"Schools Out" Renders so slow
marble
Posts: 7,500
I bought School's Out while it was on sale but I'm afraid it will not be used. The main problem is there are bits of geometry which are not selectable in the scene and which slow down the render to snail's pace.
These are items of vegetation (leafy ivy on the walls, etc.). I can find them in the surfaces tab but they are not listed in the scene. Thus, turning off the opacity does nothing to speed up the render - they are still processed as though they are present.
Any hints? Could I prevent the offending geometry from being loaded into the scene?
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Is there the option to load the scene, versus loading the building or whatever has the offending ivy/slow-down-props? If you have selected the surface tool and can find the ivy in Surfaces, but not in Scene, that tells me it is in a "group" that won't be broken down (if I recall correctly)
If there is an option to load things separately, you might find the building or whatever has the vegetation may have it listed that way.
That is annoying if you don't have much control with what's in the scene or it's removal by hiding it. Vendors should take that into consideration and I'm surprised AntFarm didn't. I don't have the product so can't check it.
I don't know if you have access to Poser, and there may be a better way, but if you can load the model in Poser, you can use the grouping tool to select everything besides the vegetation using the materials, then spawn a new prop from it. It's not ideal, but it's one possible solution.
Afriad not - the plants are included in the base object. I've PM'ed Ant Farm but I'm in the UK so there may well be a time difference.
In the meantime, it has just occurred to me to change the shaders to UberSurface so that I can disable Ray Tracing on those surfaces.
[EDIT]
OK - that helped. It still lingers over the vegetation but the render time has been cut in half. It races over the brickwork but slows down considerably on the "greens". I'd still like the option to remove the geometry.
As for Poser - I have Poser 10 but hate it. Just can't get the hang of it (and it crashes often) - biggest waste of money ever for me.
You can also use the Geometry Edit tool in DS - switch to the tool, from the Tool Settings pane, then in the Tool Settings pane click the + next to each surface you want to zap; right-click in the viewport and click Geometry Visibility>Hide Selected Polygon(s), then right-click again and select Geometry Editing>Delete Hidden Polygons.
You always come up with stuff I didn't even know was there, Richard :) I'll certainly give that a try.
[EDIT]
Wonderful! Render time down from the original 14 minutes to under 3 mins. Thank you :)
Thanks Richard, I got to the thread a bit late but I am glad you're omnipresent and were able to help.
Also Does the DS render engine have the ability or setting to ignore hidden or back facing polygons when rendering.
PS I'll keep the veggies on the side next time.
Aside from the geometry issue, I have to compliment you on such a realistic looking set. I have the city block one which was also on sale but have yet to try that. I'll get to it soon.
Does that actually delete the polygons from the model, or just from the matt zone/face group? I've tried deleting polys with the geometry editor, but it just threw them into a group called 'default'.
Does that actually delete the polygons from the model, or just from the matt zone/face group? I've tried deleting polys with the geometry editor, but it just threw them into a group called 'default'.
If you do the two-step process of hide, then delete hidden then yes. If you simply select and delete the material zone (or selection group) then no, as you are only reorganising the polygons not removing them.
Thank you, that will be a tremendous help in kitbashing.
LOL.
You're thoughtful :)
Greetings,
Weird; I was fairly sure that setting an opacity of 0 was treated as 'not there' for the purposes of rendering speed; is that not the case...?
-- Morgan
No, AFAIK the calculations don't treat 0 opacity as a special case.
No, AFAIK the calculations don't treat 0 opacity as a special case.
It treats it as if it was transparent...because even, in some cases, transparent things can cause shadows, occlude other surfaces, interact in other ways with light. Turning the 'eye' off on geometry, in the Scene tab DOES make it as if it were not there, though (or the 'visible in render' item under the object's parameters). So, if it wasn't a separate object then no, it's still calculated.
With more complex surface shaders, it may be possible to drop 0 opacity items out of the render calculations, but it's definitely not with the default ones. It would probably involve all sorts of raytype tests and such, and may not actually end up being any faster...
If you delete the polys do the vertices remain?
No, AFAIK the calculations don't treat 0 opacity as a special case.
