How to render indoors?

ChallyII

So I've looked on the forums and done a fair bit of googling before posting this question as a new thread.

It all started when I tried to use Stonemason's city loft with two G8 figures in: I left the render overnight and the next morning, after 7 hours, I had 0% progress and a grainy, blurry render. I was using the lighting out of the box, (which looked amazing in the preview window). I changed the lighting to use DA real-world lighting, which is normally my go-to lighting set for Iray, and some emmissives for the lightbulbs, and left it to cook while I was at work. 12 hours later, I came back to 0% progress and another grainy render.

 

I started doing a bit of research and tried a range of different things. I changed the scene and tried a number of different Tesla3D interiors I'd picked up (I know the figures are OK because I've rendered them outdoors with no problems). I went through and deleted every single prop and component that wasn't in the scene, and made sure to minimise the number of reflective and transparent surfaces. No wine-glasses or polished floors to slow things down! I tried using a mix of exterior lighting outside and emissive lighting inside, trying one or the other as well as both. Then I read that emissive lighting slows down renders but that some people had success with applying emissive surfaces to a primitive sphere or cube. I tried that too. Someone reccommended KindredArt's ghost lights, so I tried them. Each time, the render progress fails to move beyond 0%, even after several hours. I am literally at my wits' end trying to produce a workable indoor render with Iray.

 

I'm using a 4ghz processor with 16gb RAM and a GTX960 graphics card- not the most amazing setup I know, but usually enough to render four or five G8 figures plus scenery in an outdoor setting with decent results after 6 hours or so. It's not uncommon to leave a render cooking overnight and get to 50-80% progress with something I can post-work into a decent scene. Rare indeed that I get 0% progress and a picture that looks like a badly tuned TV.

I'd love to hear what I'm doing wrong, because I find it hard to believe that DAZ are selling indoor scenes that are entirely useless to anyone without a top of the line graphics card.

Paintbox

Tesla3D are notoriously heavy on the rendering side. I mean, they look amazing *once rendered* and I feel you need a beefy setup for it.

That said, best is to perhaps remove a few walls to let more light in, use ghost lists (as you already tried) 
Another thing is to reduce texture maps (I havent seen you mentioning that). I use the Scene Optimizer product for that. You can than select the props and interior textures and scale them down (or remove bump maps etc) This might help free up some memory which will increase renderspeed.

Good luck though, some scenes are just render intensive!

nicstt

a 960 is, imo, a very poor iray card. The rest of your system is decent.

I have a 980ti, which imo is something around the bare minimum, although 8GB of RAM is closer to the minimum recommended (again imo). Yes folks manage with less, but the operative word really, is manage.

Some folks use CPU only (shudder); we get by with what we can. Doesn't change what the minimum recommended should be.

kenshaw011267

VRAM really has very little to do with render speed once the scene fits on the card. After that what matters is cuda. The 960 is still very light on those. IME the usual culprit when an indoor scene comes out grainy and poorly converged is not enough light. Iray wants far more light than Daz's built in lights provide at the default settings. Emmissive surfaces can provide enough light but even then you need to really dial the output up.

shaneseymourstudio

ChallyII said:

So I've looked on the forums and done a fair bit of googling before posting this question as a new thread.

It all started when I tried to use Stonemason's city loft with two G8 figures in: I left the render overnight and the next morning, after 7 hours, I had 0% progress and a grainy, blurry render. I was using the lighting out of the box, (which looked amazing in the preview window). I changed the lighting to use DA real-world lighting, which is normally my go-to lighting set for Iray, and some emmissives for the lightbulbs, and left it to cook while I was at work. 12 hours later, I came back to 0% progress and another grainy render.

 

I started doing a bit of research and tried a range of different things. I changed the scene and tried a number of different Tesla3D interiors I'd picked up (I know the figures are OK because I've rendered them outdoors with no problems). I went through and deleted every single prop and component that wasn't in the scene, and made sure to minimise the number of reflective and transparent surfaces. No wine-glasses or polished floors to slow things down! I tried using a mix of exterior lighting outside and emissive lighting inside, trying one or the other as well as both. Then I read that emissive lighting slows down renders but that some people had success with applying emissive surfaces to a primitive sphere or cube. I tried that too. Someone reccommended KindredArt's ghost lights, so I tried them. Each time, the render progress fails to move beyond 0%, even after several hours. I am literally at my wits' end trying to produce a workable indoor render with Iray.

