DAZ Spot Render vs Blender Region Render
DrGonzo62
Posts: 362
Hi,
I frequently used the DS spot renderer to render the eyes of a character closed, in addition to the full render with the eyes open.
The DS spot renderer works very fast since DS seems to keep all the render data from the main render in memory and then only computes and renders the changes in the selected area.
With Blender, this doesn't seem to work the same way. A Region Render of just a small area of the same scene takes just as long as rendering the full image.
I guess there is no way around this?
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Comments
I assume you're using the CTRL+B shortcut in the 3d viewport to engage the region render? According to the documentation, this should significantly reduce the render time by only rendering the selected area. It should not take as long as the full image.
Yes, CTRL-B
I have to disagree with the documentation though.
The full image took 25 minutes to render, and I stopped the region render of maybe 5% of the image after 18 minutes.
It would probably have taken 10 seconds or less to re-render that region in DS...
Interesting. You should really post this in Blender Artists community and see what they say there. What version of Blender are you using if I may ask?
4.5.3
As far as Blender forums go, I had not too great an experience so far. Except here... ;^)
When I was still very new to Blender, I had posted a question about the render manager Flamenco in one of the Blender forums, which I thought at the time was an official Blender addon.
Got immediately lectured that I was off-topic, and how dare I... Just short of WE HATE YOU!!! 8^)
Not having this functionality is almost as bad as not having Iray section planes in Blender.
I really grew tired of DS, but it does have some still very important features. For me at least.
I'm still using 4.3.2 for most of my work, but I do have 4.5.3 installed as well. I'll test the region render on one of my scenes and see if I get the same results you have reported. If so, this could be a bug.
I believe the issue is that Blender starts the render all over, even when doing a region render. Compiling shaders, calculating lights, etc.
While DS keeps all that in vram and uses that data to just calculate the new spot render area.
I remember this being a somewhat iffy feature, but it worked well enough for my purposes. That needs a lot of vram though.
Well, I just ran a test and here is my result.
Full image took 27.9 seconds to render. The region render took just over 5 seconds. So I'm not sure why you are experiencing this issue.
The screencaps are attached with render times in the upper left of each.
Be sure that persistent data is checked in the render settings, otherwise cycles will discard the buffers at the end of every render to save memory, thus needing to rebuild them after.
render tab > performance > final render > persistent data
Persistent Data...
I'd completely forgotten about that! Thanks so much, Padone. You're a life saver, as always.
I wish this was on by default.
And thanks to gregsgraphics_cafd0962a0 for looking into this! I appreciate it!
Immediately after starting Blender, you can check Persistent Data and then re-save your default startup file with File|Defaults|Save Startup File.
Yes, but I'd like that to be enabled by default when you need to create a new startup file in case the old one got corrupted somehow.
There are already so many other settings that need to be tweaked for ones personal preferences.
Glad you got it sorted.
Yeah, me too.
I like my character's eyes to blink, and not being able to quickly render the eyes as closed would have been pretty bad.
Thanks for your input! 8^)
PS: I assume the reason the feature isn't turned on by default is that it consumes extra VRAM and RAM, and can cause out-of-memory issues in machines that don't have enough.
Yeah, probably. But I prefer the way DS handles this. Fully transparent to the user.
I remember how stoked I was when I realized how fast a DS spot render was. Unless the region was too large and the render would fail.
There are some pretty important settings in Blender that are completely buried down in some sub menus.
Another one is the Transparent toggle to show or hide the HDRI. Luckily, that is what keyboard shortcuts are for.
Oh I understand. I haven't used DS very much, but I came to Blender from 3dsmax and Maya, and they had some really powerful spot rendering capabilities. You could spot render with alpha channels, shadow passes, GI passes, anything you wanted. Also, if the full render was complete and in cache, you could spot render right over the original render in any location, and it would be seamless. Perfect for changing just some small things in the render, or doing what you want to do... make characters blink, etc., and not require an entire full frame render again. Blender's region or spot rendering is ok, but not quite as robust.
I have to say that Blender has the least intuitive UI compared to any other 3D app that I'm familiar with.
