Way to make clothed G8/G3 background characters less resource hungry for iray renders?

Toobis

Am doing an iray scene and the only characters I want to concentrate on are just three in the forefront. I don't want their background to be blurred and I want a few more wider shots of the public scene where they are interacting. Being this is inside a shopping mall during a weekend where they are talking, as you expect the place is busy with families/couples/teens just hanging out etc. To have perhaps 15 or so characters in iray renders takes quite a bit of time so I was thinking is there a way to make the non essential characters in the background remain iray but reduce their quality so the renders don't take as long on each of them even if they don't look as iray quality as the main characters. Would this process be to do with lowering the poly count? So can it even be done? Suggestions pls. Thx.

zombietaggerung

Poly count isn't the issue, it's textures. Remove any unseen textures from the figures that are out of focus; Eyes, any limbs covered in clothing, mouth, also bump and normal maps. Make the irises single colors with no texture maps, strip out clothing texture maps that are unseen or make them simple shaders. if they're even out of focus enough, you may even be able to remove all the skin texture maps and make everything simple flesh tone colors.

Sevrin

MMX Resource Saver Shaders Collection 2 for Iray | 3D Models and 3D Software by Daz 3D

Matt_Castle

zombietaggerung said:

Poly count isn't the issue, it's textures.

That's arguable, particularly when some clothes and hairs can have really high base poly counts. The other thing is that geometry is more irreducible - at least from the perspective of fitting stuff into VRAM (one of the most key parts of Iray resource management), textures can be halved in size again and again without too many issues. But once you hit the base geometry resolution, you're down to maybe using decimation, which is unreliable as far as whether it has problems.

As is I would definitely recommend turning down or off any subdivision modifiers on the background characters (remember to check for displacement as well), as well as seeing whether anything has a horrible base resolution.

~~~~~

If the problem isn't getting everything into VRAM, but just the slowness of the render, the main things to try to disable are translucency, transmission and SSS. Things like bump and normal maps may make a difference in terms of how many iterations it takes to clean up the image, but won't notably impact the time an iteration takes.

fred9803

Seeing as you asked, over at Rendo free stuff, Renderpeople have provided a few low-poly models that can be used as background people. Perhaps more to come. They come with detailed texture and normal maps and are ideal for contemporary type renders. Note they're un-rigged and you can't pose them but good for background purpose. At a distance they actually look more realistic than Daz people.

Mistara

pre render them and make them billboard people.  use an alpha mask to make them a shape on the plane 

Hylas

https://www.daz3d.com/lorenzo-and-loretta-bundle

algovincian

As has been mentioned, the typical culprit is texture size. The easiest way to lower this is Scene Optimizer:

https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer

You could also make sure your figures/clothes are at the base resolution. If that's still not low-poly enough, you could use Decimator (which preserves rigging):

https://www.daz3d.com/decimator-for-daz-studio

HTH.

- Greg

meganappstate

Now Crowd Billboards.

MimicMolly

meganappstate said:

Now Crowd Billboards.

These billboards are only good if you save them to a separate drive. They take up a lot of space since they're renders and transparency maps of the characters from different angles.

The Blurst of Times

As others say, render separate and billboard... or simply composite a few images.

With Iray Matte, you don't need everyone and everything in the scene at one time.

Yes, it takes time to organize a scene into discrete elements... or you cram everything into the scene and wait for an overloaded scene to render. Time is the fire in which we burn.

alienarea

I rendered this scene with the complicated figures (i.e. half in doorways) as png and added the other figures as separate renders, posed to the scene, same lights also png, and combined in GIMP.

https://www.deviantart.com/alien-area/art/The-Deviant-Chronicles-12-epilogue-869480940