dforce and cpu rendering?
Upirium
Posts: 711
in The Commons
It seems like every single clothes item is dForce,but I hear it's intensinve. Is there any way to make it LESS intensive? I am afraid to get any dForce items because I'm afraid I won't be able to render them right, or whatever it is you do with dForce. I also heard they don't appear in preview. Is that just Iray preview or everything? How are you supposed to see what anything looks like?
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It's only dForce hair that doesn't appear in preview, and that's not even entirely true, since you can see the guides, and you can enable preview at your own risk. dForce clothes render just like any other clothes. When people talk about dForce clothing being intensive, they're talking about simulating, which is what makes it behave like actual cloth. dForce is prone to "explosions", when the mesh gets radically distorted because the mesh intersected with itself during the simulation. dForce clothing doesn't necessarily have to be simulated to look good, and most will conform to your figure the same way as non-dForce clothing, but it does tend to be designed in a manner conducive to simulation, which means that it's often tube-like rather than being close-fitting.
does it use cpu to render or gpu? i don't have a choice because i have an amd card but i was wondering if it was cpu based, would it be standard speed unlike iray rendering
Actually, dforce can use AMD cards to do the simulation, as long as it meets the requirements. Keep in mind this is only for the simulation. You still cannot use the AMD GPU to render Iray. But at least you can do the simulation, which will save a ton of time. As for rendering, it all depends on how complex the item in question is, but dforce clothing generally renders the same speed as any other.
This is straight from Daz themselves, so as long as you AMD meets this you can use it to simulate:
"The dForce engine utilizes OpenCL 1.2 to perform simulations. If you do not have a driver already installed that supports at least OpenCL 1.2, you will need to install one. The more recent driver packages from NVIDIA and AMD typically include a suitable driver. In the case of older cards (e.g., GTS 250), the NVIDIA drivers do not support OpenCL 1.2 and so the driver for the CPU must be installed:
Intel GPU/CPU Driver Packages
Intel CPU-only Runtime Packages
You may want to install the CPU driver anyway if you want/need to be able to use your CPU for running simulations."
Keep in mind that even with a GPU some dforce simulations can take a while. Some items are so complex that using dforce is a serious chore. Consider that dforce must be run every time you adjust a pose. Every time! So if it takes several minutes to do the simulation and you just want to try some poses...you can see how that can add up.
I went from a GTX 1070 to a RTX 3090 and, although the IRay renders are significantly quicker, I have not noticed much of an improvement in dForce simulation times.
that sounds really annoying...
but also i found my dforce starter essentials and used some hair, and it loaded a whole new figure...does it do that with clothes? is there any way to stop it? as a person who has very specific characters i do not want it to be loading a new figure all the time. plus i'm using genesis 8.1 not 8, and it loaded 8.
Are you sure the 3090 is the active the dforce device? Something seems wrong here.
It is annoying, LOL. There are positives and negatives for sure.
But no product should load a new figure in the scene unless it is a subset or something. This has never happened to me. Perhaps you are loading a tutorial scene? I do not know what is going on here. But most dforce items are all loaded the same way you load any other clothes or hair on a character.
How they behave varies wildly. Some dforce products are pretty much dforce only, meaning dforce is the only way to pose them. I am not a fan of such products with very few exceptions. There are some dforce items that will work similar to regular conforming clothing and hair, with pose morphs and stuff, and dforce is more of a bonus. Some of the hairs by LadyLittleFox work this way. Her dforce hairs tend to have bones for posing, so you can get away with not using dforce at all sometimes. Some of the dforce products may mention this, and I think there is a dforce thread that lists dforce products that fall into one or the other.
It is important to understand the different between dforce clothing and dforce strand hair. Some dforce hair uses the dforce clothing type. These hairs can be versatile, but can be very resource heavy and slow to both simulate and render. Dforce strand hair is a whole different beast, as Iray generates the strands when it renders according to your settings. Dforce strand hair can simulate surprisingly fast in many cases. However I am still not quite sold on most dforce strand hairs, they sometimes lack a good looking scalp or base and can look a bit like wires. Of note is that CPUs seem to render dforce strand hair surprisingly well. They will not beat a RTX GPU, but they can put up numbers that hold their own against older GPUs. If you have a good CPU, you may be surprised how well it handles dforce strand hair.
There was once a dforce strand hair benchmark thread here, too. It kind of got forgotten, but some new GPUs have been tested. Like the other scene you can testit yourself, the download has been uploaded to sharecg, look for a post on the 3rd page for this link. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/344451/rtx-benchmark-thread-show-me-the-power/p1
Honestly I do not use a lot of dforce items, because of the hassle of the simulation. And if you have numerous dforce items all in one scene it can be a nightmare. It is very tough to simulate multiple items at once. You can hide items from the sim and do them each one by one. But think about just how tedious that can get.
