The Basics: Work Flow For Rendering...

VitalBodies

What are the best practices for rendering, and test rendering? 
Generally Speaking, the moment you click “render” your machine is nearly locked up rendering. 

An over exaggeration, yes, but not by much. 

 

I recently setup a computer exclusively for 3d, on a budget. 

I choose an Asus B550 ROG Strix motherboard, a Ryzen 5 5600X CPU, 16GB of memory and a WD SN850 M.2 NVMe. Reused my old Geforce GTX 760 for now. Reused a power supply and bought an open frame case. Graphics card? Oh my! Still waiting on the next real rev. Nvidia in their blog ventured to say shipping in May! 

To who? Not sure. 

Still, press render and all 6 cores are fully engaged. Yes, a RTX 3090 would be nice! 

Nice that Windows boots in 6 seconds though! 2-3 minutes on the old D10 when it had Windows. 

The real point though, is how to render? I have a Mac Mini M1. Is Octane an option? 

I have an old D10 ThinkStation running Ubuntu. Is Blender an option? 

Would be nice to actually work on one computer and render on another. 

Do you get what I am fishing for? 

 

What work flows for rendering are working for you? 

 Suggestions welcome. 

Robinson

So, not sure your GTX 760 supports Iray (it's "Kepler"), so presumably it's CPU rendering.  It's going to be very slow to converge I think.  In Iray advanced settings there should be a Scheduling panel, where you can limit the number of cores Iray uses, which should help with keeping your PC vaguely usable whilst rendering. Obviously that'll slow down an already really slow render even more.

VitalBodies

Thank you for your suggestions and comments.

I tried to look up if the 760 supports iRay or not, yet only found infomation that suggest it might not or might soon.

Pretty old card that I hope to replace fairly soon.

I think to render on a different computer would allow one to still work within DazStudio on the first computer which would be super nice...

I will keep in mind the limiting the number of cores suggestion in the mean time though.

ebergerly

When you're limited to CPU rendering like that, one option is to manage your scenes and break them up into separate elements that you can then bring together when you're done. DAZ Studio has "canvases" (aka "render passes") that allow you to select certain aspects of your scene and render them as separate images that you can tweak and blend together in a compositing software. And if you use Blender, it has its own compositing features that are very impressive. And I think it may also accept your GPU, though with only 2GB you may still have some problems. But I guess it depends on what you're rendering. If it's characters, then yeah, they require a lot of resources. But again you may be able to separate the character(s) from the background and use way less resources. 

VitalBodies

ebergerly said:

When you're limited to CPU rendering like that, one option is to manage your scenes and break them up into separate elements that you can then bring together when you're done. DAZ Studio has "canvases" (aka "render passes") that allow you to select certain aspects of your scene and render them as separate images that you can tweak and blend together in a compositing software. And if you use Blender, it has its own compositing features that are very impressive. And I think it may also accept your GPU, though with only 2GB you may still have some problems. But I guess it depends on what you're rendering. If it's characters, then yeah, they require a lot of resources. But again you may be able to separate the character(s) from the background and use way less resources. 

Thank you for your suggestions and comments.

This GPU is 4GB. Under hardware in the DS advanced rendering settings it shows CUDA 0.

I just explored the canvases section too, thanks. I really need to explore the DS Blender bridge.

Ostadan

Another thing you can try is to do your test renders at a lower resolution, like 300x400 or even smaller.  This will usually be enough to find whatever changes you want or need to make, like poke-through or wrong lighting, before doing the full-sized final.

VitalBodies

Ostadan said:

Another thing you can try is to do your test renders at a lower resolution, like 300x400 or even smaller.  This will usually be enough to find whatever changes you want or need to make, like poke-through or wrong lighting, before doing the full-sized final.

Thank you for the suggestion. I see one can also do spot rendering.
 

privatepixels99

Kepler GPU's will work fine under Daz 4.12/IRAY. I'm using a Quadro K4200 and it works just dandy fine.

That said, it's ancient hardware and there's always bit of coffee drinking and chatting at the watercooler involved when rendering. Also for my purposes it enough to render at 1280x543 (21:9) and often times I just render to say 50% convergence and let the Intel Denoiser 2.1 do the rest. Also, the Scene Optimiser is your very most besterest and chummiest of friends.

Using the K4200 is far from State-of-the-Art, but for paupers like myself it's still workable-ish. Sort of. At a pinch. .

 

VitalBodies

privatepixels99 said:

Kepler GPU's will work fine under Daz 4.12/IRAY. I'm using a Quadro K4200 and it works just dandy fine.

That said, it's ancient hardware and there's always bit of coffee drinking and chatting at the watercooler involved when rendering. Also for my purposes it enough to render at 1280x543 (21:9) and often times I just render to say 50% convergence and let the Intel Denoiser 2.1 do the rest. Also, the Scene Optimiser is your very most besterest and chummiest of friends.

Using the K4200 is far from State-of-the-Art, but for paupers like myself it's still workable-ish. Sort of. At a pinch. .

 

Thank you for your comments. 
Your Quadro seems fairly close, at least on Passmark, to my card. 
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Quadro+K4200&id=2944

Still learning how that translates to Daz. 

You wrote: "often times I just render to say 50% convergence and let the Intel Denoiser 2.1"

Not sure I have encountered convergence?
Although I saw a YouTube video were a guy used a second GPU for de-noising. He was using Blender. 
Would be fun to hear more about intel 2.1 you mentioned and your take on convergence. 
Is "convergence" to only let the rendering go so far and then denoise it to gain a quicker result? 
 

I just added another computer to my 3D computer world. 
This one uses is an Alienware R10 Ryzen 9 5900x and a RTX 3080 GPU. 
It will be interesting how different this really is. 

So far, as a noob, I have struggled with how to adjust my rendering settings to get great results. 
On my old ThinkStation D10 and the 760 gpu I ended up cranking up my rendering settings and just rendering over night. 
A 4-5 minute render on the new 3080 GPU is better? Or close to the over night 4 plus hour render. 

Wow. 

If I let the render go an hour and half (same settings?) on the R10 it is only marginally better than less than 10 minutes. 
Still trying to learn how to dial that in. 

I will still use a second older computer for a lot of rendering tasks. 
So far, a Ryzen 5600x and my Kepler card the Nvidia GTX 760 with 4GB. 

Really makes me wonder what the low end (but works with Daz and Blender) iRay GPU is that could potentially replace that card? 
I think we know what the high end cards are. 
 

privatepixels99

Is "convergence" to only let the rendering go so far and then denoise it to gain a quicker result?

Yep, That's exactly what it means. For my usage I'm not looking for super realism and.or very high resolution renders.

The slider in the render settings tab is called 'Rendering Converged Ratio'. I i will play with that to find something that produces ok results. I also play with 'Max samples' on the same render settings tab and often drive it down to 200 or 250 samples. Then I use the external Nvidia accellerated denoiser (version 2.1 - because that still supports the Kepler GPU, higher versions don't) to 'finish' the render for me.

Again, this isn't going to be super duper amazing quality but I don't need it to be for what I'm doing. Which if you're interested... is rendering scenes for the Visual Novel I'm working on. Like many other VN authors I use Daz to generate my images in conjunction with Ren'Py for the 'display engine' part of things.