DazStudio taking forever to render
Boojum the brown bunny
Posts: 348
So I have been a Carrara and Poser person for years, but Daz has stopped supporting characters for these two programs. So I decided I would give Daz Studio another try, but it's taking forever for the simplest of character renders.
My Machine: Intel i9-9900K CPU, 64GB Ram, 1TB SSD main drive, Windows 10.
My Scene: Genesis 8.1, Genesis 8 Anatomy, Axel Hair.
My Render Settings: 3Delight, Active Viewport (1623 x 1235). EVGA nVidia 1080 graphics card.
Everything seems to bog down on the hair. I'm at 50 minutes for the render so far and I'm attaching a picture. Is this normal? Because something seems to be VERY wrong here. :( I don't want to wait hours on rendering a single, low rez image.
Boojum
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I've also rebooted my system to make sure it is clean, not started anything else, and here is Task Manager with pretty much everything being used by Daz Studio.
1 hour 27 minutes into the render.. a bit more hair is rendered, but I'm starting to think that Daz Studio won't do for my needs.
2 hours 2 minutes. *bleh*
For 3Delight, if you select the hair, go to the Parameters Tab, there's a place to turn off shadows. Hair will then render much faster.
I gave up after 2 hours... I'm not sure why hair takes so long, it might be because of shadows... but it's such a simple scene with default settings that if it can't render it I don't know if I want to put in the effort to get it working... Not because of this hair issue, but because of the bog standard stuff doesn't work I'm worried about when I get into full body fur like I do with Carrara. 4 objects, standard render, 2 hours before I gave up. It was going to go for another 2 hours.
Well shadows certainly factor, as does all the technical stuff about our computers. Over the years many have taken it in stride that yes, renders can take a long time. They would leave the computer to run a render over night ... highly adviseable to disconnect from the internet so no updates get installed with an automatic reboot happening. That's pretty frustrating too.
This is AM's bison with fur, think it rendered in less than 5 minutes. There's not much in the scene and yes I know it's not a great render. Was 3D doodling as I call it.
{D/S beta, up-to-date NVidia Studio Driver}
I can't take over night for rendering. That might be ok for a single image, but I do animations. A five minute animation takes 9,000 frames. At 2 hours a frame (the amount of time I let this simple scene render for) that would be 750 days to render an animation. Of course, part of this frustration is because I've been happy with Daz Carrara. It's fast, does networked rendering, does dynamic hair with shadows quite quickly. But what it doesn't really do is work with any Daz figure since Genesis 3. Yes, if I spend a couple days I can get a single figure to sort of work with some of the clothes.. but what used to take minutes now takes days. But I'm constantly loseing huge amounts of time trying to do the simplest things. I posted here after spending 4 hours trying to get a single genesis 8 figure to work with the included hair and attachment. So including the time here I spent 6 hours working not on character development and design, but on just getting included assets to work with the render software.
Because I'm worked up over this I went ahead and tried turning off shadows for the characters hair. Now it's rendering evern slower. After 15 minutes the attached is all I have rendered. with shadows on I had the body rendered, but had slowed down on the hair. There has to be something wrong here. There has to be some setting I am missing. Sadly, I can't do a comparison render because this won't work in Bryce, Carrara, or Poser.
Ok, so I deleted the Axel hair from the scene and rendered just the body. It rendered in about 30 seconds. I then loaded the Axel Hair into an empty scene. A minute in and not a single bit of the hair has rendered. It looks like Axel hair is the culpret. So then I loaded my default scene again, removed Axel hair, and loaded Morley hair instead (the other hair included with my Genesis 8 starter). With Morely hair render time was 3 minutes30 seconds. That is a time that I can work with, though it's not great for a low res image. I'm going to try a print quality image. Lucily, those can take longer because they are not animated.
Ok, so the print resolution took just over 5 minutes to render. So now comes the real test. I've thrown together a simple animation (Outdoor, junk alley, Genesis 8, gymshorts, morely hair, gym shoes, Iray HDRI lighting. Rendering using nVidia Iray in 1920x1080 movie format, avi. 30fps, 300 frames, 4 minutes per frame, 20 hours. Boy do I miss my renderfarm.
Try rendering at a lower Max Samples setting and render a test image. I have used 100 Max Samples and didn't see a great deal of difference when I made the video. If you think that there is too much noise then increase the Max Samples and test render until you are happy with the time and the rendered image. Then do the full animation. I render to Image Series rather than Movie and that way if there is a glitch at some point I only need to start the sequence from that point and not start the whole movie again.
Since you have a GTX1080, why not try rendering with Iray? You'll find it *much* faster.
Hi! I don't have the hair model so can't test it. Did you apply a 3DL (RSL) materials preset? This could be the result if you use one of the IRay presets. No it's not normal, especially if you have no lights other than the camera headlamp, it should render in a couple of seconds, or minutes at most. It's also possible the mats are set up in a ...umm... not so optimal way. A screenshot of the surface editor would be helpful. Also your rendersettings, especially the sample- and shading rate settings would help.
On a more general note, be aware that 3DL uses your CPU only for rendering.
Edit: Ah well, this is kind of old news already, since I'm on pre moderation and my post was delayed by 5h;)
But wanted to say I use 3DL and, when doing animation rendering in HD pixelsize I have 30 sec/ frame as the target time. That's with using AoA distant- or spotlights + simple ambient occlusion. Yeah, on occasion I run into problematic hairs but there is always a reason why they won't render properly. Did you try progressive rendering on the Axel hair? Would be interesting to know if it makes a difference.
Why are you using 3Delight, the figures and hair you are using have default Iray materials
Well, the character and hair didn't say that it had iRay materials and not 3Delight materials. I used 3Delight because thats what I used last time I worked with Daz Studio. I have a Mimic Animation running right now, so after it's done I will go back and revisit it and see if iRay works faster with that hair and body combo.
Daz always jumps to CPU when it comes to animations.
If speed is your main concern, it would be worth looking into the Filament renderer.