Resource Saver Shaders Collection for Iray
xyer0
Posts: 6,035
Resource Saver Shaders Collection for Iray has by far the most educational promos I've ever seen @ daz3d.com (and no misspelt words). His demystification of how memory is allocated and the inner workings of surface maps was enlightening and easily understandable. Often, well-meaning Daz users give explanations that use Poserese or alternate terms for Daz Studio nomenclature that is difficult for those of us relatively new to the game. But Mattymanx breaks it down like a boss, positively epitomizing Einstein's maxim, "If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself."
Thank you, Mattymanx, for exciting me about the possibilities of jamming my scenes with even more stuff and for doing it in a way that was painless. I look forward to purchasing this next week or in the possible catch-up sale.
One question: Can you compare the size of your included car shaders versus similar unnamed shaders? And thanks for giving me a resource that puts my paint, chrome, and rubber in one place!
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Comments
Thank you very much Xyer0! And you're welcome as well.
The car paint shaders are completely textureless and therefore use very little vram. So much so that its measured in kilobytes. They are included cause some vehicles use textures and I wanted to provide a solution for foreground an background use that is easy on your system. The car paint shaders are also useful for fingernail and toenail polish.
Hope this helps.
ps, No spelling errors thanks to fellow PA DestinysGarden
Thanks for the info, @Mattymanx. I like to do traffic scenes, and the less memory those cars cost me, the more I can add. Your car shaders will be a huge help! Thanks for the tip on nail polish; I've been doing that for quite awhile.
Im very interested in this pack. Id like to see some results and comparisons if anyone wants to share.
Me too - the figures quoted are interesting to me (I have a 2GB video card so do most rendering with CPU) but I'd love to see some more examples.
I was thinking of doing something like this... thankfully I didn’t because Matty did more and better than I would have. :)
Yoink!
I think im going to go ahead and grab this. Ill post some results as soon as I can.
I hvae never understood how these things work better than I do right now thanks to the explaination as well! I'm going to be picking this up in the next week. Thank you so much!
I like the 'hide things you aren't using.'
Because, seriously, do you need 15 different mouth textures you can't see?
I rarely buy non-PC item during PC sale but I must pick up this one
Thanks for this really useful product!
If that 2GB video card is your display card as well then you wont have access to all 2GB for rendering as the system is using it as well.
Thank you and you're welcome.
You're welcome.
Thank you Will.
Hence the reason behind the whole set. :)
Heres my first test render. I stopped it at 93% after 54 minutes, noise filter = 1, render quality = 2. I think it turned out really well. I had memory to spare. I think I couldve added a couple more figures and still been comfortable. I ran a few wall textures through scene optimizer for some further savings. Im very anxious to try out more of the shaders and tools. I think this product is right up there with scene optimizer as far as getting the most out of your card is concerned. Thanks Mattymanx, great product!
(Pllease limit width of images to 800 px or the forum software will force the width. ~Mod)
You're welcome.
For work flow / order of operation, I suggest using the Resource saver shaders frist and THEN run the scene optimizer.
Heres another test. One G3, two G2 and two Genesis models.
Could I ask if this is similar to V3Digitimes' Scene Optimizer? I have that but have never installed it. Frankly, I STILL haven't found time to even sit with Studio for more that a few minutes a week... and I've been trying for years.
If the two products can add to each other's functions, I'll get Resource Saver without hesitation. But I'm retired and it's mandatory that I spend wisely. Thanks for any advice someone might be able to offer.
I dont have Scene Optimizer. I have looked at it in the past and I know there is a mild overlap between the two. It is a collection of scripts where you go through and pick and choose from a list of whats in the scene and tell it to remove maps, resize them and more. It is per item in the scene and not per surface of that item. It works with 3Delight and Iray.
The Resource Saver Shaders Collection is a collection of material presets and shader presets and there is scripts in the utilites folder related to mesh options. The character mat optimizers in my set for G3 & G8 automatically remove certain maps and adjust settings were need be to compensate. The skin is left untouched by default but you can use the additional presets to remove the bump, normal, displacement, glossy and Top coat maps The G2 and Genesis versions convert to Iray and try to give a good balance for look, though results will vary. The Genesis mat optimizers are also compatable with V4 & M4 figures. The textureless options for the characters are designed primarly for background characters and they stip all the textures from the characters and replace them with colour. Other surface settings are adjusted as well. The hair mats in the set remove all but the trans maps and using colour alone, thus reducing then number of maps loaded up. That is very crucial if you want a scene with lots of characters in the background and middle ground. They can be used on hair in the foreground if the hair is a high quality model or fibermesh hair. All the other shader presets are there to help you quickly cut down the scene by giving you a quick and easy colour options and car shaders that remove all the textues and replace it with a colour. Very useful for textured surfaces that are not seen but still needed or ones in the background where distance or depth of field causes the details to be lost.
If you have both, I would run mine first and then the Scene Optimizer to reduce texture size and even to mass remove certain files.
Before you buy, if you have the time, I would recommend that you read over the promos from both sets first and see if you think my set would be a good addition, compared to what the scene optimizer already does.
