How do you handle heavy scenes? (hardware, props, tips)
cajhin
Posts: 154
Note: If I write too much, there are a couple of not terribly important
***Question:
inside...
I just got my first Stonemason "Architecture" set (Streets of Steampunk).
Am impressed, looks great, both from a technical and an artistic viewpoint.
(I looked a bit into how it's put together, and the bits and bolts look squeaky clean to me. I could probably create something like that myself; it would be finished around 2040).
PERFORMANCE
1 Mio vertices, 4GB VRam, quite efficient for a scene with that much detail.
My RTX2070S will handle ~8 Mio vertices and 8GB VRam (my rule of thumb).
But... iRay preview is *crawling* at ~1 frame per second.
My rule with "8 Mio verts is ok" is based on dForce hair.
Maybe there are other considerations, maybe the shaders can't keep up with all the shiny materials?
update: it was a new 8k HDRi that murdered the card (wasn't aware of the res, the product never mentions it).
***Question 7: shouldn't an 8GB card be able to handle an 8k HDRi?
***Question 1: does anything other than "number of vertices" and "memory" impact the "greyshaded iRay preview" performance?
***Question 2: I assumed a crazy expensive 3090 would handle about any scene that fits into 24GB, like 3 Steamvilles and 20 figures. Is this really the case?
Note: I switched from 4.14 to 4.12 - the old DS version handles Steamville gracefully??
Either iRay degraded, or my 4.14 settings are messed up.
Filament to the rescue. It runs it at 60 fps, as always.
For science, I threw figures at the scene to see how far you can push Filament.
Piece of cake.
Test Render (iRay):
The result was MAJOR upheaval in Steamville. See Exhibit A (attached pic)
STYLE:
For a 'real' render I'd need suitable clothes. I don't have any Victorian stuff.
(I have a selection of bikinis, because 1 bright beach HDRI + 1 figure + 1 bikini was about all I could render on CPU back then).
Now DAZ would surely prefer I raid the store and spend hundreds on a dozen steampunk outfits (need some males, too).
Too much for one "just for fun" render. I'd spend maybe 15 on a hero outfit and 20 on a bag of background wardrobe.
I'm more liberal with figures and hair, since you can use those in any scene.
***Question 3: do you have any tricks how to populate a bigger scene, so that clothing items are not obviously duplicated?
I can dabble with the colors, but the shape is usually quite fixed. This will look like a clone army unless you buy many many items.
With a bit of adjustment, Western style might fit in, not much else.
Note: it seems most products are 'high fashion', the kind of stuff people on the street don't / didn't wear.
Too bad, since 'plain clothes' haven't really changed that much between eras. (otoh, people tend to not make renders of me in my jogging pants)
TECH:
The iRay render fell back to CPU (8 Mio verts, ~10GB, 5 lights + skydome). Slow but it will get there...
Oh. It took *massive* amounts of system RAM. 75GB of committed memory. Major SSD thrashing.
(I just ordered an upgrade from 32 to 64GB. Canceled that, ordered 32 to 96. RAM is cheap, fortunately).
***Question 4: why does CPU rendering use SO much more memory than GPU rendering?
The scene just barely doesn't fit into 8GB VRam. CPU needs 75GB Ram. Local issue?
Note: I know I know, I *could* optimize the scene a lot. Part of why I'm considering a 3090 is the luxury of not having to fiddle with it.
Note: Filament still handles the loaded scene like a piece of cake, for posing all the pieces (with texture quality '1 notch below max' though; max eats VRam like nVidia gave it away for free).
Too bad I cannot really guess from the light preview what I'll later get in iRay.
LIGHT:
I'm not quite satisfied with the light.
Problem is, for light work, I first need to redudce the scene to something my Gfx card can handle in quasi realtime.
***Question 5: is there a good workflow to keep a large scene manageable, like "put everything very relevant to the main scene in one group, everything else in another" ?
***Question 6: is there any way to alter the lighting strenght of the skydome, *without* altering the apparent brightness of the dome?
As in, sky should look the same, but illuminate the scene more or less.
(guess I could edit the brightness of the sun in an HDR capable editor, is there an easier way?)
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Comments
I have a GTX 1060 6Gb version, so, for sure I must do trickies for doing big scenes, lets move on!
***Question 1: does anything other than "number of vertices" and "memory" impact the "greyshaded iRay preview" performance?
on preview the name says all...PREVIEW!, don't use all geometry Subdivided or smoothed, all go BASE Geometry!
***Question 2: I assumed a crazy expensive 3090 would handle about any scene that fits into 24GB, like 3 Steamvilles and 20 figures. Is this really the case?
Yes, it will!, but even if not fit you must use scripts, I use V3SDO Scene Optimizer, you will discover some hairs have 8096px on textures?? NO WAY!
***Question 3: do you have any tricks how to populate a bigger scene, so that clothing items are not obviously duplicated?
I do separate scenes, 1 for scenery and environments, other for figures saved like Subsets, because all populated DS will crash.
