DAZ Studio 4.3.9 Pro General Release Experiments - Iray Server 2.1
JoelLovell
Posts: 115
Home sick today so was able to spend a bit of time playing around with the new 4.3.9 release; in particular, the network render capability which I've been looking forward to.
I don't think I can justify the $295 price tag of the annual subscription of the Iray Server 2.1 once my 90-day trial expires, especially since it only supports single image jobs (no animation) but in the meantime, I will continue to take advantage of it. Here is how it went for me -
1. Updated my laptop and my desktop, both running latest Windows 10 64-bit to current NVidia drivers. My Surface Book uses a custom GPU, which is referred to as both 1347 and 134B. Based on its specs, it seems roughly equivalent to Nvidia’s GeForce 940M, The GPU has 384 CUDA cores, a clock speed of 954MHz, and one gigabyte of GDDR5 memory. The Processor is not too shabby, a quad core i7. For what is essentially a hybrid tablet/lightweight laptop, I have found it to be superior to today's Macbook Pro due to the CUDA capabilities. My desktop has a Maxwell Titan X with 12GB RAM, and a water cooled 8-core i7 CPU and 32GB of system memory.
2. Updated DAZ on both, and made sure both systems were on the exact same wifi network.
3. Downloaded trial of IRAY SERVER 2, installed it on my desktop, then ran the update to get it to 2.1, which is important to ensure compatibility with the bridge feature in DAZ 4.3.9 and for folks running Pascal GPU's.
4. Took me a bit of time to muddle through the Professional Application Manager and IRAY Server setup, but pretty much left it stock. I still am not sure exactly where it saves the finished jobs but since I can see them and download them from a web GUI, I didn't worry about it for now. Keep in mind, that the default web page you go to is as described in the terminal window - http://127.0.0.1:9090 is what you use to access the web gui on the machine running the master iray server; which is not the IP address you use to access the web gui from your other systems, i.e. in my case, my laptop.
5. Once you access the iray web GUI, your first login is username: admin password: admin, then it prompts you to change the password. I did this and also set up a user account with full access and priority 0 (highest).
6. To access the GUI (to start or monitor queue, download finished the image, etc.) from another system, you simply put into your other systems web browser the IP address of the machine running the IRAY Server. so instead of http://127.0.0.1:9090 I used HTTP:/(iray server hosts IP here):9090.
Opening DAZ on my laptop, I grabbed a scene that would normally choke on render on the laptop and then went to the render settings. I was puzzled at first, because I could not find the button for rendering to the network, until I floated my mouse pointer over it then it appeared.
So, clicking on Bridge [BETA] brings up this:
Make sure secure is unchecked, otherwise you might get a sign in error like I did. The Server will be the IP Address of the machine running IRAY Server, and the username and password will be whatever you setup in the GUI earlier. Then you just hit Add to Queue...
It will ask you for a name of the job and then when you submit it shouldn't take very long to push it along to the Iray Server.
Monitoring it from the GUI reveals the queue - make sure you hit [start queue]. YOu can leave it started so that the jobs will automatically kick off. When it's done you can go to Results and see the image or download the final image zipped up.
Render time:
From Surface Book local render: Gave up after 20 minutes and it hadn't gotten to 1% yet.
From Surface Book, sent to IRAY RENDER SERVER: 530 iterations, 8.301s init, 1170.273s render
From IRAY RENDER SERVER machine, but using local DAZ Render: 536 iterations, 13.223s init, 1194.451s render
Fairly painless, and I like the fact that I can create a scene on my Surface Book, and then que up to render on my desktop, so I don't have to be sitting at my desktop or messing around with moving my scene file and keeping content libraries perfectly in sync. I also like the potential of being able to setup a VPN so that friends can send a render job to my system who have the misfortune of having spent a fortune on a Mac Pro with AMD GPU's and whom can't take advantage of GPU acceleration. (Craig!) Or maybe even setting up a deal where someone sends me a small PayPal fee and I'll open it up for them to render. Who knows, I am sure there are some interesting possibilities.
Also, now that we have this new general release I can decide on how to ramp up the GPU horsepower in my system aka Mec4D quad Titan X monster.
My next experiments will be with DAZ Genesis 3 to iClone action.
Regards,
Joel
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Comments
By the way, anyone know what Nitro Mode does?
Well, I reran the test above - laptop to iray server - same file - and the results were: 518 iterations, 8.010s init, 1140.900s.
Seems only marginally faster.
Here is the image created for those curious.
Thanks for this guide ;-) I was going to ask about whether we needed iray server or iray server 2- I admit I havent read up on the server or the new Daz Studio release yet
I wasn't sure either, but when I searched on 1 vs 2 the rule of thumb was you needed 2, and to make sure to update to 2.1. You also have to have of course, the very latest NVIDIA drivers and new DAZ release.
Hello,
I installed iray server 2.1 on a windows machine with a Nvidia Titan X and I configure DAZ to use it from an other machine (a mac pro).
it works: I can queue a rendering, it computes it on the gpu, and I get the result. There is still one worry:
It seems the cloths are not smoothed before to be send to iray server (it's smoothed in the viewport).
I didn't test with others cloths or others props yet, maybe it's specific to some cloths. The same scene rendered in DAZ Studio and its embedded iray on the same windows machine with Titan X renders the clooth smoothed as expected.
Do you have an idea if it's a bug, a limitation of iray server or a setting to change ?
Beside that, it's a great feature. it's a little expensive (you have to buy an iray server licence) but it's a lot more efficient to queue renders to test ideas and go back to tweak the scene or do something else.
thanks.
okay, it seems it was "nitro mode" which I enabled (without reason, I still don't know what that nitro mode do).
A new render without nitro mode sent the scene with clothes properly smoothed.
Good to know. I found that Nitro mode didn't really do much for me either - barely shaved 14 seconds off of a near twenty minute render.
Given the problems mac users will have trying to get cuda working properly I can see where the investment in a cheap windows barebones with a couple of decent nvidia GPU's could be a useful thing to have lying around. Throw in a decent 6th gen i7 with 8 or more cores and a water cooler and you also get a nice rendercow node for Vue or Luxrender.
Thanks for the tip.
Sadly,it's where I am: I prefer a LOT to use a mac for works (many great software, efficient and simple interface and so on) but with now no mac with nvidia gpu and slowly more and more problems with CUDA and others stuff, I'm forced to migrate, at least computation, to a PC. And I hate it.
Anyway, it's a story for another day. iray server works great with daz. In time I'll do a crazy linux iray server full of gpus :)
I'm 90 days trial user.
I don't know how to search server adress...
Would you tell me ?
Thanks.