Slow Render Time

deleted user

I'm not sure why but for some reason my render engine has gotten so slow its nuts.
A year ago I was able to make a 3000 x 3000 sized image in a matter of seconds.
These days I'm lucky to get a 800 x 800 image to render in 25 minutes.
I was trying to make an animation 400 x 800 I gave up on frame 6, Some hour n a half later.
I'm on default quality, One shadow map. It should not be taking this long.

PC Specs

sriesch

It is entirely dependant on what is in the scene. Somethings render quick, some things render slow. If you have lots of transparencies, that'll slow it down. If you render really dark scenes, you'll have to up the quality to avoid splotches, and that really slows things down. Unverified, but I would expect lots of reflection could slow things down a bunch.

SickleYield

1. What's your shading rate? Maybe try it at .4 or .5 if it's all the way down to .1 (that just makes things sharper and is most useful at low values in a very large pulled-back type of scene).
2. What are your raytrace samples? If there's not water next to a mirror or other things that are multiply reflective, you're probably good with 1 or at most 2 (a single water surface without a mirror next to it just needs 1 or 2).
3. Hair renders WAY faster if you put UberSurface on it, set the Occlusion Shading Rate mode to Overrisde, and set shading rate to 128 (even 64 will make a difference).
4. Raytraced lights render faster than shadow mapped lights because shadow maps are broken in recent versions of DS.

deleted user

I'll try a couple of those things. What do you mean by shadow maps are broken?

CypherFOX

Greetings,

FlowerGirl said:

I'll try a couple of those things. What do you mean by shadow maps are broken?

I have found that often, and with certain settings (that I do not recall off the top of my head at work) shadow maps will take longer to generate even one single shadow map, than the entire image would have taken to render with raytracing. Since shadow maps are supposed to speed up renders, this makes them (in my mind, at least) broken.

There's a thread somewhere around here where I complained about trying various things and running time tests with shadow maps to figure out what was going on, but the upshot was that for many scenes, you'll just be faster going with raytracing. Plus you get to see your image unfolding quicker, which is less true of shadow maps, as they're a pre-process step.

But the core answer is that it depends almost entirely on your settings and your scene. For example, I found that 'Pixel Samples' was a huge contributor to DSM creation time. Dropping that low made a big difference, but it was still only barely comparable to raytracing at the same level.

-- Morgan

kyoto kid

...Sean is correct on all counts, including reflectivity. One person I know who had a "fully loaded" Mac Pro (Dual 6 core hyperthreading CPUs/64 GB memory) brought that system to its knees just with reflectivity.

Daz Studio has seen several "updates" in the past year including to the 3Delight render engine so there may be more "robust" features compared to earlier versions that your Duo core system is now having difficulty handling. I had few issues rendering in Daz 2.3 on my old duo core notebook (even a large scale render I once did in "Todd AO" 70mm aspect ratio) while 3.1 was "iffy", and 4.5+ usually crashed even when rendering fairly simple scenes at 600 x 600.

I tended to stay clear of anything "Uber", even on my 8 thread 12GB system, as it slows the render process down significantly (on the notebook it was usually a quick trip to a render crash).

Does anything in your scene use SSS, HSS, or HD morphs? Those could also slow down the process.

If you have/are using Age of Armour's Advanced Lights, you can flag troublesome surfaces (like hair) to render in Primitive Hitmode and/or use Adaptive Sampling to speed things up.

alexhcowley

Further to Sean's comments, I've found that Ivy (or any other plant/tree that uses transparency maps) will slow your render down a treat.

I note that Predatron has started making a lack of transparency maps on his latest trees a major selling point.

Cheers,

Alex.

Mattymanx

Your bucket size is important too. Bucket size tells the render engine how much data a single core will process at a time. If you scene is not very complex with reflections and raytraced shadows through trans maps then a larger bucket size will do though I dont recommend exceeding 32. If you have a far more complex scene then reducing the bucket size to 16 or even 8 can help as each core is handeling less area at a time.