What will take Daz that extra step forward to make animating and rendering less time consuming?
Usernamenottaken
Posts: 53
I understand that animation is time consuming in its nature, but what about the render times? I've tried mocap with Kinect and while it's not amazing, it's easy. For $2,500 you could buy a "cheap" suit with improved accuracy of your movements and very, VERY easily put it into daz. Much like Facemojo or what it's called, I've used that too and it is effortless to bring your characters to life.
The issue is that the renders are painfully long. Yes, I've optimized the scene. Yes, it's in a smaller resolution with very few iterations, and yes - I have a great card. The 2080ti, but I am waiting on the 3080 to come in the mail
Hopefully the next update that allows for Ampere seriously speeds up these render times. It's just sort of a tease to be able to now easily integrate mocap (Body and facial) with daz, with brilliant images - but render times that last decades.
Perhaps this is just something that comes with the quality and I'm complaining an inherent tradeoff, or do you think that that there is a better way / better tech that could be implimented to improve these times. Keeping Iray, of course.
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Free Nomon who was working on Face Mojo is releasing soon Facemotion. He has some great tips for rendering speed ups, which will be improved even more with the new Iray Denoiser when it's updated. Here are his tips:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VGa-WdMs_E0X5je9JVmC-l8Mj4D5lQ3aKBWkItEvWEI/edit
Wow, this does speed up times a lot. Thank you!
Well I don't know what render times your experiencing or what kind of scenes you render because there were no details towards that in your post, so it's all a little subjective and based on perspective, isn't it. I can't imagine doing only a few iterations of a small res render on a 2080ti takes ages, but maybe for you it does.
Without any information it's hard to know how much faster your renders can be.
Personally, I don't find the render times to be an issue, generally, but that's just me. I know others have also commented on the long render times, especially compared to real-time render options...
I set my path length to 32 at the most instead of infinite
often I have it at 16
a) Render the background without the animated elements at 1080P, 720P, or less (someone has said elsewhere in the forums the American entertainment industry masters video at 2K so that would be 2048 × 1080, probably done for cropping purposes on different output screens).
b) Render the animated elements with shadows but not the background.
c) Composite
d) Upscale using DLSS
Also, don't use a lot of water, glass, metal and so on but practically speaking having all your action in the dessert can be monotonous. Also, it's common to have scene in low light with high contrast to reduce render times. You've seen the scenes like that in video games - streets after dark with street lighs and neon signage lighting a very high contrast scene with few details.
You are welcome! Free Nomon's results look good and his render times are great. Glad you are having success!
This might help you. I'm using this server farm to render my comic there: http://www.jacktomalin.com/iray/
But so far, the Iray servers can't do animation, so you'd have to render sucessive frames.
I wish Jack's service handled animation. But using Free Nomon's method looks to work well as seen on his YouTube videos.
iRay is inherently always going to take a lot of time. PBR's take a long time to render.
You can turn down quality till you get a speed you find acceptable or get more HW. But thinking that Daz will somehow change iRay is not going to happen. Daz does not write iRay. Nvidia does.
Individual images don't require nearly the same level of convergence in animations as they do when you're rendering a single still image.
The problem is real-time feed back in the viewport. There isn't any. You can have the settings dialed in as low as possible and will be lucky to get 2-3 frames per second of feedback in the viewport when doing animation. A single character with no textures, decimated to 10% will still be sluggish when trying to view it in motion. With the joint correctives turned off. This makes absolutely no sense to me. I honestlly wonder if there is some frame limiter coded into the software to make it slow intentionally. Consequentlly, animation can not be done in the software. That problem, and the lack of a proper graph editor with bezier features are the two main problems that prevent animation from being done in Daz.
Rendering is not an issue, or at least it is a much lower priority issue. It's possible to get decent render times of under a minute per frame. Or maybe 5 minutes per frame if you want something really nice looking.
This is what 1-2 minute per frame renders look like for animation purposes:
might need to open in seperate window.
I recently did a 10 second intro animation for work in Daz 3D. I used Daz because I had a very tight deadline and it's pretty easy to get something basic up and rendering. The 10 second animation was 1920 x 1080, was 30 fps (would have preferred 60) and I gave each frame 2 minutes 30 seconds to render. Yes, it took around 12 hours. Unless you're a baller with twenty grand to spend on an iRay server animating with Daz is not really possible. Mostly for this reason, my quest to get Daz content into other packages easily (with varying success, particularly in the mesh resolution area) continues.
The ideal would be Unreal Engine but it's ray tracing is still kind-of beta and it's not really intuitive (looking forward to UE 5 though). There's a lot of faffing about to get the kind of look you can get easily with a few lights and iRay in Daz.
Free Nomon says he can get acceptable results on a 2080ti of about 10 to 30 seconds per frame using Iray. His YouTube videos look quite good. I myself would use 24 fps which would look more filmic and would save time (of course post processing motion blur since we can't do it with Iray in DS). Now for a faster video card. My old one can't cut it.
Have any of you seen the videos on youtube of AI frame interpolation? I saw one video of a stop motion lego animation that has it's framerate tripled? I think. It looked wild. Animated at 12 frames per second and then "upscaled" or should I say "uprated" to around 30 frames per second. Freely available tech if I remember correctly from the video. It looked very convincing. The few odd AI artifacts that showed up were barely noticible, though if you were looking for them they're easy to spot.
