UberEnvironment 2 with Iray

9mmheater

I have a 1080TI and a 6700k(oc'd to 4.6) and I was getting terrible performance in the viewport(rendering seemed mostly fine as it switched to the gpu fairly quickly) for iray. everytime i rotated / moved the viewport(and it would always pop out of the grain immediately to the negative like image) it would take minutes to re render and I couldnt figure it out, I tried every tip and trick to improve performance in the render and draw settings, tried switching to interactive mode etc. It would always load everything to the cpu first (which could take minutes) before switching to the GPU even if i was just rotating the camera a few degrees in iray. One day I decided to load uber environment 2 base into a scene and VOILA, all my iray performance issues were fixed, I cant explain why but if I have uber environment 2 loaded into a scene everything is smooth when moving the viewport and it loads very quickly. Can anyone explain the reasoning behind this, does uber environment 2 even support iray? If not is there an iray supported environment i could use that would (hopefully) acheive the same thing.

Thanks

Edit: I tried running a scene without uber environment base but ran another renderer (specifically blithe hair render settings) and it ran just as good if not better in the viewport. I am new to daz, but either this is a strange performance problem or I have just misunderstood how to set up an iray scene and you always need some sort of dome for the performance to be good in the viewport (and for quicker renders). I rendered an image with the blithe hair render settings and it rendered 2-3 x as quick as usual, im not sure im necessarily happy with the results in terms of look, but the speed was a lot quicker than im used too and this specific scene (in a city) is more detailed than what i usually render. So basically I must be missing something  with my render settings, i would have to go back and check whether dome is off by default but that could potentially be what i am missing.  For instance I have paper tiger light rigs and if i use those solely for lighting + a few ghost lights the performance in the viewport is terrible and the render times are considerably longer. I cant check at the moment as the render is still finishing but I assume it is a dome off issue, so i guess the real question is, does anyone else take a huge performance hit in the viewport with dome off in iray? Is it because it is drawing infinitely without a dome? the only thing that makes me think otherwise is i could shrink the Uber environment 2 base down to 1 % so it was just a miniscule globe and the performance would be the same (good) as if it was at 100%.

vwrangler

UberEnvironment is 3Delight only. It shouldn't work at all in Iray. I would imagine that when you put UberEnvironment into a scene, that simply disables Iray Preview, even if it doesn't say so, because they're incompatible.

It sounds like you were trying to use Iray Preview mode. I don't know about your specific setup, but I've found Iray Preview to be unacceptably slow, in part because it's essentially doing an Iray render to your screen and has to re-render from scratch every time you adjust anything or move around the workspace, so I don't use it.

As far as actually rendering goes, I can't help there. My video card isn't up to the task, so I always do CPU renders, which are by their nature slow. (Honestly, I'm wondering if maybe your scenes are large enough that Studio is dumping the scenes to CPU. That would explain the slow render times. I think you can tell by looking at the log file, but I'm really not sure about that.)

DrunkMonkeyProductions

Most of what you are experiencing is perfectly normal.

The reason uberenvironment is "helping" is that you are blocking the Iray Envrionment(render settings>envrionment) with a physical dome.

This drops the amout of data that iray has to calculate, as the iray envrionment is a 360 light source.

You can achieve the same result simply by changing to "Scene only" in the iray Envrionment settings. Render settings>Environment>Environment mode.