A Little Bit of Advice Please

csteell_c2893e4ab6

I am finding that rendering a 360 frame animation in DAZ Studio 4.11 takes about four days to render either as image frames or Movie.My render size is in 16.9 format and the image size is 1000 X 563 pixels.Is this this too large or is there another way to shorten my render times? My actual screen resolution is 1900 X 1200. My computer is on a Windows 10 platform Professional,Custom Built,64 gigs of RAM, Nividia Quad Core K220 4 Gig Graphics card ( ( I am looking at getting a Nvidia P4000 when I can afford it) I also have amongst 6 other 4 terrabyte Terrabyte Hard Drives a 250 Gig SSD.I am also finding that with Windows updates there is alway a restart after a couple days that restarts my computer thus crashing my renders. Any advice appreciated. Cheers

SimonJM

Leaving aside my distates of Windows 10, I'd say your best bet is to upgrade th evideo card - what you have does not have many CUDA cores, so will be relatively slow compared to more recent cards.  Assuming your aniamtions keep running on GPU until the end you would not need to get  a 'rip-snorting', bleeding edge' card.  Next I'd render an image series and if a reboot happens or it drops back to CPU at any stage, you can just pick up the render from last frame, then stitch togetehr using a 3rd party tool.

Richard Haseltine

I suspect your render is using, or dropping to, CPU instead of the GPU. You can probably lower the map sizes, which may reduce the load. It may be worth rendering in chunks (using Image Sequences) and restarting DS between them.

Sven Dullah

In addition to what has been mentioned:

• Lower quality settings
• Use the denoser
• Use HDRI lighting whenever possible
• Avoid emissives with a high polygon count
• Make sure your scenes are well lit
• Use smart camera angles
• Render against a static backdrop whenever possible
• Use every trick in the book, such as hiding/deleting things not in the view, hiding walls, remove ceilings etc.
• Render backgrounds separately and composite in your video editor
• Use a rendering engine more suited for animation

TheKD

I gotta say, I had an issue where win10 just kept dropping to cpu in the middle of renders for no reason I could discern. They were simple scenes with one or two figures and not a huge environment like a jungle or something crazy like that. After a few months I ended up having to hack win7 onto this new rig(no support for win7 with a lot of new mbos), it solved the problem. I know win10 has the issue of reserving a ton of vram for itself, but it had some other issue with how it handles vram that it doesn't hog as well, or it wouldn't drop to cpu after the render started. That doesn't happen on win7, once the render starts, it keeps going until it is converged or I tell it to stop.

onix

Depending on your situation I suggest considering switching to 3delight because it is unlikely that you will manage to render anything reasonable with 4 gig video card

but maybe if your picture size is 500pix only, you can try to scale down all textures to the quarter of their original size,  remove normal maps and all other nonvital textures and it will somehow fit in your video card.

rendering an animation will be still super slow, so you can try to speed it up a bit by splittings scene into components

if you cant use HDRI and your camera is not moving first render all stationary stuff into one picture, and then render what moves and later combine them.

But if you do many optimizations and bright single step lighting you will practically end with the same picture as if you just used 3delight.

 

I think there should be some kind of GPU video denoisers available on the internet that can alow you to reduce rendering time many times, because denoising single picture is harder than denoising video. 

so do not use integrated iray denoiser save raw pictures then denoise them with video denoiser

 

 

Taoz

As for Windows updates, there's some advice here (I'm not sure if it's still not possible to block it from restarting in the Home version, may have changed since) :

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/118396/i-hate-windows-but-i-have-to-use-it-any-advice-to-keep-it-from-restarting-without-permission

 

Silver Dolphin

I don't want to be a buzz kill but why are you animating in Daz studio? If you can afford it use iclone7 if not use the new blender 2.8. Animation for me as a hobbiest  is about speed>> not photo realism. Iray is good for stills but takes too long for animations. I use Iclone 7 for animations and if I can get all the shaders working and the facial bones I may start using evee in blender 2.8 for animations. Game engines work in real time which is why I use them for animation work. This is just my opinion if you prefer to wait a few days for results that is your business not mine. I wish you luck

Ivy

Silver Dolphin said:

I don't want to be a buzz kill but why are you animating in Daz studio? If you can afford it use iclone7 if not use the new blender 2.8. Animation for me as a hobbiest  is about speed>> not photo realism. Iray is good for stills but takes too long for animations. I use Iclone 7 for animations and if I can get all the shaders working and the facial bones I may start using evee in blender 2.8 for animations. Game engines work in real time which is why I use them for animation work. This is just my opinion if you prefer to wait a few days for results that is your business not mine. I wish you luck

I like animating in daz studio its alot of fun. & personally i think alot of long render times has to do with settings & set-up more than anything  like your render iterations and how much poly count & textures maps you have in the scene, all plays a lot into any rendering times like Sven said ..  this is pretty true with any software not just daz studio. to me Iclone drop and drag solution looks boxy and flat like something out of anime studio properly why i never invested in it .  if i was not using daz I properly be using unreal4 to animate with.

My tricks to speed up render times in daz.  reduce textures maps # 1 resource killa  , decrease iteration render settings to around a 100,  remove props and items not seen by the camera or used to create shadows.   and use bill boards for background fills where you can get away with it. this holds true for any software rendering.  If you think daz is slow try rendering with poser11 superfly , Maya with vray,  & Blender with the same scenes setup will take the same amount of time to render as daz in some cases even longer if your running simulations engines .   Thats why I believe render times has more to do with set up & setting rather that software

As a hobbyist,  Software is more of a personal choice that person develops usually because that is what they have worked with the most learning animation. or if a project requires a certain format that can be shared across 3d platforms if yuor working as a team .  But that is just my opinion.  I like using daz studio for animation I see nothing wrong with it.

I did this dragon animation in 5 days with iray in daz 4.12 . and i was hitting around 12-16 seconds per keyframe rendering which i think is pretty good

 

 this toon animation below took me 16  days for 32 scenes all done in iray getting render times around 23 seconds a keyframe and that was with deforce used

click to play pic

 

This animation took 3 days to render  as a water simulation test scene I was hitting around 28 seconds a keyframe, it all has to do with set-up and settings imo

 

 

alan bard newcomer

great little movies, now I will try to forget that it can be done,

Ivy

alan bard newcomer said:

great little movies, now I will try to forget that it can be done,

why forget???  when you can learn