Thank you
Ive been doing this for about five or six years so I know a little bit about how the basics work, but if you were to ask me about technological specifics, I wouldnt know what to say. So, heres my opinion on the two products from a more or less average end user perspective. Firstly, install Scene Optimizer. Its an excellent tool for reducing texture size, etc. I only use it to reduce texture size because ive never read the tutorial and im not sure how to use the other functions. I am pretty sure that you can reduce and remove things like normals and bumps, but im not positive. It does have alot of other functions that im not fully aware of. It does not provide any shader options (someone fact check me if im wrong).
When I saw Mattymanx's product, the first question I had was whether or not this would be a benefit to my renders or just another duplicate product that I would just end up returning (which I am not at all shy about doing). In both of the test renders that I posted, I started with standard best practices. I deleted every object that wasnt viewable. After that, I applied Mattymanx's shaders to every wall and window that does not appear in the scene. The scene uses sun-sky only lighting so I couldnt just delete walls as it would change the lighting. So I took those surfaces (walls, window frames, mouldings, etc) and shaded them flat black. I used the Hide Surface utility on the windows because I just needed the light from the window and not the window itself. The Hide surface utility is great because it does alot more than just dial the cutout opacity to zero. I also used the optimizer for all of the characters in each of scene. I did some other stuff like apply straight color and gloss shaders and remove bump maps.
So, consider the second example "Lots of Zombies". After using Mattymanx's shaders, I ran the scene through scene optimizer. See that zombie on the far right? After using the shader optimizer, his texture size was still huge. Thats when I used scene optimizer to resize that texture (cut the file size in half) and a few more to a size that would consume less memory. The ultimate result was that the "Lots of zombies" render looked great (I thought at least) after 25% completion and I still had memory to put more items in the scene if I wanted to.
Personally, I think the two products work great together based on what I know of them and im happy I made the purchase. I never wouldve attempted either of these scenes without Mattymanx's shaders. Just remember to keep an eye on your memory use. I use the task manager to keep an eye on things (seems to work). Also, both of these scenes ran hotter than usual but only by two degrees, 63 degrees C as opposed to the usual 61 C. And remember, there will always be other sales and if necessary, daz has a great return policy.
Thank you for your honest review @AnotherUserName
Thanks to Mattymanx and AnotherUserName for the very good, in-depth responses! I feel much safer in picking up Resource Saver.
You're welcome Kenkoy. And thank you as well! :)
I was on the fence when I saw this early today since I have Scene Optimizer and wasn't sure if it filled the same role, I wishlisted it but I kept coming back to it due to the shaders for skin and hair that is for background characters. Which would be really useful for some of the images I have in mind. The review @AnotherUserName did sold me on it. I did a render way back when, using the same set as he did with "Lots of Zombies" but it only had one figure in it and it pretty much choked my 4Gig card. It seems like this in conjunction with Scene Optimizer your product will allow me to do those larger set scenes but with lots of 'extras' in the background that I've been wanting to do. So thank you for the addition of new tools for our toolkit!
Glad to help. Like Mattymanx said, there is some overlap in the functions, but the shaders are super helpful. And if you want to do really epic scenes (or as epic as your card will allow for) use the human shaders for all the little background characters on genesis models. I havent tried them yet on v4/m4 yet, but im assuming they will be just as useful. Post some work if you get the chance.
I think youll be happy with the product. Show us some work if you like.
This looks very useful, and the promos are quite the educational resource! I have 'wishlisted' it for now, PC+ for a day items have gobbled up this month's allowance. The fact that geometry isn't the memory killer as much as textures seems to be overlooked by many, including PAs.
So this (and maybe in tandem with the Scene Optimizer product) will help a lot with VRAM consumption, but will it help with system RAM usage, and if so how much? That is my biggest problem, with 8Gb of VRAM and 'only' 16Gb of system RAM, I am often closer to maxing out the system RAM with Iray renders.
This looks really useful; bought in part due to the really good explanations included in the promo. :)
When I rendered the original version of "The Girls Dorm" - https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/48862/ - I did it on a computer that only had 8GB of system ram BUT I had manually set the page file to 8GB. And DS used 12GB total to render it. When I got my new computer, I tested Ds with the exact same scene in 3DL and it used 20GB of my 32GB of ram. The orginal version had everyone with different skins and hair and so on so there was a lot more to load up. The newer iray version on my newer computer uses 9.6GB of ram to load the scene and settled at 14.15GB during rendering. So having less in the scene then before will reduce your system ram usage. If you manually set your page file to create a safety net, say 8GB which is half your system ram then you should be more then fine to render big and not have DS crash on you.
How do you do that Mattymanx? Id really like to be able to tell DS to stop at a certain limit before my computer starts to panic or daz crashes.
You're welcome Skydoghex.
Remeber to set up your characters as seperate saved scenes so you can tweak them quickly and easily and keep track of their vram useage. Then merge them together later on in the main scene. Once you have them all in where you want them, then you will be safe to save a new scene. Ds handles saving and loading large scenes a lot better than it use to.
Thank you very much Nicstt. Glad you found the information useful.
You cannot tell it to stop. The best you can do is to set your page file manually and give it enough to play with. All programs will slow down a bit when they have to use the page file, since its writing to the hard drive but its a lot better then seeing it crash.
Depending on your version of windows depends on how to set the page file, though I think 7, 8 & 10 are the same.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/how-to-manage-virtual-memory-pagefile-windows-10,36929.html