Iray Render - Appearing to be stuck .. but not sure!

Sparkie Shock

I've been trying out the Iray render in DAZ 4.8, I've got two computers chewing over a render right now and here's the thing .. one is stuck at iteration 136 .. and it's been going for 50 hours now and shows only 0.40 % done. The other has been going for 51 and is stuck at 3% done and show's it's on iteration 104.

So .. according to Mac OS the application doesn't appear to have crashed .. and the utility app reports that the CPU is still cranking away at 25% .. which seems normal for Iray renders. I don't have an NVIDIA card so I assume that 200% of CPU power is all you can get out of this if you only have an AMD card ... which sucks by the way .. but there it is.

Anyways, This is really frustrating because for all I know in a few moments, or few hours time it's going to suddenly jump to a new iteration and get things done ... or has this thing hung? It's impossible to tell. The pic isn't complete .. its still full of noise.

Now I selected a render quality of 1 .. I see it goes up to 10,000 ... it'd be REALLY handy to know what I'm getting into there. I want this to look photo realistic .. is 10,000 overkill? I don't know, nothing tells me what is considered normal. Is 1 enough to be photorealistic?

Also if I try to end the render early it usually crashes the program .. at least with Luxrender I could end at any time, and even resume. DAZ REALLY needs to have a 'save as is' function. Since you can't even find the temp file where it should be baking. It's not visible on Mac OS. And yes I know exactly where it should be.

So, what do I do about the renders that I've got going. I can't see if they're actually working or not?

Iray seems like a really great idea because you can finally make anything an emissive source, something I can't do in regular 3Delight ..although I'm scratching my head as to why not .. donut's it make sense to be able to have a light bulb model actually emit light??

So I'd like to really get into using this but it seems it can't render a room scene in any decent size in less than 100 hours or more?

Or am I using a very bad setting. I'd welcome any help

Richard Haseltine

This does seem to be an occasional issue. There's a known bug in Iray involving intersecting transparency-mapped planes, as used for many plants for example. What is in your scene?

Sparkie Shock

It's a "Scary Basement" set from Sparkyworld .. with some furniture from Davo's electro torture collections and two Genesis 2 figures. One light source ... a bulb which has been changed to an emissive Iray shader. All other surfaces and things have been converted to Iray uber base shaders. I don't think there's any transparency things going on. It's four walls, floor, ceiling and stuff.

My render settings are largely set to default, with 'scene only' rather than full dome and scene. Though I have just found out about the speed/memory setting which has definitely improved performance. The renders now actually finish. Setting the render to a quality of 10 is a terrific quality .. a little bit of noise but it looks more like film grain (which I don't mind as it's a nice effect). Render time for my scene at 2,000 x 1,800 pixels is about 10 hours on my i7 iMac.

I don't quite know why it was hanging before but it started fin and then tapered into a lull, until finally just giving up .. like it ran out of steam.

Obviously I realize this might be very different had I an NVIDIA card .. but I don't. But that 'speed' setting sure has made a huge improvement. All 3 of my computers finished their renders within about 4-5 hours last night .. that was the same images but at a render quality of 1.

Anyways, i seem to have iRay working well for me. I'd strongly suggest a BIG dialogue box on the render settings telling the user if they're having 'hangs' to change the memory setting to speed.

And there really needs to be a way to save the rendered pic as is if you get the feeling the program has hung. I've wasted several good pics because it wouldn't stop rendering but wouldn't do anything further.

Sparkie Shock

Oh and additionally .. I used my CPU meter to see what was going on during these renders. Under 'Memory' optimization .. my macs (any of them) were using about 15-20% processor power .. which I thought was odd but I left it to it. Under "speed' it's using the full power potential.

However on the PC side .. (One of my iMac's has windows for running Carrara ((which sadly runs like a pig on Mac OPX)) ), I noticed that the CPU meters were at full even with Memory setting selected. So, might wanna look into the Mac OS X version and see if you can't pep up the CPU usage for DAZ. I realize that the memory mode is for using with NVIDIA Graphics cards but that's no reason for the CPU's to be doing nothing. Especially if DAZ doesn't detect any NVIDIA card.

Just what I noticed.

mikael-aronsson

Don't read too much into the cpu meter, 3D software eat memory like pigs, RAM memory is about 10-20 times slower then the CPU so the CPU will spend a lot of time waiting for memory to catch up and fill the cache for you, this lets the other cores run (even though they will also be waiting) so the CPU meter will think that the CPU is not doing anything while it's actually sitting there waiting like crazy for your RAM to catch up.
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Ralf1958

I am having a lot of crashes with close-up renders that have transparency maps. By example any kind of hair or window curtain. If I remove the transmaps the render goes through. Do you guys have a solution?