Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part IV
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Thanks barbult,
For lighting, I just use an HDRI rendering preset and then set all of the light bulb textures in the environment to be emissive so that the lights that should really be lighting up the place, ACTUALLY light up the place. That is why all of the lights are on during the day in this apartment. The lighting looks more dull without them set to be emissive. I also like to use as much glass and reflective metals as I can get away with to really get the light bouncing around. Other than that, I just trust Iray to simulate realistic lighting. It helps that ForbiddenWhispers put lamps, overhead lights, and windows in all of the right places. So really, I am just converting over the original lighting.
Another thing I do is take all of the furniture and rotate it by 1 or 2 degrees. In real life, nobody gets all of their furniture complete straight and it helps make the shadows on the wall have more angles to them.
Your renders of the Croft Apartment are stunning, Ivo. When you tone down the shine on the floors, your renders will look like photos.
I've read elsewhere, and have proved it to myself, that using a lot of emissives slows the render time way down. That's a big problem for those of us using CPU Only to render. How was the time on these renders? And how robust is your system?
Thanks L'Adair,
I will have to repost after I have made some adjustments to the floors and a few other little things. I haven't had much trouble with lots of emissives, which is why I am very happy with Iray. I have a system that I built to eventually have 4 GTX Titan X cards but I only have one right now. So my upgrade plan is to just buy more cards. I have a power supply and everything ready for 4 cards:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/TfWMWZ
Maybe the difference is just having an Nvidia GTX card so you don't have to do CPU only. Right now, I get a pretty good full screen preview of scenes that have over 50 lights in about 60 seconds on my 4K monitor. It doesn't seem to slow it down much to add more lights. What slows it down is SSS, Translucency, and a high polygon count that the characters have when HD morphs are on. With these environment only renders, I don't see much of a render time difference between a single HDRI lighting and have 50+ emissive lights in the scene. But if I stick Victoria 7 in there, then the render time doubles.
The renders I posted were set to a maximum time of 8 hours and were originally rendered at 5464 pixels by 4096 pixels. Then I size then down to 50% to help get rid of the grain from the render. The renders looked pretty good and would be considered usable around 15 minutes in but I just let them go overnight just to try to get rid of the grain as much as I can.
For instance, I have attached a work in progress of Planet Lava by Stonemason: https://www.daz3d.com/planet-lava
I have the lighting done. I have the lava emitting light and I feel that I am done with it. I have the skydome emitting light now. I set the windows to be light emitting as well so it looks like lights are on inside of the building. I am calling it a night on it as I have only gotten to the metals on the bridge in this shot. It looks like I will have to fine tune each metal texture and there are a lot of them. The rest of the metal beyond bridge floor in this shot is still just using 3Delight textures.
I stopped this render at 15 minutes in to show that it doesn't seem like more lights really seems to give the Titan X much issue.
...very nice work. Yes, the floors could do with a bit of roughness to tone down the almost mirror like gloss. Otherwise they look fantastic as if something out of Architectural Digest.
I like to do those "little touches" as well myself (such as slightly moving thing so they are not in perfect line) to give a scene a more natural "lived in" look.
Here is a quick test before I go to bed. I could see where maybe a GPU only rendering setup might have a problem with a lot of emissive textures but I am having an easy time of it with the Nvidia card. I have attached 2 more 15-minute renderings of the same view of Planet Lava. I have all of the lights in this scene are coming from emissive textures. Each blue light, red light, the windows, the skydome, the lava floor, the lava on the rocks, even the sparks are emitting light.
The difference is using an atmosphere like the one that AtmoCam for Iray supplies. A technique to add atmosphere is to create a big invisble sphere or cube and then add just SSS properties to it. So, one render has the SSS atmosphere ball and the other does not. It really slowed it down to add the atmosphere which is why I don't add that until I am done. Otherwise, I just keep adding lights and I don't see the render times increase much at all.