 

I'm using a 4ghz processor with 16gb RAM and a GTX960 graphics card- not the most amazing setup I know, but usually enough to render four or five G8 figures plus scenery in an outdoor setting with decent results after 6 hours or so. It's not uncommon to leave a render cooking overnight and get to 50-80% progress with something I can post-work into a decent scene. Rare indeed that I get 0% progress and a picture that looks like a badly tuned TV.

I'd love to hear what I'm doing wrong, because I find it hard to believe that DAZ are selling indoor scenes that are entirely useless to anyone without a top of the line graphics card.

Are you able to post a few screenshots? Namely one showing the preview iray view, one for your tone mapping panel and either the final output render or screenshot of the output. I am not sure that there will be answers in these but it may lead to something.

Also, did you verify that it is loading into your gpu and not dropping to cpu at render time or during render?

Are you on 4.10 or Beta 4.11.0.236?

JonnyRay

Surface settings (beyond the texture map size) can also have an effect indoors. In my experience a lot of surfaces are set up to be too reflective. For Iray this means that it has to trace light bouncing around a LOT before it finally comes to rest. You can also adjust the number of bounces that a light path will travel (I'm not at my rendering PC or I'd show the setting in render settings) which can reduce the number of bounces that Iray has to calculate, but you may need to add more ghost / direct light to compensate or the image may end up too dark.

Relying on the environment light to provide all the light through the windows is also problematic. Again that means almost all of your interior light is bouncing off surfaces from very far away. Using a product like KindredArt's Iray Ghost Light Kit can help Iray out a lot by providing more direct light that simulates the effects of the light coming through the window.

Sharing your render settings may help us provide some specific guidance as well. There are some settings that work just fine outdoors and will kill you indoors. Screen shots of all the panels of render settings would be great.

DrNewcenstein

That scene has Iray and 3DL versions, make sure you're using the right one.

Find lamps and light bulbs in the scene, select their bulb surfaces (if they have them - if not, get busy with the Geometry editor and select those polygons and creates those surfaces) and apply Iray Emissive shaders to them. Set their Temperature to match real-world light bulbs (a simple Googling of various household lightbulbs will yield this info off the box).

Set the Luminance Units to Watts. For a single bulb in a single lamp in a large room, you want to set the Luminance to 5000 and the Luminous Efficacy (Watts) to 100, and that's not going to light much. For multiple lights in the ceiling, you want the same settings, but 100 watts per bulb, so, for Stonemason's Contemporary Living, the lights in the main ceiling get set to 600 watts. This will provide a realistic amount of lighting. The three lamps around the room are also set the same way.

You also might want to look at your Camera positioning and make sure you're not in a wall or a piece of furniture.

If it's blurry, the camera is using depth of field. Turn it off or set it right.

You also want to look at the Tonemapping settings. While some sets do work with the default settings, others do not. Either turn tone mapping off or cut the fStop setting in half, then see what happens. Set your Viewport to Iray draw style for a quicker preview.

Also check if you're using Dome and Scene or Scene Only for the Environment. Not all domes work with Iray. If the windows are opaque, and you're using an Iray skydome, you should get light through the windows. If not, the windows are not opaque.

Sven Dullah

DrNewcenstein said:

 

Also check if you're using Dome and Scene or Scene Only for the Environment. Not all domes work with Iray. If the windows are opaque, and you're using an Iray skydome, you should get light through the windows. If not, the windows are not opaque.

Wait what? I'm not an Iray user but this can't be true?

kenshaw011267

Sven Dullah said:

DrNewcenstein said:

 

Also check if you're using Dome and Scene or Scene Only for the Environment. Not all domes work with Iray. If the windows are opaque, and you're using an Iray skydome, you should get light through the windows. If not, the windows are not opaque.

Wait what? I'm not an Iray user but this can't be true?

He's got that backward.