need help with iray settings
Samanthie
Posts: 308
The scene I am working on is using product Cinematic Light FX plus Atmosphere, a few flame objects, horse with rider..etc. Render did not complete and was very grainy. I had max samples at 10000 and today went even higher with same result. I'm not an expert on settings so had to ask for help. I looked at the log file for last night's render and it says warning nvidia card may not have enough memory. Anyway have tried tweaking the scene all day. I purchased Scene Optimizer but it doesn't seem to have an effect on the atmosphere. Thanks for any help.
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I guess what I am looking for are best settings for iray for faster rendering. Anyway been watching tutorials on yt and reading iray threads in the forums. I'm still learning.
If you're not familiar with Iray rendering, the Cinematic Light FX plus Atmosphere isn't a very good beginning choice.
Max samples is not the only variable that controls render time, In general, more light will give faster, grainless renders, provided you don't exceed the Vram on your GPU. If you want a darker scene, then use tone mapping to get the effect you want. Manipulating Exposure in Tonemapping doesn't add or decrease the amount of light Iray uses for calculations, contrary to popular belief.
Render time is influenced by:
Render Quality
MaxTime
Max Samples
Rendering Converged Ratio
Basically most of the parameters in the Render Setting>Progressive Rendering tab.
How big is the image, and how close to the camera are the elements? Unless you are zoomed in on something, so you see only part of it, then it's highly unlikely that any of the maps needed to be bigger than the image size - Scene Optimiser should let you shrink them to match. However, emissive surfaces (especially complex models with many polygons) and translucency are very demanding.
The Cinematic Light FX set is giving me some of the coolest effects. I did get the max time and samples set to 15000 and 10000. Rendering Quality is off. Need to find out how to do tone mapping. My scene is dark with dramatic lighting so if I can get the same effect and faster renders then that will help. Thanks fastbike1.
Thanks Richard,
Image is 2200 x 2500 sized up only because I read you can size the image down after render to remove grain. I am trying to render it again to see if I get a better result. I will try Optimizer again on the main characters if this latest render stops. I do think it is the atmosphere effects that is slowing things down. Maybe my card can't handle it. In the advanced tab Nvidia card (GF GTX 1060 3gb) and Optix Prime are checked.
It's that a 3GB 1060 doesn't fit large scenes, so it is normal that it goes out of vram .. If even the scene optimizer can't help I guess you're out of options. You may try simplyfing your scene to fit the vram. For example it may help using iray section planes, and/or rendering the characters in a separate pass then compositing with the scene.
Thank you Padone. I can try what you suggest and see if it helps. Right now it's pretty much grinding to a halt. The scene/render stays forever on 'zero'.
Are all your renders stopping after about two hours? If they are, you're hitting the default time limit before the render is "finished", and you should try again with the limit nudged up a bit. You can find the time parameter in the same place as the max samples one.
Note that the time limit is in seconds, so be prepared to do a lot of multiplying to get the time value you want (or enter a time of zero to ignore the time and let the render keep running until it hits one of the other stop conditions).
Thank you SpottedKitty. The current render aborted. Here is a snippet of the log file that goes with the render. I read somewhere to put the max samples at zero. Right now they are 15000 and 10000 max time, Render quality is off currently. >>
2019-09-30 11:34:04.890 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Initializing local rendering.
2019-09-30 11:34:04.891 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Rendering with 1 device(s):
2019-09-30 11:34:04.891 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : CUDA device 0 (GeForce GTX 1060 3GB)
2019-09-30 11:34:04.891 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Rendering...
2019-09-30 11:34:04.892 Iray [VERBOSE] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.2 IRAY rend progr: CUDA device 0 (GeForce GTX 1060 3GB): Processing scene...
2019-09-30 11:34:04.948 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.4 IRAY rend info : Initializing OptiX Prime for CUDA device 0
2019-09-30 11:34:04.948 Iray [VERBOSE] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.4 IRAY rend stat : Geometry memory consumption: 122.482 MiB (device 0), 0 B (host)
2019-09-30 11:34:05.050 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(305): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.4 IRAY rend error: OptiX Prime error (Device rtpContextCreate): Memory allocation failed
2019-09-30 11:34:05.050 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(305): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.2 IRAY rend error: CUDA device 0 (GeForce GTX 1060 3GB): Scene setup failed
2019-09-30 11:34:05.051 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(305): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.2 IRAY rend error: CUDA device 0 (GeForce GTX 1060 3GB): Device failed while rendering
2019-09-30 11:34:05.051 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(305): Iray [WARNING] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.2 IRAY rend warn : All available GPUs failed.