..that's quite a beast
I've been working on the design for a dual Xeon 8 core (LGA 2011-3) system with 128 GB of memory and up to four Titan X's. However, by the time I will be ready to build it most likely the new Pascal GPUs should be out with 16 GB of HBM 2 video memory and between 5,000 - 6,000 CUDA cores. Two of these beasties would be sufficient for close to "realtime" rendering, four of them would have almost as many cores as Nvidia's VCA, allowing me to build scenes completely in Iray mode. Not a "make Art" button, but one that will allow me to make art more intuitively.
...OK, ran into something really strange and very annoying.
For most of the week I've been pretty busy with RL stuff, like moving to a new place and cleaning out the old flat.
So tonight I finally was able to sit down to do resume work on my current project. I added a kitbashed prop I created to the scene and went to test render it, only to get a black render window. I didn't touch any of the render, tone mapping, environment or camera settings nor any of the lighting in the scene, Turning off the prop did nothing, nor did deleting it. I even closed the scene reopened it which didn't work and even shut down and restarted the programme but to no avail. Even with teh camera headlamp on the scene still renders completely black.
If I switch to another camera the scene renders normally so not sure why it is rendering black though the camera it is supposed to.
I have absolutely no clue as to why this would suddenly be happening and it is very frustrating.
Rendering in straight CPU mode.
I'm excited about my hoped-for machine in December... finally settled on Alienware X51 with a Titan X in it, and will consider adding more Titan X's as budget and if it seems useful.
...make sure your PSU is able to handle the load. My design calls for a 1,600w unit.
Okay... I'm officially jealous. I bought this computer a little over a year ago, and I'm sure my husband would throw a huge fit if I bought another one, especially an expensive souped up one like you have, even if I were to build it myself. C'est la vie.
During the Festival, I picked up AtmoCam. I've only used it once but it really slowed down the render. A lot! I love the effect, but it's not going to be used very often when I have to wait days for a single image to render!
I'm excited for both of you. If I keep my fingers crossed, maybe I'll stumble on a great deal at the same time I have the money. Until then, I'll just be green with envy for all you folks with the fast computers and kick-[backside] Titan X video cards.
I don't have a clue, either. But have you tried viewing the scene from the camera in question and creating a new camera with "Copy active view" selected?
If the new camera works, then it's probably that somehow the code for the old camera got corrupted. If neither camera works, then it's something else. But at least you'll know it's not the camera.
Well, I don't have it YET. So... ;)
...OK found the reason for the "black" renders. Apparently the camera was partlu inside the cylinder mesh light I created. (positioned it where the chandelier was in the set, moved it back 1 metre and the scene now renders fine).
No. But you do have it budgeted. I'd have to win the lottery to afford the machine I want. But to do that, I'd have to play the lottery... (in my experience, a fast way to throw money away!)
That's exactly what I was going to suggest it might be. I tend to do my promos with the camera in close at 30 - 35mm, and I frequently discover it's sitting inside a light.
Yeah, I'm thrilled. I haven't bought a cutting edge computer in... ... since the 80s? And I just went through several MONTHS of not being able to even spend a cent on the store because of money (it comes, it goes, and we were in the midst of losing money on house sale because of the f'in real estate market)
Before falling on your sword in despair, keep in mind that network/cloud rendering services are around the corner for those of us who can't or don't want to invest in a box full of Titan X's. Even the most expensive current VRay and Iray cloud rendering is about $3 per GPU hour, We're talking lots of cores in these GPUs, able to turn a render that might take 5 hours CPU only into 10 minutes. I don't know Daz's plans for their own cloud rendering service, but we can count on it being very popular.
Except that will require unlimited broadband service, which many of us don't have access to..
Why "unlimited"? The scene database is smaller than the scene data uncompressed in GPU memory, and the resulting file is maybe a few megabytes. In offline batch mode (I imagine the favorite for most users) you are not connected to their servers throughout the render.
I am sure there will be some people who won't be able to take advantage of some aspect of the latest technology. That's a pity, but it doesn't mean the only answer for everyone is to purchase their own high-end rendering platform.
At the moment, I'm too excited to think about super-duper computers vs cloud rendering services... my latest image made the banner in the Galleries!
It's the first time ever for me, and I'm thrilled to pieces. "Going Home" has 21 Likes and is the last image on the right. It may not stay up there long, so I took a screenshot. lol But I made it! What a milestone. (happy dance.)
