Rendering Questions

areg5

I recently purchased a product that takes a ridiculously long time to render a single scene using my laptop. Here are my specs:

Dell Latitude E6430
Intel i7-3520M @2.90 Ghz
8 gig Ram
Windows 7 64 Pro

Until I tried to render the product, Country Resort, I had no problems rendering in a reasonable period of time. When I checked task manager I saw the processor was maxing out, and the Ram was only half used. I have several questions:

1. My system will accommodate 16 gig of Ram. Would an upgrade make rendering happen faster, or is rendering purely processor related?

2. Is the stand alone 3delight engine significantly faster? It seems kind of complex to use. I haven't found a walkthrough.

3. I see Daz has a batch rendering product. Does anyone have experience with that?

Szark

1: More Ram means bigger scenes and to some extent will decrease render times I believe.

2: I believe it is but it will only use 4 cores so for some it may not be faster. The new e-zine for Daz Studio has a walkthrough http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/42372/

3: sorry no I haven't.

What product is it that is giving you long render times.
and how long is long?
What render settings are you using?

StratDragon

areg5 said:

I recently purchased a product that takes a ridiculously long time to render a single scene using my laptop. Here are my specs:

Dell Latitude E6430
Intel i7-3520M @2.90 Ghz
8 gig Ram
Windows 7 64 Pro

Until I tried to render the product, Country Resort, I had no problems rendering in a reasonable period of time. When I checked task manager I saw the processor was maxing out, and the Ram was only half used.

The rendering engine will use all CPU power unless you specify outside of Daz Studio to use less, it did exactly what its supposed to do.
What you need to determine what's in this scene that causes it to render slowly.

Are there a lot of surfaces with displacements or reflections, refractions etc. Those types of surfaces tend to take longer to render because additional calculations are required to render them.

Are there a lot of lights with retraced shadows? Raytrace lights+displacements = S L O W R E N D E R S . . .

Are there surfaces with polygon intense geometries that need to be rendered? These take longer than lo-poly surfaces.

Was anything additionally subdivided?

Were there objects in the scene that are not visible in the render but designed to visible in a reflection?

Was the entire render substantially slow or were their portions of the render that were noticeably slower? If so what are the surfaces it was
working on at the time?

What were the setting in your 3Delight control panel and sometimes adjusting those sliders does not offer any quality increase but will substantially increase your render time. No two renders are the same, there may or may no be room for adjustment in the scene to speed it up.

Was something else running in the background like a virus scan or a youtube video?

areg5 said:

I have several questions:

1. My system will accommodate 16 gig of Ram. Would an upgrade make rendering happen faster, or is rendering purely processor related?
Rendering in 3Delight is a split between CPU and RAM but CPU is doing most of the heavy lifting. RAM is there to store data and feed it to the CPU, so in the case of this render you describe; NO: adding more RAM will not help, not if your only using half your RAM to begin with, it may help with other renders. 8 GB RAM is a very light amount of RAM these days for rendering computers, it's good but more won't hut.

2. Is the stand alone 3delight engine significantly faster? It seems kind of complex to use. I haven't found a walkthrough.

Standalone 3Delight will not be faster unless you buy a license and allow it to use your multithreaded cores on the i7. Otherwise it does not use the multithread, just the cores making it slower. I've written two walkthroughs but the link Szark sent is pretty straightforward. You can try it.

3. I see Daz has a batch rendering product. Does anyone have experience with that?

No.

areg5

StratDragon said:

areg5 said:

I recently purchased a product that takes a ridiculously long time to render a single scene using my laptop. Here are my specs:

Dell Latitude E6430
Intel i7-3520M @2.90 Ghz
8 gig Ram
Windows 7 64 Pro

Until I tried to render the product, Country Resort, I had no problems rendering in a reasonable period of time. When I checked task manager I saw the processor was maxing out, and the Ram was only half used.

The rendering engine will use all CPU power unless you specify outside of Daz Studio to use less, it did exactly what its supposed to do.
What you need to determine what's in this scene that causes it to render slowly.

Are there a lot of surfaces with displacements or reflections, refractions etc. Those types of surfaces tend to take longer to render because additional calculations are required to render them.

Are there a lot of lights with retraced shadows? Raytrace lights+displacements = S L O W R E N D E R S . . .

Are there surfaces with polygon intense geometries that need to be rendered? These take longer than lo-poly surfaces.

Was anything additionally subdivided?

Were there objects in the scene that are not visible in the render but designed to visible in a reflection?

Was the entire render substantially slow or were their portions of the render that were noticeably slower? If so what are the surfaces it was
working on at the time?

What were the setting in your 3Delight control panel and sometimes adjusting those sliders does not offer any quality increase but will substantially increase your render time. No two renders are the same, there may or may no be room for adjustment in the scene to speed it up.

Was something else running in the background like a virus scan or a youtube video?

areg5 said:

I have several questions:

1. My system will accommodate 16 gig of Ram. Would an upgrade make rendering happen faster, or is rendering purely processor related?
Rendering in 3Delight is a split between CPU and RAM but CPU is doing most of the heavy lifting. RAM is there to store data and feed it to the CPU, so in the case of this render you describe; NO: adding more RAM will not help, not if your only using half your RAM to begin with, it may help with other renders. 8 GB RAM is a very light amount of RAM these days for rendering computers, it's good but more won't hut.

