Settings for Iray preview viewer?
Endlessdescent
Posts: 106
Sometimes [Iray preview] it works, sometimes it totally crashes. Does anyone else have problems with the Iray preview viewer?
It works great for really simple scenes but if I have more than one clothed figure in a complex evironment it totally craps out. DS completely freezes up and is unresponsive and everything is lost.
So now just to check lighting adjustments I have to do a render, make an adjustment, do another render. I'm really wary now of turning it on because it is such a gamble of if it will work or kill the program.
My hardware:
Processor Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1650 v3 @ 3.50GHz 3.50 GHz, Installed RAM 64.0 GB, System type 64-bit operating system, GPU RTX 2070 Super, Library is on a SATA6 Samsung EVO SSD.
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Comments
Just answered your own question.
Everything has to be sent to the GPU for rendering. The 2070 Super's only got 8GB of VRAM, and even then you can't use all of it due to OS overhead. Two characters plus clothing plus one complex environment is a lot of 4K texture maps to store on the GPU.
There's two things you can do:
I'd recommend doing both. Save your assets and poses in isolation, bring them all together and reduce the texture maps while you work on lighting, then do the final render. If the characters are sufficiently far from the camera, for a final render you can reduce their texture maps by 2x or even 4x without noticing any dip in quality.
1. Make sure your Nvidia Driver plays nice with your version of Daz Studio. Sometimes, reverting to an older driver helps but in most cases; make sure the driver you are using is the one required by the version of Daz Studio you have installed. You can find that out here: https://tinyurl.com/52nj3jad
2. Check the Subd Resolution for the meshes you have loaded (anything at a level of x3 and above can be resource heavy). You can see that the pic below.
3. Next, check your texture compression here (default is 1024 x 2048). You can see that in the pic below.
4. Lighting. Say you have 3 Spot Lights and an HDRI lighting an area that has reflective surfaces like character sweat, windows, glass or metal; you'll get issues from that real quick. So try to minimize any of those I mentioned.
5. Iray Section Plane Node is your friend as it can not only help you light an interior scene with an HDRI but also "cut out" whatever is not ending up in your final render aka what's behind the camera.
Whenever I'm working on my products I spend copious amounts of hours in Iray Preview with simply a EVGA GTX 1080ti SC2 and a EVGA GTX 1080 SC. The 1080 SC drops the majority of the time so it's pretty much the 1080ti doing most of the work.
My setup runs 5 characters at most, clothed and with architecture. Your experience not only depends on your rig but also how you work your scene. Ofc with the rig not being a Nintendo 3ds but something reasonable like yours :)
I hope I helped to some extent, enjoy your Friday.
Peace
I assume you are referring to the Viewport Tab and not the Aux Viewport. I have a GTX 1080 and don't experience crashes as you described. Perhaps look at the Draw Settings Tab and try fiddling with the Draw Mode and Manipulaiton Resolution parameters to see if you can find something that works for you. Also, while I don't think this is related to the Viewport, still, you may want to check the Render Settings Tab | Advanced Tab and check off "Allow CPU Fallback".
Problem is, texture compression is all-or-nothing. Unlike Scene Optimizer, you can't control which objects it'll affect. Also, I believe compressing textures is slower since they need to be uncompressed when they're rendered, which wouldn't help with viewport lag.
Thank you everyone for the insight. That is all very helpful and good information to check into!
Yes I have definitely starting making character presets etc to speed up workflow. That has made a big difference so for now lighting scenes is the worst issue.
I'm not familiar with scene optimizer or how that works? Where can I learn more?
Yes the viewport. I did try turning off CPU fallback which resulted in sometimes very complex scenes would simply refuse to final render at all and would only render black nothingness. This was when trying to render and entire group of houses and trees so I think sometimes it is just too much for the 2070. IDK. Would really like to get a 3080 but the market is still impossible right now.
I'm not sure what Draw Settings are the best.
Very helpful info, thank you.
Mine was set to 512, 1024, is that bad?
Iray Section Plane Node is like culling correct? That is a great idea, I will have to figure out how it works...
https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
It's on sale right now, so get it while you can. It'll pay for itself many times over.
Basically, it's a collection of four scripts. One of them creates a text file that records all the textures in the scene. Then you run the main script, which will open a window listing every object in the scene and its distance from the camera. You select the objects you want to optimize, and you get the option to reduce their textures by 2x, 4x, 8x, or 16x. The script will create the new textures as copies in your temp folder. Then, you can use the final two scripts to either restore textures per object, or per surfaces.
Although it's not a one on one example I actually rely on Filament whenever I'm working on an Iray render. It's not perfect for sure and also a rough impression at best, but the engine is still a lot faster than Iray and although some details don't fully match it does a very decent job.
Maybe food for thought?
That is a good suggestion. Until now I always avoided Filament because it looks kind of strange but now that you mention it, it does work very well for working with placement and general lighting. Thanks!
That is really neat, never would have thought of something like that. Thank you for that!