However, there are still merits to dforce. Having a piece of clothing or hair drape more realistically can make a huge difference in a render, and when it works, it can be fantastic. But I just want people to be aware dforce can be a double edged sword. It can both wow you and make you want to pull your own hair out at times. Sometimes within the same session.
Whereas I use dForce clothing and hair almost exclusively, because I am a lunatic.
Ok How do I know if my pc is the right setup for dForce? This attached image is my specs I think. I keep having dForce issues though.Also how do I check if the above mentioned drivers are what I need & which ones?
According to AMD's website, your video card supports openGL 4.5, which meets the requirements for dForce. Are your drivers current? What kind of problems are you having? Do you have your GPU selected as the dForce simulation device?
I think this is correct ...
I bought a dForce hair and tried to sim it but I gave up after half an hour waiting for the sim to finish. That hair is sitting in my Library unused.
There is definitely something wrong with your setup.
On my i7+64GB+2070 super with Win7, the dForce simulations take maybe 10-15 minutes max.
As far as I know the drivers are current. I'm having problems of the dforce outfits going through floors,poking into the body in areas where the body parts don't touch. Thing is no one else has these issues using same items. Is this screenshot what you meant about the dForce simulation device?
I do not have Natty Hair, but I have Dforce Classic Long Hair and that is a bit heavy. However it doesn't 30 minutes, maybe 5+, with a non animated sim. Perhaps animating would push towards 30 The upgrade from a 970 to a 1080ti was very noticeable for dforce. So something must be different. Maybe you have other dforce objects in the scene that you did not before, or your scene is bigger overall. If you are using the 'start from default pose' you can try turning that off. I don't think this hair would need an animation to sim ok.
Keep in mind that every object in the scene is factored into the simulation. More stuff in your scene can potentially make it take longer, even if that stuff is nowhere near your dforce item. There are two ways to deal with this. You can select objects that you know will not effect the simulation and hide them from the simulation. Another way is to click the little eye icon in the parameters to hide the object in the scene. Both basically do the same thing, except one makes the object totally invisible. Use either to hide everything you don't need for the simulation.
Also, Daz has continually updated dforce, and some of these updates have made a huge difference. To be blunt the first version of dforce was pretty terrible. Everything exploded on me. I had a very hard time ever getting it to work. With 4.12 it started getting better, but it still took a couple versions to get there.
Daz 4.15 offers the most stable dforce, but I can still get it to explode sometimes. It appears that colliding with other dforce objects can lead to an explosion, as can situations where the item has lots of different layers and particular poses overlap with itself. The Natty Hair looks like it could be pretty harsh. There are hairs (and clothing) where I just look and go "nope" because I think it may be too heavy to work with.
And maybe there is a speed limit for dforce simulation where the software itself is the bottleneck. I don't know. Maybe the CPU is holding things back. I do not know what kind of workload the CPU has while the GPU runs the dforce sim, it could be a factor. I had hoped somebody would make a "dforce benchmark thread" like we have with Iray. That would be pretty neat, and we could have a standardized scene to test with so we can directly compare results. I think that might answer some questions about performance.
What other options do you have for openCL device? I would guess that what's currently selected is your CPU.
It only gives that as an option
I use dForce a lot but not for hair. I tend to optimise the scene as much as possible - in that I turn off "Visible in Simulation" for everything in the scene other than the dForce item. I do, however, use "Start from Default Pose" all the time so that clearly adds to the sim time. The clothing normally takes a few minutes - maybe 5 at most. That hair put me off buying other dForce hair. So maybe 5 minutes is not unreasonable but I don't remember it taking longer than that with my old 1070. Also, I simulate items one by one so if there are two clothing items I hide one of them (actually I hade the fifure wearing the clothing using the Control-key while clicking the little visibility eye - a trick I learned recently to hide the figure and anything parented to the figure in one click).
I also have Marvelous Designer (which I need to use more) and perhaps dForce is damned by comparison because MD sims are very quick and I don't even have the version that uses GPU. I tried VWD a couple of years ago and I think that was pretty quick too.
was just checking in :) seriously this is weird not being able to use dForce.
Are you using drivers that Windows has installed or ones downloaded from AMD? At least with the Nvidia cards, the drivers from MS don't work.
I think Windows installed drivers.I tried finding drivers at AMD but not 100% sure I found the correct thing. I used this auto detect tool from this page https://www.amd.com/en/support but not sure id did the drivers that I need for DS.
I have the Adrenalin 21.6.1 from here https://www.amd.com/en/support/graphics/radeon-500-series/radeon-rx-500x-series/radeon-rx-580x#amd_support_driver_list ; installed too.