Rendering takes 5 hours for just one image?
Fetito
Posts: 481
Is it normal that rendering takes 5 hours for just one image?
It renders fine up to 42% then it takes 4.5 hours to reach 43%. Then it renders way faster again.
:/
Is there any option that I should reduce?
I already reset the render options to default.
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Comments
Hard to say whether it's "normal" as that depends on the specs of your computer, what's in the scene, and your render settings. I've had renders take up to 70 hours (on my old, slow computer, and that was primarily because I'd cranked the settings up too high).
Do you know what it is working on at that 42% mark?
I don't recommend rendering with the settings at default. Set the raytracing to 1 (unless you're rendering a lot of reflections of reflections, like in a mirror room) and the shading rate to 0.4 (for an image with any dimension bigger than 2000) or 0.2 (for smaller).
Adding the Ubersurface shader (from Shader Presets/omnifreaker) to any transparent object in the scene - hair, water, plants - and changing the Occlusion to Override and 128 samples will speed things up. Transparent objects are a major cause of slowdowns in 3Delight. You can add a shader without losing textures using ctrl+click on the shader and "ignore" when the popup comes up.
Advanced Ambient lights are faster than UberEnvironment, although some settings you can only get using UberEnvironment. Replacing all lights in the scene with their Advanced counterparts (Ambient for UE and point lights, spot for spot, distant for distant) will speed things up quite a bit when combined when the aforementioned techniques.
Try to see where it is the image at 42%, usually you can see what it is doing, maybe lots of reflections or transparancy (raytrace) is the cause of the very slow rendering, can also be extreme detail mixed with reflections or something like that.
Often you will see it when it renders the face of a character (eyes), reflective metals or glass.
Real hair can be nasty also.
As the above posters have said, whatever it is rendering at the 42-43% mark is hanging things up. My renders often get slowed down with hair -- I remember the V5 Elite hair being the kiss of death for renders late last year when I was using it. I mean, I could render the whole scene with everything but that hair turned on, and it would be done in 4 minutes. Then I would turn on the Elite hair and re-render the exact same thing, and it would take 1-2 hours. This was because of the high detail of that hair model.
Even within that, I've noticed that when two detailed objects are very close the render engine will slow way down trying to resolve what is shadowing on what. So for example, if the hair of one character is intersecting the hair of another in one tiny area, those pixels would take forever. As soon as the renderer got past those pixels, boom, speed would go back up.
So look at what it is rendering right at the 42% mark and that will help you figure out what is going on. Maybe turn that thing off, and re-render the scene, and see how long it takes. If it's a HUGE difference just for one object, maybe rather than working on the lights, work on the options of that object, lowering the detail, maybe (if it won't harm the scene) turning that object's shadowing off so the renderer doesn't have to compute shadows for a complex object, etc, etc. Obviously you don't want to do this if it makes the scene look worse, but sometimes you can get away with a slight adjustment like this without damaging the overall quality of the render. For example, I had two characters whose hair was overlapping a little in one shot and hanging the renderer up. But I found that if I just rotated the camera a couple of degrees, that intersection was no longer visible to the camera, wasn't being rendered, and saved tons of time -- without damaging the quality of the shot at all.
If you want a better understanding of the render settings start here:
http://rubicondigital.host22.com/index.php/articles/4-optimising-render-settings-in-dazstudio
It includes comparison images to help you visually understand what the settings do.
Without knowing what's in the scene, and computer specs, There are many things that can affect render times as mentioned above.
Transmaps (this includes hair) are notoriously slow when rendered with UberEnv2 lighting. That's often a culprit, so try a render without hair and see if the time changes. And then consider rendering the hair with some other faster method and layer the hair later in postwork
Once on Terragen forum I read about a 709 (seven hundred nine, 29 days and 13 hours) hours render for a single, not so big, image.
More recently, I read that Rango required 12 hours of render time per frame.