How can I get a clean render on my Mac in DAZ Studio?

vfxtodd_5d3a5547b4

I've been looking for solutions to get good renders in DAZ Studio working in my Mac. I found PC tutorials that show you can switch to GPU for rendering. But, in the Mac version of DAZ Studio (v4.10), there is no indication of choosing my GPU.

Can someone point me to a tutorial for quality rendering in DAZ on a Mac?

Thanks in advance.

Cris Palomino

Do you have a graphics card with GPU capabilities on your Mac? I know I had one on my laptop but was only able to render with CPU. Others have been able to use GPU. I have had no trouble rendering CPU. What happens when you render? How are you rendering? If you're talking about GPU, are you using Iray? More information is needed.

murgatroyd314

Quality of CPU renders can be just as good as GPU, it just takes longer, and on Mac with Iray, it's the only option. There's nothing Mac-specific about how to get a good render.

Source: I've been using DS on Macs for years.

adacey

Yep, sadly Apple hasn't put a Nvidia GPU into any Mac models for several years now, so odds are that you only have an AMD GPU, which isn't supported in Iray since it uses CUDA (a Nvidia technology) for the GPU acceleration. You can do CPU only rendering, depending on the speed of your CPU and the complexity of your scene this can be workable. I've managed to do some more complex scenes with relatively simple lighting, but if I try to do something like volumetric effects then CPU starts to get rather painful.

Padone

for Macs with AMD cards you may want to use lux instead of iray

https://www.daz3d.com/reality-4-daz-studio-edition

bytescapes

As everyone has said, the chances are that you're going to be limited to CPU rendering on a Mac (my increasingly-elderly MacBook Pro has an Nvidia GPU, but with only 2GB of VRAM, it's never used for rendering).

A CPU render is -- I believe -- just as capable of producing a 'clean' render as a GPU, but it takes longer. Sometimes much much longer ...

The 'Render Settings:Progressive Rendering' panel has a number of controls that affect the quality of rendering. One is called 'Rendering Quality', and defaults to 1. I sometimes set that to 3 in hopes of a better render. The 'Rendering Converged Ratio' also has an effect on quality; I often turn that up to 98 or 99, instead of the default 95.

However, if you just set those and hope for the best, you're likely to be disappointed. You will probably also need to increase 'Min Samples', 'Max Samples' and 'Max Time'. Basically, 'Min Samples' tells the renderer "I want you to do at least this many sampling operations for each pixel before deciding that pixel's been satisfactorily rendered", whereas 'Max Samples' says "Don't bother doing more than this number of operations for any given pixel". 'Max Time' tells it "Quit when you've been running for this long". So if you just tell it "I want super-quality", but don't increase these values, then the renderer may well stop working before it achieves your target quality -- either because it thinks it's done a decent job on any individual pixel, or because it hit the overall time-limit.

As far as I can tell, there's no real reason not to set 'Max Time' as high as possible. You can always stop the renderer if the scene starts looking good enough for your tastes. If Studio could render multiple scenes sequentially and you wanted to give it a queue of scenes and then go away for the weekend, there might be some reason to set an upper limit on 'Max Time' for each scene. But as it can't, there's probably no reason not to set 'Max Time' way high and then just check back every few hours to see how it's getting on.

So now you've tweaked all these settings and told the renderer "Make this as beautiful as you can", and your final image is still covered with red, green and blue noise. What's with that? Well, a likely cause is that your scene isn't lit brightly enough. You can increase the light level in the scene by:

• adding more light objects
• turning up the intensity of each light object
• increasing the film ISO under 'Render Settings:Tone Mapping'
• increasing the 'Environment Intensity' (if you're using HDRs)

The different types of light source also affect the quality of the render. Anecdotally, I have found that -- other things being equal -- physical lights like points and spots tend to produce the noisiest renders (or, put another way, take the longest time to converge on a 'good' render). The products sold in the store as 'Light Probes' and 'HDRIs' seem to produce cleaner renders and produce them faster. (HDRI's are wrap-around maps that act as light sources for your scene; 'light probes' seem to combine HDRI lighting maps with actual lights).

Of course, those two tend to produce more uniform, all-around lighting, and sometimes what you want is a single point or source of light. In that case, you'll need to use a spotlight or point light. And sometimes you do want a dark and moody scene, even at the cost of it being underlit.

There are other factors. For example, very complex shaders or scenes will drive up the time taken to render ... and perhaps push you over the 'Max Time' limit you've specified.

This is all just based on my own observations, and I am by no means an expert. But the key recommendations I'd make would be: (a) set for higher quality, (b) ensure your scene is fully lit, and (c) consider light probes or HDRIs instead of scene lights.

adacey

You can still do moody scenes with more light. Deep shadows are about contrast, not the amount of light in the scene. Crank up the lighting to throw more light into the scene, but make sure your subject and background are lit appropriately for what you want to achieve.

Ron Knights

I have a late 2013 27" iMac. it has a 1GB nVidia card. But that's not good enough for iRay GPU rendering. CPU rendering takes too long.