2019-09-30 11:34:05.051 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(305): Iray [WARNING] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.2 IRAY rend warn : No devices activated. Enabling CPU fallback.
2019-09-30 11:34:05.051 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(305): Iray [WARNING] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.2 IRAY rend warn : Re-rendering iteration because of device failure
2019-09-30 11:34:05.051 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(305): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.2 IRAY rend error: All workers failed: aborting render
In the Render Settings, go to Advanced, and uncheck the Optix Acceleration. It looks like your card isn't supporting it and it could be causing the fall back to the CPU. Or the textures are just too big for the 3GB card. But I would try turning off the Optix and it's caused issues for other people.
Thank you JonnyRay turning it off now. Also I will try optimizer again and see what happens.
Started new render after using optimizer just to make the textures smaller. Also Optix is off now and I have the Render Quality on and the setting at the bottom of that tab set to 1.5 (read this setting reduces noise) and it does seem to be doing that. So far I am 50 min into this render. I see less noise in the middle of the image while the upper area seems to be more grainy. It is also the part of the image with the most light. If the image finishes and with a little postwork I hope to have it in my gallery soon. Thanks everyone for all your suggestions. I have HP Omen 870-220na and I am not sure if it can run a stronger card (RTX). Couldn't find any info.
4 hours 17 min later and still rendering and it is looking good finally! Still see some noise but compared to the earler renders this is so much better. Going to let it render on for a while. Thanks again to everyone who posted their knowlege and tips!
I think this is oof to one side of the actual subject matter here, but searching for something relevant brought me here, so I'm wondering if it might be related.
I went to get the render time from the log and I saw this error, numerous times:
2019-10-01 15:59:13.503 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(305): Iray [WARNING] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend warn : The 'iray_optix_prime' scene option is no longer supported.
I didn't remember if Optix was on, so I went to turn it off to stop the error from happening - and it wasn't on. I turned it on, re-rendered, and got a (very slightly) quicker render without the error in the log.
I dunno what the heck to think of all that.
Also, more lights makes it render faster? I thought more lights made it render slower! I've been making do with few lights and correcting in Photoshop. >.> Now I need to go learn about "tone mapping" in DAZ studio. Thank you. Gawd there're a lot of layers to this thing. :)
Don't know about the optix prime issue, anyway a warning is not an error and it shouldn't harm anything. That said optix requires solid drivers to work properly so I'd go for studio drivers rather than game drivers. Also it always takes more vram so it is better to keep it off on low-end cards.
As for iray lights, the more light the better because that makes iray converging faster. This is true for any pbr engine. Indeed there are issues with dark scenes and one way to handle it is to shoot day for night, that is, render with day light then use tone mapping and/or postprocessing to make it dark.
So you see, pbr engines are completely different from raytracing.
More light in the right place, which usually does mean adding or moving lights.
Studio Drivers!!! Holy flying monkey babies, when did that become a thing and why didn't Nvidia have someone call me personally and say "There! @#$%@! drivers specifically for artists and creators. Will you shut the &#%@! up about it now?" I am literally installing them right now and have to reboot. Thank you!
The thing I found most bizarre about the warning was that it screamed "Oh Noes! Not Optix!!" when Optix isn't on, and is strangely silent when it is. :) I've got a 1080 and a pile of VRAM, but in my experiments with it, it only speeds up simple scenes, and only slightly in those cases - sometimes twice as long with it on in even moderately complex scenes... So, I'm assuming I'm doing something wrong and I've got a lot to learn about it, from somewhere.
And I need to learn the tone mapping function, too - thank you again for pointing that out. Normally I'd do all that in Photoshop, but now, knowing there's a native way to do it, I should definitely know more about it.
That I did not grasp from the other comments - thank you. Right after my last comment I went and loaded up a scene with an HRDI, six spotlights, and a home-made ghost light, started doing test renders, and ended up wondering what I was doing wrong. ::understanding intensifies::