What about also removing all texture settings from the materials? The geometry is still there, but it shouldn't have the overhead of processing the textures of completely transpartent mesh as well...
...or will it?
What about also removing all texture settings from the materials? The geometry is still there, but it shouldn't have the overhead of processing the textures of completely transpartent mesh as well...
...or will it?
I'm not sure what you mean by texture settings but I zeroed out everything (diffuse/spec/gloss/bump, etc.) in the surfaces tab with little to no effect. Changing the shader to Ubersurface and killing raytrace did help but the most dramatic effect was achieved by following Richard's method, above.
One more point about this product. While it looks very realistic from a distance, it really needs a displacement or a normal map for the brickwork. The edges of the walls, etc., are razor sharp.
I seem to remember that displacement maps can be created by desaturating the texture in Photoshop and applying the B&W image into the displacement channel. Is that correct?
I'll give it a try when I get some time later.
What about also removing all texture settings from the materials? The geometry is still there, but it shouldn't have the overhead of processing the textures of completely transpartent mesh as well...
...or will it?
I'm not sure what you mean by texture settings but I zeroed out everything (diffuse/spec/gloss/bump, etc.) in the surfaces tab with little to no effect. Changing the shader to Ubersurface and killing raytrace did help but the most dramatic effect was achieved by following Richard's method, above.
The issue is mainly the shadow calculations - if you don't have shadows on the lights things will be faster. As we know from the AoA Advanced lights, the shadow calculation defaults to evaluating the shader on a surface to decide if it should be casting a shadow - for the AoA lights using flagging you can tell a recipient surface to just use the object property and apply it to the whole geometry with a speed gain, and that might work here depending on what else you wanted to cast shadows on the walls and ground and depending on how wrong the square leaf shadows would look..
Because I am a huge fan of all the creative designs of the artists your posts motivated me to check if I can replicate the mentioned issues.
I am under the impression that most of those issues are not the "fault" of the artists but they exist because in the past the artists did not have many alternatives to work around the issues you mentioned.
My motivation of this post is to illustrate on this practical example how "new" render engines like Iray and OctaneRender now offer new opportunites to solve some of those issues the OP mentioned.
I do some map compositing in photoshop when the artists did only provide bump maps and did not provide any displacement maps.
The issue is that this will not be very precise.
At the same time you can also render out the bump or displacement maps.
The user then has the choice to
- use normal or bump maps if the object is in the background
- use the displacement maps if the object is visible in the foreground and the details matter.
- - -
Alternatively as an unprecise workaround for some cases you can also connect the bump map to the displacement slot in your render engine.
Adjust the Offset properly so displaced areas do not intersect with other objects.
In the example screenshot you can see how some displaced bricks still intersect with the sign.
Of course you can also add a displacement offset value to the sign to compensate.
In this case this may not work as intended because the sign is on the same map as other objects.
- - -
Issues like that have plagued me for years and months when using DAZ content in other render engines.
I did not post on the DAZ forum about it because officially only 3Delight was supported.
I hope that now that Iray is an official render engine for DAZ Studio artists will start to have a closer look at different techniques so new solutions for such issues can be provided.
linvanchene, much of what you are saying are limitations of 3Delight are not...rather they are limitations of the surface shaders in Studio. ShaderMixer is an attempt at a Studio version of a node based shader construction kit for 3DL. UberSurface 2 is a dual layer surface. But then again, most don't even make materials using its features (very few, overall, even use UberSurface...the single layer version, for materials), let alone venture into the custom world of SM. Part of that may be habit and stuck in the past thinking....part of it is definitely due to limited documentation of certain features...like ShaderMixer.
And yes, as we go forward, old ways of doing things are becoming more and more 'wrong'. Small, all encompassing maps just aren't going to cut it. I'm a big fan of tiling maps for things like brickwork...
But, as it far as it goes, something like CrazyBump or an alternative ( http://alternativeto.net/software/crazybump/) seems to make 'nicer' maps than simply just desaturating the diffuse map. It is best to bake the makes from high detail, very high poly models, in the creation app, but for other than extreme close ups, the maps created in one of those programs are better than desaturated diffuse maps...lots better.