2. Is the stand alone 3delight engine significantly faster? It seems kind of complex to use. I haven't found a walkthrough.

Standalone 3Delight will not be faster unless you buy a license and allow it to use your multithreaded cores on the i7. Otherwise it does not use the multithread, just the cores making it slower. I've written two walkthroughs but the link Szark sent is pretty straightforward. You can try it.

3. I see Daz has a batch rendering product. Does anyone have experience with that?

No.

The product is the Country Resort Bundle. The render settings are the default 3delight. What slider adjustments can I make that may help? When I render just the resort, it goes pretty fast. I notice it starts slowing down when I add the furniture, which I don't understand. How are the reflective surfaces an issue if there are no lights?

The bundle comes with a light set. If I add all lights, the render takes over 3hrs. If I just use sunlight with raytrace, its almost usable but still takes a long time. These render times are with nothing else running.

I've written off using this set in my current work because it would take too long, but I would like to have it usable for the future.

StratDragon

areg5 said:

The product is the Country Resort Bundle. The render settings are the default 3delight. What slider adjustments can I make that may help? When I render just the resort, it goes pretty fast. I notice it starts slowing down when I add the furniture, which I don't understand. How are the reflective surfaces an issue if there are no lights?

The bundle comes with a light set. If I add all lights, the render takes over 3hrs. If I just use sunlight with raytrace, its almost usable but still takes a long time. These render times are with nothing else running.

I've written off using this set in my current work because it would take too long, but I would like to have it usable for the future.

if you just add the furniture, nothing else, no lights does it seem very slow? If there are mirrors or glass it's going to slow things down as well. If the furniture has custom shader surfaces it could be causing a slowdown.

if you just add the lights into a new scene with two or three primitive objects and render does it seem to take a long time with the lights?

Take a screen shot of your 3Delight window with the settings and post them.

Takeo.Kensei

Notebook CPU are only 1/4 - 1/2 as fast as their desktop counterparts. If you want quicker renders, upgrade your CPU or buy a desktop PC

areg5

StratDragon said:

areg5 said:

The product is the Country Resort Bundle. The render settings are the default 3delight. What slider adjustments can I make that may help? When I render just the resort, it goes pretty fast. I notice it starts slowing down when I add the furniture, which I don't understand. How are the reflective surfaces an issue if there are no lights?

The bundle comes with a light set. If I add all lights, the render takes over 3hrs. If I just use sunlight with raytrace, its almost usable but still takes a long time. These render times are with nothing else running.

I've written off using this set in my current work because it would take too long, but I would like to have it usable for the future.

if you just add the furniture, nothing else, no lights does it seem very slow? If there are mirrors or glass it's going to slow things down as well. If the furniture has custom shader surfaces it could be causing a slowdown.

if you just add the lights into a new scene with two or three primitive objects and render does it seem to take a long time with the lights?

Take a screen shot of your 3Delight window with the settings and post them.

Primitives with light render in 2 minutes.

Just the furniture with no lights render in 1 1/2 min

Jaderail

Max Ray Trace does not need to be set to 8 unless the scene has lots of glass and or reflections in it. Lower it to 4 at least.
Shadow Samples at 16 is okay but only really needed for High Quality Render output...
Gamma Correction Turned on and Set to 2.2 is only needed IF you are going for 100% photo Real renders and it then requires more than just a setting to get Photo Real out put.
And Shading Rate set to .1 is over kill even .5 will speed your renders some and do the job just as well.

prixat

for quick test renders change:
max. ray trace depth to 1
shading rate to 4

when you're ready for detailed renders change the shading rate to 1.0 or 0.5
The most I've needed is 0.2

If you've got reflections and/or tansparencies you can increase the ray trace back up but only as much as necessary.

areg5

prixat said:

for quick test renders change:
max. ray trace depth to 1
shading rate to 4

when you're ready for detailed renders change the shading rate to 1.0 or 0.5
The most I've needed is 0.2

If you've got reflections and/or tansparencies you can increase the ray trace back up but only as much as necessary.

Ok. With those settings, the render with all lighting on took 18 minutes and looked ok (if a little artificial). I guess I can work with that when the time comes, and try upping the detail for close ups. Thanks!

Jaderail

Here is the Best one click set of Render Presets we have right now for DAZ Studio.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/16085/ the full folder once Un-Zipped is Script files, you can just Copy the Folder to your Script folder in your Content folder and start using them. They have some very good base settings to do many things, including creating your on Presets from.

Mattymanx

Bucket size is important too.

From my own tests I have discovered the following:

For intensive parts of the scene where you will have trasmapped hair with raytraced shadows and areas with raytraced reflections a lower bucket size of 16 will allow your CPU to process those areas faster. However in less intense areas it will render faster if you use a bucket size of 32 as it takes far less time to process those areas. Also, a bucket size of 32 is middle ground for speed. If you go lower or higher you end up taking more time to render. At least thats what I observed when I did my tests.

Also, for smaller images such as thumbnail images which are normally 91x91 pixels, a bucket size of 8 can usally be a lot faster then using 24 or 32 unless its a very basic image. You will need to judge these things per image based on whats in the image.

If you are going to use Depth of Field, set your pixel samples to 32 for the final image for a very smooth grain but use a pixel sample of 4 for your test renders.

A shading rate of 0.2 will do you for most final images. Setting it to 0.1 or even lower is only needed if you need to show details.