Learning 3DS Max and Maya seemed a lot easier back then. Or Lightwave... ;^)
Even DS, but then again, DS doesn't have that many features compared to commercial applications.
It feels like Blender is programmed by folks who are 90% coders and only 10% 3D artists. If that.
Like, you wouldn't do some of that stuff if you were actually using it yourself every day.
You'd immediately realize how inconvenient that implementation is. *cough* n panel *cough* *cough*
@DrGonzo62
Actually, no. Blender is passed by the guys at Blender Studio who use it to make movies. That's typically how they design Blender, i.e. from feedback from people who make professional grade animations.
Personally, when I was learning Blender and found something I didn't like, I assumed that the problem was me and just kept at it until it was muscle memory and now I can't stand other apps that behave differently, like ones that make me take my hands off the keyboard often. 99% of the time, I'm glad that I did.
I say this to everyone who thinks that Blender isn't well designed: Blender isn't the way that it is because the devs are lazy, masochists, or stupid. Trust them a little bit; they know what they are doing. If you persist in your efforts, you'll find it easier and easier to do more and more sophisticated operations that you couldn't have dreamed of in, say, DAZ Studio.
Just my $0.02.
I don't know... I find the Blender learning curve exceedingly steep at times.
Just not something I'm used to I guess. And I have picked Blender over DS myself.
The gains from using Blender outweigh the drawbacks for me.
Well, I get what you're saying, but compared to most other applications, Blender is a bit of a mess in its UI. It's a MILLION times better than it was before version 2.8 came out, but it still needs some work. The N panel, for example, gets very unruly after you start collecting addons. There are addons to help sort the addons, so that speaks for itself. Only since version 2.8 has Blender become appealing to most artists. 90 percent of its user base came because of the UI improvements introduced in 2.8. The issue is that, being a free open source software, the programmers work on it as they can and only when they have enough money to develop further. The Blender studio isn't really a full-time production studio. They can only do what funding allows, and Blender is currently back to having some financial difficulties. Apps like Maya and 3ds Max were actually tightly developed based on the real needs of high-end production studios over the course of decades. Their UI and features come from decades of production requirements in studios producing the world's biggest VFX blockbusters and games. Blender's independent features have certainly helped its production recently, but it doesn't have the depth of production needs that commercial apps tend to have. That aside, the UI is definitely better than ZBrush at least. LOL
And I suppose I also get what you are saying. (Right-click to select, anyone?) But I suppose I feel I am not particularly impeded by things like the n-panel and value much more the clever and consistent hot keys that let me get things done very quickly, often without having to reach for the mouse. RXX to rotate by the local X axis (and no points for guessing how to rotate along the other local axes), or G-SHIFT-Z to move objects around on a flat surface such as a table (and again no points for guessing how to slide a painting along a wall), for two incredibly useful and simple examples. Another I find incredibly useful is fixing poke through without going into sculp mode by selecting normal axes, proportional editing smooth, and GZ. With countless powerful things like that, to me it seems misdirected to have a strong opinion on how to bring up the N-Panel...
To each their own an all, but it I feel for the people say they struggle when all they have to do is keep at it... it'll eventually become "normal".
I have no argument about the hotkeys in the software. I absolutely love them, especially for modeling. I get things done much faster in Blender using hotkeys than I ever did in Maya or Max. Still, finding some of the not-so-common tools are a bit less handy. Finding some nodes can be a pain, and the location of certain other features can be like finding a needle in a haystack. F3 becomes your friend rather quickly, but only if you know the exact name of the tool or function you are seeking. Blender Guru had some really good points about further improving the Blender UI that I wouldn't argue with if they decided to impliment those changes.
OK, that's something we can both agree on :) I'll have to look for the Blender Guru points you mentioned.
My personal opinion is also that blender lacks some UI concepts and they don't have a good understanting of the frontend "user side" and the backend "code side", with way too much "options" exposed to the user that should be dealt with in the backend. I know this is strong to tell, but I'm convinced there's good reasons. I come from Lightwave, where also shortcuts are heavily used for production.
There are huge flaws in the blender design itself, so it's rather misconceptions than coding errors.
