3Delight: Progressive Rendering is a thing that should be talked about more.
Scavenger
Posts: 2,674
in The Commons
I found a reference to Progressive Rendering in 3Delight in a thread.
Did you know this was thing? It is..And seems to go much faster than the pixel by pixel method....
Does it have other deferences? In my trying it on a scene I'm working on, I'm seeing some weird changes in how things look, but woo! faster renders!
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Faster, yes, but a bit noisier in the finished image. Still, not quite as noisy as some Iray renders I've done.
As daveleitz says, it is more prone to noise and also the behaviour of specular highlights can be noticeably different. Whether or not it is faster will depend on the complexity of the scene. It does tend to use more memory, though not by an enormous margin in my experience (now - it used to be a monster).
I've been using progressive 'Yes' rendering for weeks now and it seems blazingly fast. This image took 1 minute and 36 seconds to render on my old i5. Of course, my style is not necessarily smooth/realistic so your mileage may vary. UE2 plus distant light. Flipmode Skybox, earkham ground, 1971s building, fence from a nike vignette, dinoraul tree (ain't it magnificent!), smay dwarf morphs for g2m, unshaven for the beard, Koit by nursoda.
I've long been a fan of progressive render, even back in the day when it used monster memories. I usually only do small scenes, so it was never much of an issue. It has improved immesurably since then.
Simple scene does not necessarily mean few items.
Just enabling shadows can start to close the gap, especially with transmapped items, like hair. Any effects that rely on raytracing will narrow the gap or push the speed advantage firmly to progressive ON.
A 'simple' scene with a shading rate of 0.2 (yes, shading rate IS used by the progressive render) and just raytraced shadows, single spot light...
Progressive ON: 2 min 01 seconds
Progressive OFF: 6 mins 26 seconds.
There is very little difference between the two images, mainly due to the differences in pixel filters used (box vs sinc), and they show around the very edges of the shadow and ends of the hair.
And the gap is even more significant with transmap + occlusion.
This pair is just an occlusion light (like UE2 set to Ambient Occlusion/soft shadows, with a uniform map in place...softbox type light)
Progressive OFF: 22 mins 10 seconds
Progressive ON: 5 mins 16 seconds. (about 1/4 the time as opposed to 1/3 for the last pair)
Nice demonstration there.
There's one more coming up...occlusion + shadows...and it's a real eyeopener.
And this is the third set...
Progressive ON: 5 mins 57 seconds
Progressive OFF: 23 mins 24 seconds.
Notice while both increased over the occlusion only render, the Progressive OFF render had more of an increase (over 1 minute) while the ON only went up about 40 seconds.
Combining things like SSS or translucency will have similar impacts.
Occlusion + directional shadows? or Soft Shadows?
Directional...should have made that clearer. The first one is softshadow (2nd set) the other is directional (3rd set).
but you have to look very carefully to recognize that.
Since I usually take a render into post processing, applying curves to tweak the brightness and contrast usually shows up the noise a bit more, especially in the red. Iray usually has some hot pixels to clean up, too. Fortunately, noise removal algorithms can do a decent job without destroying too much detail. So, yes, a significant increase in speed is worth dealing with a bit of noise, which can be dealt with "post" haste.
Could someone please write on what progressive rendering really entails... what is it?
So progressive in the clear winner. It's one of the things I hate about 3Delight and how it handles transparencies... slow like mud and I have a pretty good machine.
This took just slightly under 5 minutes. Background is just a plane. Don't mind the hideous couch, it's just a WIP I'm playing around with! lol
Faveral mentioned progressive lighting in my Art Studio thread months ago-it was used for the Lake Village promo renders I think. I was surprised that it cleared up my cloudy, splotchy water. I was at wits end (I am NOT good with water!) and poof, problems disappeared the minute I switched to Progressive.
Yea, from now on.... it's progressive for me too when using 3Delight!
DOes 3Delight Progressive Rendering work like Iray or Lux, where it heads towards 100% but goes all zeno's paradox and never truly gets there, or does it have a definite end?
I started using progressive rendering just to be able to spot check lighting faster... then I noticed it was over-all faster too. :)
And it does have a definate end.
It ends the same as if it were not on...
That's one of the distinct 'biased renderer' items...a definite end point. In theory, an unbiased renderer will actually finish...but it would take so long and so little will change after a certain point, it's usually called of long before that point, usually when we stop noticing large visual differences.
I did an overnight progressive render (the dungeon scene I've talked about elsewhere). When I woke up, it was in the low 90%'s...and took a couple more hours for it to finish (~9 in total). I asked during that "couple" of more hours...wondering if just killing it then would be "good enough"...as I had other stuff to do, I just let it run.
From my limited experience with progressive rendering using 3Delight, yesterday I loaded up some light set from a merchant here that uses non ray traced shadows so a shadow map had to be produced and low and behold is loaded up a bunch of black ants all over the render so I actually got to see the progressive do it's thing. It does most of the base render in seconds and then the wait begins. It was cool to watch the black ants transform into smooth, lovely shadows.... lol
I have not yet been able to work out when it is quicker. I went for a time using only progressive, and then on one image, because it seemed to be taking forever, I switched back to non-progressive, and it rendered a lot faster. So what we need is some sort of chart with various parameters enabling us to predict which mode to use.
Or better still, DAZ 5 could do a quick recce of the scene, the lighting etc., and then advise us which to use.
Deepshadow map shadows should be relegated to animation renders only...and then not all that often.
So I have to say, that I am really happy about the progressive render mode :)
In 3Delight or Iray?
In 3Delight I have nothing like this so far
Had this happen in 3delight with a recent render. I didn't like how some things were working, so I rendered again as foreground, mid, and background. The foreground figure had some noise in the original progressive render, not much but still noticeable when pixel peeping. When I rendered it again non-progressive, there was no noise. Probably why progressive is faster, depending on the scene. It could be an artifact of how light is hitting the object in question, too.
I get the noise most in progressive renders when using the AoA subsurface and at places where there should be "odd" shadows (under chins, around fingernails and knuckles, etc.) Now I'm also usually using the AoA lights, which may also impact how much noise there is.
But yeah, not usually much worry to clean up in post.
Two factors contribute to the 'noise'...one of which can be adjusted to reduce/eliminate it. The other can't...by design the progressive mode uses the box filter, instead sinc. This can't be changed. It will provide a slightly different looking finished render.
The other, possible source of noise is the sample settings...shadows, occlusion, etc.
Because nothing is simple, in doing some renders to test differnt lighting methods, I did the same picture (ue2 light) with progressive and non progressive...same settings, just that.
No Preogressive: 3 minutes 10 seconds.
Progressive : 4 minutes 2 seconds
First time I've done a head to head comparison...Do the time savings come with bigger pictures or does my system just run counter to everyone else?