a little with curves to get some nice warm and cool tones on the building and sky - it didn't need much. I also use the VirtualPhotographer by OptikVerve (free but excellent) plugin on the Ambient setting and then Fade to around 20%, this just adds a little contrast and "pop".

All this may sound complicated but it only took around 5-10 minutes of playing around. Depth passes are very useful for distance effects such as fog and haze, as well as Depth of Field (with the Camera Blur filter) on a Carrara render.

I used some replicators in the image as well, there are 100 trees over on the right, I had some long grass clumps replicated in the foreground, and the far bank has 40,000 replicated grass clumps! (that you can barely tell are there...)

erik leeman · February 2015

Simple portrait, rendered in Octane Render v1.2 for DAZ Studio.
3.7 k Spp, no SubSurfaceShading or anything fancy.

Cheers!

Erik

j cade · February 2015

A few days ago I was stuck with the sudden desire to try a portrait with a smile (I, like many others, have the habit of making renders with blank stares). This is my final full test render. I have a few things to tweak (adjust the skins SSS and specular strengths), then I'll render it much bigger.

I also may break down and make particle eyebrows, these ones aren't cutting it for me right now.

I am disgustingly satisfied with the hair. Anyone want to hazard a guess on how I did it?

Robert Freise · February 2015

My latest done in Poser 2014 with the latest Reality version

WendyLuvsCatz · February 2015

Kamion, tell me you did not photoshop in real hair!

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