Scene Optimizer??
brainmuffin
Posts: 1,213
in The Commons
Does anyone have feedback on the Scene Optimizer tool? How well it works. Ease of use. Etc.
This is the product page: https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
Thanks.
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Comments
It is very easy to use. It is generally run script push button get result in a few minutes.
There are a lot of options you can tweak, and if you want you can manually go through all the obkjects in the scene and exclude ones you don't want the maps reduced, but you'll get good results from just using the defaults.
I found it a little confusing at first, but I found it works well for the things I mainly use it for which is optimizing textures (resizing them) and has helped me get plenty of large scenes back into my VRAM so I didn't have to use the CPU
Indespensable. It's good that PAs include large maps, but they're not necessary in many instances. It takes a while to run on complex scenes, but creates lower resolution textures for the maps you select, saves them, and applies these maps to the objects in the scene. I usually save a new file so this doesn't have to be done again in the future.
Scene Optimizer is great for helping to fit scenes in the VRAM of your video card. Highly recommended.
- Greg
I use it every time I do something. I usually render in 1920x1080 for animations so I don't need the 8K maps I'm seeing a lot of going around now. I bring it down to 4K, sometimes 2K depending on what it is. I see a huge difference in rendering not only in Daz renders, but it works transferring over to Blender as well.
Very highly recommended! It can do many useful things in addition to reducing texture sizes, too. For example, it can remove all displacement maps from all or selected surfaces very quickly. You don't even have to know what objects and surfaces have displacement maps, if you just want to get rid of all of them. Displacement is not very useful in Iray, especially if you have limited GPU memory, because it requires dense geometry.
Thanks everyone. Sounds like it could really help my animation renders not take weeks.
I use it in every scene but I don't use all the features. I reduce texture sizes because otherwise my scenes drop to CPU during IRay renders.
Of all the tools in the shop, scene optimizer is the best you can get. Unless you have unlimited VRAM ;)
The less VRAM you use, the better performance.
All that does is mess with the settings to lower the quality of the output in order to speed up the viewport and/or final render. In particular it makes it easier to toggle between Iray Interactive mode and Photoreal mode to help with the response of the viewport (although I personally did not see much difference).
With all settings at equal quality your renders will be the same speed, with or without render throttle.
Yes it is a must have piece of software, apart from shrinking texture sizes, the other is the Translucency/SSS removal option.. Be surprised how much of a difference when Translucency is turned off to render speed and load on the GPU..
I use it all the time. Sometimes I think it loses its optimization though. For example you are supposed to optimize save ,reopen, and over time, I wonder if that data gets lost.
You switch out maps, so if you load character fresh in some cases it will load the original maps (and lose the optimizations)
Does Scene Optimizer modify the original textures of a figure after making the backup? So using that figure in a completely new scene will have the reduced textures?
No, it saves the reduced textures separately.
ok good, thank you.
it also allows you to restore the original textures with one click.
it's a really well-designed tool.
I bought the orignal version 12 years ago and never used it much, then I moved on to Reality.
Put it this way, before I picked up a TITAN RTX in May (and thus, I no longer really need Scene Optimizer), I had 2 TITAN Xp cards and did not have any scene where this tool wasn't used. Yes, even 12GB ran out quick with Studio, so I advise grabbing it as you will be satisfied when you see what it allows you to squeeze into a set up.
Just purchased a new PC and Scene Optimizer but I am having trouble using them both.
Scene Optimizer: divided by 8 and removed all displacement maps, saved, closed and restarted DS as per instructions
Despite my best efforts, my GPU seems to be ignored and not used by Iray. The GPU utilization is 0% and CPU is 100%... this is so disappointing as I had purchased my first PC in order to utilise Nvidia for Iray.
Am I making a mistake somewhere? From the Iray statistics, does it mean that my scene is using 960MB? In which case it should definitely fit into my GPU with 6GB, no?
*Sobbing in my corner*
Uncheck CPU in Photoreal Mode. And the 960mb is just how much the geometry of the objects in your scene are using. Textures are what get sent to the GPU for rendering.
Sigh, still doesn't work... GPU is 0% yet again :(
FWIW, I am using Misty River Gorge, 2 G8M characters and a boat... and divided by 8 with all displacement maps removed.
Oh dear, my log file seems to suggest that there is an Nvidia driver error?
2020-07-17 23:56:10.027 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(353): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.13 IRAY rend error: optixInit() failed: Unsupported ABI version. Please update your NVIDIA driver (www.nvidia.com).
2020-07-17 23:56:10.027 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(353): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.11 IRAY rend error: CUDA device 0 (GeForce RTX 2060): Scene setup failed
2020-07-17 23:56:10.027 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(353): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.11 IRAY rend error: CUDA device 0 (GeForce RTX 2060): Device failed while rendering
2020-07-17 23:56:10.027 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(353): Iray [WARNING] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.11 IRAY rend warn : All available GPUs failed.
2020-07-17 23:56:10.027 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(353): Iray [WARNING] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.11 IRAY rend warn : No devices activated. Enabling CPU fallback.
2020-07-17 23:56:10.027 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(353): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.11 IRAY rend error: All workers failed: aborting render
Updating the driver would be a good idea. Get it from Nvidia's website since the ones windows tries to use are usually not good. https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx? <--You can tell it what type of card you have and what OS and it will give you the correct/most up to date drivers.
Also it helps, in my experience when making changes like this to close and re-open DS/your scene file to allow the graphics card's memory to be cleared.
Apparently there is one that was released on 16Jul... Nvidia suggested getting a driver from my OEM but Dell only has a driver from March... guess I will have to take the risk and use Nvidia's.
Drivers direct from the manufacturer are ALWAYS better.
Get the studio drivers version if it asks. Not the game version.
No it isn't.
Always, always get the driver direct from Nvidia. Dell, HP etc. don't care about keeping their drivers up to date and they just plonk up the Nvidia drivers up on their website whenever one of their engineers get around to it.
SUCCESS!!! I downloaded NVidia's driver that was released 2 days ago, the studio version. Now, my render was just completed in 12 minutes flat without using Scene Optimizer (99% GPU utilization and 84% GPU Memory utilization which gives me an idea of how much I can push the GPU if I had used Optimizer). Twelve minutes!! It was taking over an hour on CPU and would have taken 12-14h on my Mac.
How could Dell ship me a new laptop with a GPU driver that does not function?? Had I not investigated and checked the logfile, I would NEVER have thought of updating the driver (mac user here). I did update the laptop when it arrived as Dell prompted it but there was never an update for the GPU. Again, how could Dell ship me something that rendered (no pun intended) the GPU totally unusable? I was so disapppointed all evening but now I see the power of the Invidia GPU and just the base 2060 RTX version and not even the 2070 or 2080! It is a billion light years quicker than my Mac!
On new Windows systems it's usually a good idea to update the drivers on things. Especially if it's a pre-built system, because the installed drivers would be from when the system was actually put together. I'm glad you got it working though.