question render times

Eggwhite

Hi.somewhere in the past i had bought "Contemporary Loft" from the vendor "Human".

Had it tweaked in 3dl for daz 4.7 and could render in minutes.

now i have the set installed again and am trying to render in Iray.  oooh boi.

With only one character standing in the room. the darn thing takes 1 hour 20 minutes to render a 2500px x  1400 ish picture.

Standing on some tropical island with the same Character takes about 25 minutes.

Are these times normal or anything? render settings are pretty default. texture compression to 8000 and quality to 100 with maxed out times

Richard Haseltine

How were you lighting the scene? With iray you can't turn shadow-casting off to let external light in, and if there are areas of the scene which are getting only indirect light the render will be slow.

Eggwhite

I'm using the default hdr as enviro light, lighting the room through the main window. reduced the lights that came with the set (indirect spotlights) from 5 to 2 and have added 3 direct facing emissive lights, 2 of those are lighting an open room (kitchen) that is in view. 1 spotlight to accentuate the character.

So 6 lights and one hdr. that gave some faster results till the render hit 85% was "only" 45 minutes in, but after that it got to 94% at 1 hour and 10 minutes (3900) iterations. Cancelled the render after that. also took the from of the room of with the geo editor because i've read that in a closed room the rays can't escape and increase the render times even more. besides an hours worth of work. no change in render time. trying a new very basic set up now. will post the render. if i can get it to the end.

 

RD2ART

I use ghost lights https://www.daz3d.com/iray-ghost-light-kit-2 shaders on https://www.daz3d.com/jm-proper-emissive-lights lights to light the environment. I like the ring light as it shows in the eye reflections without being seen in the actual scene. This also allows you to place the lights close to the objects and control the brightness of the object. I also recently downloaded a camera with IRAY panes called "Iray Interior Camera V1.4" from another site that seems to have great promise. However, you are limited to one view camera at a time.

Eggwhite

once i have a baseline on how to Iray in Daz i will create my own emmisives and ghost lights. i read it is the way to go. but first i want to learn what it is that brings iray to it's knees with indoor rendering. and master it so i can grow as i did with 3dl.

what kind of render times are you looking at btw? and with what sort of system, if i may ask.

 

RD2ART

I have a NVIDIA 1080 and 4.20GHz Intel Core i7-7700K. Most indoor scenes with the one ghost ring light takes under an hour for a near zero firefly result. But must of my rendering are done in the IRAY viewport as I have trouble with my Vram not being released after renders. I found if I use the IRAY viewport to render that I dont usally need to restart the program to reclaim Vram. Also if you are not hiding objects not in the viewport, you can try that. Such as walls, ceilings and assets. Hiding these objects that you can't see can speed up the render time and reduce Vram usage.

Eggwhite

i made it to 95% of this render 59 minutes with 5442 Iterations, 2550x1820 steps are now with 0.2%. so that's going to take forever aswell.

Render settings i used for this are:

Render mode: Photoreal

Progressive render

udates every 60sec,  min sample 5

Max samples, max time and rendering converged ratio are maxed out.

Rendering quality is at 1.

in optimization, Architectual sampler is on rest is off

used the omnifreaker park hdr for this one. (just trying things out) at 2.5 intensity and default 2 enviro map setting

texture compression is medium 2048 and high 8000.

 

I also took the entire front of the room. so it's open

1 spotlight as fill light. think you can tell which one that is.

1 spot light as face light. there are 3 spotlights facing the wall ( pointing at paintings) that throw indirect lightning back in the room

2 Spotlights above the character facing and lighting the room upstairs.

2 emissive lights in the kithchen ceiling to light up that room.

the render went faster than ever, till it hit 85% at some 35 minutes in. but the picture looks like boiled water water now. bland as.....

as for the character used and composition. it's just flung together with no brush up on settings. this is just for learning

 

Any tips are most welcome

 

RD2ART

You can try playing around with the "Tone Mapping" settings in the Render Settings Tab. I use Exposure Value, Gamma, White Point and Vignetting. Vignetting set to 10 or 15 sometimes gives a transition around the photo so it doesn't look so digital. I also sometimes set to "0" Glossy Layered Weight, Top Coat Weight and Glossy Reflectivity surface settings on all objects that are not characters in the Surface Tab. This will cut done on IRAY reflection bounces and speed up the render and remove fireflies. You can also set Render Mode in the Render Settings Tab to Interactive and cut "Max Ray Bounces, Max Reflection Bounces, and Max Refraction Bounces by 1/2 so 8,4,4. This sometimes will speed up renders and cut down on fireflies.

RD2ART

You can try playing around with the "Tone Mapping" settings in the Render Settings Tab. I use Exposure Value, Gamma, White Point and Vignetting. Vignetting set to 10 or 15 sometimes gives a transition around the photo so it doesn't look so digital. I also sometimes set to "0" Glossy Layered Weight, Top Coat Weight and Glossy Reflectivity surface settings on all objects that are not characters in the Surface Tab. This will cut down on IRAY reflection bounces and speed up the render and remove fireflies. You can also set Render Mode in the Render Settings Tab to Interactive and cut "Max Ray Bounces, Max Reflection Bounces, and Max Refraction Bounces by 1/2 so 8,4,4. This sometimes will speed up renders and cut down on fireflies.

Eggwhite

Thanks for the tips. did a "quick"render over breakfast this morning with your settings aplied and throwing out most of the lights. Downsizing the sample rate had the biggest impact i think. it rendered to 100% in 30 minutes exactly.

Iterations were also cut down from 5k+ to just short of 3K.