Rendering Advice
jniemiec86
Posts: 25
Hello,
I'm looking for component/hardware advice that can reduce my rendering time frames. Currently I'm using just my laptop which has an i4 CPU and 8.00 GB of Ram. I'm not sure if it is normal or not but when I do video scene rendering it takes an extremely long time to complete the renders. I'm currently generating a video scene render that is 252 frames long and has been rendering for roughly 48 hours and has only completed up to frame 161. Again I'm not sure if this is normal or not but I feel like it shouldn't take this long when I see other people saying still image renders only take 10-20 minutes where my still images take hours.
Not looking to spend a whole lot(i.e 1000+ dollars on a single component) since this is just something I do in my free time for a game I am building. All suggestions/advice would be greatly appreciated.
-James
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I started on a laptop too and had long render times with not great quality. I'm not sure what your specs are on your laptop but it's less about RAM and more about your GPU. Laptops (unless they're a gaming laptop) typically don't have a whole lot of muscle when it comes to the video card which causes long render time. I know you said you're not looking to spend a lot of money but sadly that's what it takes. When working in Daz, especially with animation, you'll need something more hi-powered. I bought my desktop for under $1000 and have been using it for Daz for about 3 years. It came with a GTX 960 GPU and it works much better than my laptop did. Renders faster, better quality but it's by no means a Rolls Royce. Long story short, if you want to make Christmas dinner, you can't use an Easy Bake Oven. No offense to your laptop. I'm sure it's a fine machine that's doing it's best.
DDCreate, thanks for the advice and no offense taken at all, I know my laptop is un-equipped for this type of situation. Question for you though, when I do my rendering if I open my Task Manager my internal GPU is showing 0 percent usage while my CPU is at 97 percent usage. From searching through the forums I read that Iray mainly uses the CPU and not GPU to do rendering. Is this accurate or is there a way to make my laptops CPU and GPU work together? I think 3Delight doesn't default to strictly the CPU but I haven't tried that.
As far as my price goes I was more referring to 1000+ dollars on a single component. A guy I know who does 3D rendering told me to pick up a GTX 1080ti Graphics Card and that would help. After reviewing the product is looks like a serious piece of machinery but has a price tag of 1600 dollars (if memory serves me correctly). I just don't do this often enough to want to spend that kind of money is all. Recently I broke my leg and tore my achilles tendon at work so I've had extra free time to mess around with this. So if buying a desktop, modem, ect... and together it equals that cost, then thats a different story.
I'm a 'just for fun' hobbiest as well. What I do to speed up my renders is the following. (Warning, I'm a trial and error kind of user, some of these settings might be the exact opposite of what should be for speed/memory savings. And you will absolutely not get 'high quality' renders this way. But they will be fast.)
1. Render in 3delight only. Single distant light offset and parented to the camera to give just the slightest hint of shadows.
2. Resize all textures to 1024x1024 max (I do this in the figures runtime/texture library when I get the rare new product, since I'm not looking for photoreal). For objects that don't really have a need for texture maps (jewelry, sword blades, etc...) I just dump the maps completely and use Daz's shaders for metal/plastic/etc to give them their look. Most of my characters only use diffuse and maybe bump maps. A few still have specular maps just because I haven't gotten around to stripping them out of the saved character set.
3. Watch out for Genesis 2/3/8 hair. Many of them can be massive resource hogs. For me, old V4 20-40k poly hairs work just fine, especially when they pop up as freebies.
4. Convert all shaders to Daz defaults except for hair which is sometimes Ubersurface with Occlusion Shading Rate Mode set to Override and Rate set to 128. You will need to do a lot of tweaking of the sliders/colors in Daz shaders to get them to look not-horrifying. I have a baseline skin shader template I like that I then put in whatever new maps I'm using for a character as their material preset .duf. Ubersurface is a tad slower to render than Daz default and the quality difference on anything but hair isn't enough to make a difference to me. AoA subsurface takes way too long to render and gives the whiteout problems enough that I quit using it years ago and will never try it again.
5. Put all characters to Base resolution with 0 subdivision 1 rendering subdivision.
6. To save memory and speed up character load times I also have a clean and renamed install of the genesis 3 m/f and their associated data directories with no additional morphs added to them (for example my g3f is named Genesis 3 Clean.duf in the 'My Library\People\Genesis 3 Female' directory and points to my stripped down 'My Library\data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 3\Female Clean' directory). Once I have a character tweaked the way I like with the morph sliders from the regular genesis 3 version with all content available, I export it as an obj, then load the clean genesis 3 and morphloader the new shape to it and save that as my character. I have some charactes that can eat up around 4GB of memory loading them from their slider settings, but are under 1GB of memory loading as morph on a base figure. They load in about 10-15 seconds as well since Daz doesn't have to check a ton of sliders for information when loading.
I'm doing a fantasy story using these settings and just did my largest render a couple of days ago (inappropriate for the forums, sorry). 13 clothed/haired/weaponed/posed characters hanging around a temple pool that included terrain and a skydome that took around 25 minutes to render at 2500x2500 on an Asus laptop, 2.4Ghz i7 with 24GB of RAM. Using the above settings the memory usage was under 8GB for the whole scene. It's definately cartoonish, but photoreal isn't for me so I'm good with my results. I have done renders with up to 30 characters but I didn't have my 'system' worked out as well and those still took hours to complete.
(edited for typos)
Sorry for the delay. The reason your renders are using the CPU is because Daz will revert to that when the size of your picture exceeds the amount of GB your GPU can handle. For instance, I recently did a picture with a larger interior that had a small-medium amount of props but contained 5 characters. I hit render and left it to render overnight. If I had limited the picture to one maaaaaybe two chracters I might have been able to stay inside my 4GB GPU. But I'm sure when I hit 3 characters, that kicked me above and beyond and ended up in CPUville in Long Render County. A 1080ti has 3584 CUDA Cores and is a 11GB Card and yes, very expensive but it's head and shoulders above whatever you have right now. I'm just not sure if they make them for laptops. But if you want to save some $$$ and are willing to sacrifice some horsepower, a 1080 (not Ti) has 2560 CUDA Cores and 8GB and is about half the price. $750 on NewEgg which is where I get my componants. Again, that's for a desktop card. But even at that reduced power from the Ti version, you're still looking at a HUGE difference from what you have. That's the card I'm saving to buy too and am looking forward to quality/render time leap it will give. I'm not sure what your money situation is but you can always try to raise some of the funds on the side through commission work. The 3D Art niche is bigger than you might realize. Places like Deviant Art and Facebook are great places to start. You can make an artist page at both for free and just start posting your work. People WILL find you and it won't be long before you'll get messages saying "Are you cpaable of making..." and you're off and running! It's worked decently for me so far. If you have any more questions, feel free to send me a message and I can answer any questions you have as best as my experiance (3yrs) allows.