Check it out:
There's also this - DAIN works with Nvidia cards
https://grisk.itch.io/dain-app
I don't make animation with daz to save time. I use daz to make animation for fun like spending time putting a jig-saw puzzle together. most of the real work is done in the film editor anyway. But If needed or wanted speed to make animation and wanted to use drop and drag animations tools I would properly invest in iclone pipeline or Anime studio or one of the 3d programs on steam. you could learn how to use a game engine like Unreal. there are many options other than daz studio
But even those other 3d software can take time to develop animations. the biggest thing with rendering animation in Iray is remembering your 3 "R" of your set up
Reduce = Textures maps and remove normal maps from everything, biggest resource hog of rendering animation.
Reduce = Iteration's to shorten render time. I try to have a target goal of a 11 seconds pre frame. & i never bake a render longer than 30 seconds a per-frame and that is at 1920x1080HD
Reuse = reuses scenes and light set ups you have created already & save the render sets up as render presets for quick scene builds one scene with 10 camera POV will give you a lot of options & will save you up t 50% on you build tmes.
Other wise there are other software for faster animation builds. But I don't mind the longer render/build times i get with daz because i like my final results I get :)
The biggest thing is to make sure you share your animations .
Good luck
This is a animation made with daz. took me a little less than week to make from start to finsh. I was getting about 12 seconds a PNG frame rendering in Iray
fun to watch. Best viewed in 10080HD
Daz can take time to make animation with, specially if your not very good at using the daz software. but as you learn more about how daz studio works & how to use it in a work flow with a film editor you can put a animation out in pretty short time.
This animation took about 2 days to make with daz . try not to smile when you watch it..lol
I am guessing since I cannot watch the video you are talking about viewport playback.
DAZ studio has never been able to do real-time viewport playback even using openGL with everything fancy turned off in preferences
Yep, you have to find the ways to reduce the render time and your tips obviously work.
I mean.... This kinds of proves the point as to how inefficient it is.
what do you need to be efficient? your slowest part of animation is film editing.
Indeed. working with animation in Daz Studio does require a lot of prep work. IMO I believe thats why there is such a complaints with daz studio. I don't think a lot of users understand you can't just load a model made for rendering still images with volume lighting and ect and expect to have any kind of speed to your render times.
Lots of prep work goes into each scene when trying to render animation with daz studio. If people do not want to do the prep for more efficient render times . there is always other apps they can use instead of daz studio for drop and drag ready to use out of the box animation. Daz is unfortunately not one of those apps. just look at the size of a normal map sometime to those alone will eat most of your vram add that to 8k texture maps and 4 k bump maps your render times come to a crawl.
I just use 1080ti's GPU's and can achieve 12 second a frame with 2 characters and a loaded scene. using daz 4.12.0.86. So if i had a couple of 24 gig Ampere cards imagine what I could render. :)
Generated in real time.
Video doesn't matter, just an example of reasonable rendertime for animation - I think I had it on private, it's on unlisted now.
The viewport, yeah, exactly that. It is the single largest bottleneck in animation production. There are at least work around solutions for the incomplete functions of the graph editor.
rendering vs viewport issues: A pin prick next to a deadly wound.
@karia007
Yea, your properly gonna have to wait for that Iray feature in Daz Studio or any 3D app for that matter for a little while.. daz does not make iray it only implements its features into the studio app. So as far as I know right now NVIDIA has real time raytrace for rtx cards But the real-time "IRAY" rendering options is as far as I know is only available in unity3D developers edition. So I believe that realtime rendering has more to do with NIVIDA than daz . So your complaint maybe with NVIDIA more than with daz. daz ony implements what NIVIDA releases for development. I maybe wrong though because there have been some new changes. but nothing about real time rendering in the Daz studio change logs that i have seen reported as of yet.
& for realtime rendering you can always use Unreal, maybe even cryengine. gaming engines are the only ones I know capable of realtime rendering. besides Blender cycles. none of which are iray though . I know that blender EEVEE does real time rendering butits not Iray either
I am by no means saying that I need realtime or any miracles. Simply that your clip (2 days) vs. real time is a very large gap.
Clearly the animators here know more tricks than I do so I have a couple of questions. Has anyone seen Google Filament in action - I mean is it integrated in some application that we can look at? I have not found one yet and am wondering whether DAZ Studio might be the first.
Otherwise, I'm not sure about the posing/animation capabilities of game engines. I mean, it seems to me when I look at the videos out there that the animations are a series of stock movements strung together. Does Unity or Unreal have a timeline, keyframes and character posing like you would find in Blender or even DAZ Studio or is it more like the aniblock approach? The kite video above would suggest that there is some pretty advanced posing capability in Unreal but are we sure that the animation was done in Unreal or just the rendering?
really?! because I thought rendeing out 1800 keyframes out in Iray, creating 1800 png's at 1920 x 1080 @ 300dpi , putting them all together in Adobe premiere film editor, then adding in music etc. was pretty darn good for 2 days or about 10 to 12 hours work .. Ha! what do i know.
How about this film below . it was rendered in Iray at 1920 x 1080 @300 dpi running at 30 keyframes per second. it took me about a week to hand keyframe the animation & render out 32,000 keyframes which created rendered in 32,000 png's
Like i said when creating animation with daz studio the most work is the film editing. Daz does not save in MP4 so I render in PNG image series. as most pro studios would for animations.
But like I said what do I know I just do this for fun
Click to play, Best viewed in 1080HD