To start with, the whole mechanism of linking and overrides should not be exposed to the user. Lightwave had a simple solution for that, that is, modeler always deal with local resources, while layout always deal with linked resources from modeler. This way scenes only contain animations with linked geometries. No exposure to the user of any override things, everything plain and simple for the artist and for production.
DAZ Studio itself has this thing of "save as support asset" that basically hides assets linking and overrides.
Then comes materials, here we have material slots exposed to the user, again with no real purpose other than confusing anyone. The user creates new materials, he doesn't care one thing of material slots. There's no other software anywhere exposing material slots aka the code side containers for materials.
Then comes shapekeys, where the whole object geometry is stored for each shapekey, that is just ridiculous. One figure can easily have hundreds of shapekeys these days, that means hundreds of duplicate geometries that is especially stressful for HD objects. Lightwave had endomorphs, where each endomorph only stored the changed vertices from the main mesh. Think of the difference where for each facial shapekey we store the whole figure too. Now there's workarounds as splitting the mesh, plus the blender team seems they're finally considering fixing this and storing only partial data, but afaik it's not done yet, I mean in blender 4.5.
I probably can go on but these are what comes to mind right now. Thing is, blender is by no way well made in general, nevertheless it gets things done and it's powerful and free, that's enough for me to make it good.
Blender definitely has its issues, and its community is one of them for sure. I have had some of the most toxic interactions on-line come from the Blender community, and I've been fighting the internet naked since Netscape was the only game in town. Anytime you question anything over there you are treated like you are attacking the hive. It's crazy, I've had fire ants respond to my lawn mower more calmly. It blows my mind that adding, let alone switching, the default interaction paradigm form "right click select" to "left click select" didn't cause the community to implode. It's a problem for sure. It reminds me a lot of when artists have to learn to receive constructive criticism. Generally it's very difficult for an artis to separate themselves form their work and hear the input as just that, input, and not as a criticism of them as a person. If you question or doubt anything that the Blender devs say or do, it's like you proposed curing a famine by making babies to use as food. I recently made a lengthy comment on the latest Blender Today stream posted on 9/16/2025 and one of the things I said was "Innovation is massively important! However, so is making sure there is a foundation for that innovation to stand on. Paint is pointless without polish (a buff and a waxing)." Over the years I've watched them do the same thing over and over. They implement a cool idea, push out the MVP, and then ignore it until it breaks some other new feature they want to add. Otherwise it gets relegated to the pit of "Stuff for new code contributors to do". Makes ZERO sense. Personally I think Blender could deal with a full year of polish. No new features, just fixing what is there. I find it utterly amazing Blender has come as far as it has in the last 5 years. Especially without the developers not typically having any experience with other software. Something they once touted as an advantage, but as someone used to designing workflows and processes I know it is a pure disadvantage. It's like Building a house having never seen a house. Then when someone says "The most efficient shape of a door is a rectangle" they yell at about how circles are better under compressive forces. Meanwhile the new kids are trying to even out the paver driveway no one bothered to compact the soil beneath. Then when the inspector shows up and says "Neat ideas" and hands them a list of things they have to fix they shoot the inspector. Pure craziness. If I were in the position to financially contribute to Blender in a areal significant way I would do it by hiring a team specifically to go through and polish it from top to bottom.
As for OP's comments about how Blender isn't really user friendly that is true. The thing no one really ever tells you when you start with Blender is that it does not hold your hand in any way, shape, or form. Any result you want, you 100% have to deliberately make a change somewhere to get the desired result. With other software this is different to varying degrees. Blender expects you to know exactly where you want to land, and 100% of every step to get from point A to point B. Which for anyone new is a brick wall, and a death sentence for people new to 3D in general. I've been doing the 3D thing since the DOS days. I have had my fingers on a lot of different software and it still took me about a year to feel like I legit knew what I was doing in Blender. I went from Max to Maya in about a month.
Interesting perspectives on the software being discussed here. I agree with some and disagree with others. I think @TheMysteryIsThePoint brought up some of the good points, and @hardwire666 brought up some things to think about regarding the community. I agree that I think Blender is harder to pick up and learn in SOME aspects than 3dsmax was for me. However, Maya was harder for me to learn than Blender or 3dsmax.