Rendering 5 hours per second?
daancouzijn
Posts: 53
Hey guys, it's my first time trying to render a series of animations for an 82" screen (16:9, 3840 x 2160) and I'm wondering if it is supposed to take this long. Right now, it's rendering for c.a. 5 hours per second/30 frames. These are my current render settings:
Max samples: 200 iterations
Max time: 7200 sec
Rendering quality enable: off
Render engine: NVIDIA Iray
Graphic card: MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Armor 8G
Hope anyone can help me out!
Post edited by daancouzijn on
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Comments
Yeah, that's not far off from what I got on a single 1080ti.
BTW size of display ios irrelevant. That you're rendering for 4k is.
Nice Card I am envious.
By my math you are averaging 20 minutes per frame at nearly 4K resolution.
NVIDIA IRay is not a Production Animation render engine
It is a brute force path tracer for arch vis and product visualization so your render times are not unusual.
https://www.irayplugins.com/iray-for-maya/gallery.php
https://www.irayplugins.com/iray-for-rhino/gallery.php
https://www.irayplugins.com/iray-for-3ds-max/gallery.php
Note the absense of a Video Gallery at those links
Now there may be some
"optimizations" ( ie, compromises) ,you could make to your daz studio scene but in general you need to be prepared for such long render times with animation projects of this scale in IRay.
3840x2160 is 4k BTW
Correct
and 90 minutes of 4K video will require 477Gigbytes of storage space.
Of course by the time the OP's render is done we will have already invented quantum computers that store our Data inside artificial singularities where there is no theoretical space limit.
That depends on the encoding. Raw 4K footage is even more IIRC, depending on framerate of course.
So what are my options of improving render time, even if it is just slightly quicker? Lower the resolution? to 1080? Or render in 3Delight? Render an image series as opposed to a movie?
Changing resolution w8ill help but not a whole lot. 30 frames will still take several hours.
Rendering in 3Delight might be much faster, I've never tried it with an animation. The biggest issue, for me at least, is how different an image looks when renderedin 3Delight.
Rendering 30 images to the same settings as you have set for the animation won't take long at all, however you'll need the render queue plug in or it will get very tedious.
Your only other option would be to get another GPU, more CUDA means faster renders.
Thanks! Where can I get the render queue plug in? And what GPU will cause the rendering to go faster? I thought the one I have right now is quite top notch?
That’s actually rendering rather fast
the only thing you can do to make longer animations is composite
render png series with alpha transparency
render your static backgrounds and animated figures separately and have camera cuts not movements
Your figures if distant in the scene and not obscured can also be rendered at a lower resolution and background ones looped and repeat those frames in your png layers in your composition software
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing. Basically I'm rendering seperate seconds of a close-up of a characters face with subtle movements such as breathing, blinking, swallowing, etc. Background is transparent and the only lighting in the scene is environment lighting. I guess I have to try rendering image series. Maybe that would go even faster.
There are several options, depending on when you need your animation finished, the final quality that you need and whether you will be doing similar work in the future.
Firstly, because you have an RTX card the good news is that there is an update coming to iray which should give big improvements in render time on those cards. Unfortunately, no one knows exactly when this is coming to Daz Studio. But for future animations, you should have a much better time because of the card that you have now.
If you plan on doing a lot of animations, it might be worth taking a look at iClone. It isn't free, as Daz Studio is, but it is much faster for animation, though at a lower level of "realism" than iray. There is a demo available, and with some of the bundles, you can get Character Creator, which will allow you to import Daz figures and send them to iClone. There is also an iray plugin now, but it isn't any faster than the version with Daz Studio.
For now, if you render at 1920x1080 (as you mentioned yourself), that means your images will be 1/4 of the size (roughly 2MP compared to 8MP). This doesn't necessarily mean 1/4 of the render time, but you should see a marked reduction. Maybe try repeating a section of your animation and then compare how the HD and the 4k compare when played on the 4k screen.
Thanks! Will definitely check out iClone! I used to work in Blender but I think importing DAZ characters in Blender is such a struggle. So, if importing them in iClone is slightly easier, it's worth trying. Do you think that if I render at 1920x1080 it will be stretched when I show it on a 82" screen?
I have been considering Topaz Lab’s AI Gigapixel but don’t know if it will save any actual time batch upscaling than just rendering big.
It's for sale in the store here.
https://www.daz3d.com/render-queue
It is one of the best productivity products I've bought for my VN workflow.
As to GPU's you wouldn't replace the 2070 but add another Nvidia card to it. Iray will use every compatible GPU available for rendering. So any recent, Pascal or Turing, card with 8Gb of VRAM, you'll want 8Gb so that any scene that fits on one card will fit on the other, will let you render much faster.
Apart what others already said, also lowering to 128 iterations may work fine enough with the denoiser. And turning on optix will make it even faster. Then passing to 24 or even 12 frames per second also helps, depending on the final quality you need.
You will be working in the same aspect ratio, so the image won't be distorted. The image quality overall won't be quite as good, but for animation it's less critical I would say. The end result would be like watching a HD Blu Ray movie on a 4k TV - not as crystal clear as a 4k movie, but not noticable unless you had both side by side to compare. To compare (and save time), a video editor should be able to resize your already rendered 4k footage to 1920x1080 and you could compare the before and after. If it's acceptable, try rendering in 1920x1080 and see how that looks.
And, if I may, I would suggest to avoid at all cost rendering movie files. Animations should always be rendered in image sequences (and then converted to movie files). If you computer crashes after a few hours of rendering a movie file, you may lose everything. If you've been rendering an image sequence, chances are that every rendered frame will be OK and you'll be able to continue your render from the last saved frame instead of rendering all over again.
Hi Daan
Quick question, are you using the daz studio Beta for rendering? I don't think the standard version has support for RTX cards yet in iray, so having that RTX won't help you at all. You might want to look at something like Marmoset Toolbag which is way faster and does take advantage of your GPU, you would have to export your scene to fbx, dae or alembic though
There isn't a DAZ|Studio version that supports RTX, yet. DAZ is waiting for NVidia to produce an Iray version that supports the new features, then DAZ has to work on integrating that new Iray version into D|S. It'll take a little while longer. All the improved performance we've seen so far from the 20-series cards comes from the latest-generation CUDA cores built into them.
Setting your Max Time lower will result in a lower per-frame render time, but may negatively impact render quality, as it will stop rendering the current frame once the time limit is reached, even if it hasn't reached the full number of iterations.
Even though the aspect ratio (16:9) of 2K and 4K are the same, the final result will be less detailed when scaled up to twice its size. Scaling down generally improves image quality (from 4K down to 2K), and can hide minor imperfections, but scaling up will enhance imperfections, and may result in pixelation.
Multiple GPUs working together will improve render time, as was said, but not by a strict per-card factor (i.e. 2 GPUs = twice as fast, 3 GPUs = thrice as fast, etc). It would be nice if it did, but it doesn't.