VERY WELL DONE! It's a wonderfull render
and deserving of a resounding round of applause!
Vinny
Congrats, L'Adair. It was a really good render. I loved the skin you created.
Thank you, GallCommTV and Knittingmommy.
And thanks to all of you who took the time to give it a Thumbs Up. You all made my day. Hugs all around.
(If you're interested, I started a "Making of" thread over in the Art Studio. So far, I've got how I created the old woman, including her skin, and how I modified Divine Wings posted. http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/63826/the-making-of-going-home)
*Nudity* http://fav.me/d9bjgh0
I was playing around with Skin Builder last night. I wanted to see how it does in Iray. After applying the skin, I just used the Iray Uber shader to all materials. The render is nice. However, it quit when the max seconds ran out and claimed it was at only 19%. I think that was a little over 2 hours of render time. So, I upped the max seconds and increased the sampling rate just to see if it got better. I stopped it at 4 hours and I didn't see a noticeable difference between the two. The only difference is that I changed the eyes and the pose is just slightly different, I was having technical difficulties with the out blouse. It kept doing something weird that kept messing up and moving the model fixed the glitch, but had nothing to do with the render or Skin Builder. I changed the eyes just because I thought it looked better with the brown eyes. Overall, I'm actually pleased with how the Skin Builder skin looked in Iray.
edit: I think I may have also fiddle with her expression...again no impact on the skin.
I read that before I came over here. I've been working on a couple of skins with those products, as well, I hope they turn out as nice. It is so hard to find a variety of skins for the older generation. There are a couple of nice ones, particularly ForbiddenWhisper's skins, but not many. It is nice to have Zevo and DraagonStorms overlays as an option, though. I have gimp in place of Photoshop, but I'm still learning and my skills aren't that great yet. You gave a lot of really good information on how you did the skins and I plan on utilizing it.
The combo of Skin Builder and Overlay is really cool. I like to be able to create specific eyebrows for a character, for one thing.
For just applying Iray Uber Base, those look really nice.
As for the render time, if you move the slider down to zero, it turns off the timer. Then the render will continue until it hits either the Maximum Samples (iterations) or the Image Converged Ratio. Or until you hit Cancel. I'm guessing it's the hair that is slowing down your render. Lots of surfaces in that style, and lots of shadows. And I'm sure you'd see more detail in the shadows on her clothes, too, if you let it render to 95% or more. Not worth the time, though, when you're testing.
I'm doing all my renders CPU Only as well. When I'm checking on my work, I keep my renders at about 10 minutes. That's usually enough time to see what I need to see to make further changes. For the final image, I let it render overnight while I sleep. And for some images, I let it go on for days. Going Home, for example, was rendered to 93.32%, (I had a deadline to meet for the contest,) and that took 21 hours and 8 minutes. I didn't close the render window, saving the image from the file menu instead, (File > Save Last Render,) and I let the image continue to render. I finally got impatient at 99.99% and stopped the render. All told, it took 2 days 21 hours 11 minutes. Keep in mind, though, I rendered it at a very large size, 3000 pixels wide and 2308 pixels high. I don't usually render images that big. And there were things in that image, displacement, highly detailed hair, and so on, that added to render time. I often have a useable image by the time I get up the following day.
I actually didn't know that about turning off the timer. I must have missed that somewhere along the line. I'll keep that in mind for the future. CPU only is my default, no nvidia graphics card here as I'm running a Saphire Radeon graphics card. I do pretty well with what I have. I'll have to remember to save it from the file menu and let it render extra time when I'm doing something more than a test render and I've turned off the time. So far, I have just let it render until it maxes out and save the render. This was the first time I had actually had a render quit at so low a percentage completed. Lots to learn!! Thanks for the tips.
Speaking of infinite render times I cant seem to be able to do it no matter what I do. Crank the samples quality, time to ridiclous numbers, turn off quality and covergence crank samples to high values put time at minus 1 they always end under 90 minutes this in on my ROG Asus24 G laptop GTX980M and 2 1/2 yr old 32G tower with a newly installed GTX980.
Meanwhile staying on topic *Nudity* http://fav.me/d9bmmz4