***Question 4: why does CPU rendering use SO much more memory than GPU rendering?
Is the calculus preparations
***Question 5: is there a good workflow to keep a large scene manageable, like "put everything very relevant to the main scene in one group, everything else in another" ?
You need to understand what is a RENDER, is a 2D image of 3D geometry, based on that concepto...all is valid, if you want to use billboards of prerendered people...why not?, there is even a product in Daz Store that does that when you need a ton of people.
***Question 6: is there any way to alter the lighting strenght of the skydome, *without* altering the apparent brightness of the dome?
As in, sky should look the same, but illuminate the scene more or less.
and you are lucky, only 6 questions?, there is more than 15 questions on issues when Vram and Ram hogs the software and smash to the smitherens!
First of all, sorry, I had to respond ;) I probably won't be able to help you out (going to try!) but oh my word that render of yours! It's hilarious and really nicely made too IMO! I'm a fan (I think), that's for sure. Though I suppose it would explain why I couldn't get RIley to wear her bikini earlier on, hmmm :D
And then that banner on the store, easily overlooked? That's the fun stuff ;) Just wanted to share, I really enjoyed that!
Congrats! It's not the kind of advice you asked for but always remember that depending on the scenery you can usually also use individual parts which can sometimes even help take the whole thing out of context. Sometimes even a black background and decent lighting can help maskerade that you only used one "scenery prop", depending on the setup of course. You probably know this but ey, wanted to share. Your comment reminds me of the days when I just got (parts of) West Park. I had so much fun with that...
Depending on your audience I'll bet bikini's work just fine ;-) (ok, ok, sorry, sorry!)
A few things you might want to try but please bare in mind that I don't heavily work with Genesis 8 (just yet) but... Auto fitting is a thing, you can often fit clothes on one character even though they were made for another. This runs quite deep. The best way to try is to ignore the auto content pane but instead use the content library tab and find your wardrobe items in there. If an item doesn't fit at first right click and then use "fit to..." and see what happens. I've managed quite a few tricks this way.
Another thing to consider is to check out "freebie sites", there's a whole forum section dedicated to that. Who knows, you may find some good stuff there as well. Just because something is free doesn't necessarily maean its bad, there's some good (and really impressive) stuff out there as well.
Also... but you're probably aware: the Platinum club can save quite a bit of money, esp. with larger purchases. They even provide freebies (though... their quality fluctuates, I've had periods where I got something very good every month but you sometimes also have periods where the only thing you get is a freebie for something you have to buy and it "only" costs $23,- or so... errr, not a nice freebie). Still, maybe food for thought?
Hmm, you could apply the tricks they often do in the news: when a group gathers keep the camera angles low(er) so that it looks as if a lot of people are attending while in fact there are only a handful present. You can also split up a scene and use some items in different places, depending on context.
Keep the morph panel in mind as well, you can apply morphs / changes to plenty of figures and you could then save thay character preset so it can be used later. Then there's also the wardrobe which can obscure a thing or two. Heck... in an old render I even used to add the default (gray) Genesis because I only needed a (back) shot of the wardrobe. And it never showed that it wasn't even a 'real' character ;) (but don't mind me too much with that I guess, I still use Genesis 1 on frequent ocassions and still heavily enjoy the figure. That probably won't fly well with HD scenes).
Not that you're aware off anyway! :D
A CPU has to do a lot more than just your render whereas a GPU can be more or less dedicated to it. And an OS will also apply swapping.
Well, that's it for me. Can't really help with light issues because I'm still struggleing with those myself in iRay a bit. My gear can handle it but so far I'm still using 3Dl a lot as well.
Hope this could still be useful.
The basic way how I handle complex scenes is by reducing texture resolution, usually from 4k to 1k or even more
The logic behind that is that if your scene contains many characters they are positioned far away from the camera and high-resolution textures are meaningless anyway
characters that are close to the camera probably need better quality textures.
If the scene has a lot of characters in the background they all should use the same texture. and generally, textures should be reused whenever possible.
So no matter what complexity, you can fit your scene in the GPU ram but it may turn into a lot of hassle if you have to tweak all that stuff manually and change things when you rearrange items.
The funny think is that DAZ genesis figures are extremely low poly and pose almost no challenge to GPU you can put as many as you like on the scene without any penalty. hair and clothes often consume far more resources. So rendering your characters in bikinis(or naked) is much better for the hardware :)
I apologize up front for going completely offtopic here (sorta) but this had to be done:
I can see now why you got this one because solely based on your render I decided that I'd grab this scenery too (which I just did) and I'm very pleased with the end results. It even has an "under the bridge" scenery which can be quite usefull too. So yah, now I'd like to thank you again for sharing your render but this time based on what I (now) know about 'Streets'. Without your render I'd have fully overlooked it, simple fact. And within this community I feel especially strong about "credit where credit's due" as such: I'd like to thank you once again for sharing the above.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/407371/making-really-big-scenes-try-this#latest