Iray *without* progressive rendering?
JOdel
Posts: 6,288
Is is possible to turn off progressive rendering in Iray? I think I *might* have asked this before some time in the past few years, but don't recall getting an answer.
I'm going to be limited to CPU rendering anyway, but I might be willing to try it if I could turn of the damned progressive rendering.
Post edited by JOdel on
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You can switch render modes to interactive.
Which pretty much disables all of the progressive stuff.
I'll have to check that out. What I want is for the rendering to go in strips the way it does for 3DL. Withh that, once it renders, it's properly rendered. one of theis emerging from an amorphous blur.
Unfortunately Iray doesn't work like 3delight. The way it renders requires the entire scene to be a part of the render and doesn't render in tiles or lines. Even if it did, it wouldn't improve the speed any. If you are looking for a way to just evaluate a small portion of the scene to get a sample of what the final render might look like you could do quick spot renders. Another option to just test lighting, etc is to reduce your render size thus speeding up test renders. When everything looks good go back to the desired output size for your final render. Rendering in interactive mode will also speed up renders because it doesn't use things like sss that can really increase the time needed to resolve images.
There are a lot of other tweaks that you can do to improve render speed as well, but most of them also reduce quality to varying degrees.
The time isn't my main issue, it's the clarity. 3DL doesn't produce anything like as much noise. Not enthusiastic about the noise.
I suspected that it probably wouldn't be possible to get the same rendering in tiles/strips with Iray.
If time isn't the issue, you just need to let it render a longer time and maybe try different ways to light up the scene.
If you are doing interior scenes, the one setting that made everything different was setting the "cm^2 Factor" in Tone Mapping to 10, since I read about it here in the forums, I have not needed to flood the scenes with million lumen lights and still no noise.
You can also just set the luminence units on the emissive shader from cd/m^2 to lm (lumens) and the default luminance of 1500 will light just fine. Though it is more up to user, one option is more akin to a photographer adjusting the lighting to fit, the other (tonemapping) is more akin to using Exposure Value on a camera, rather than setting Aperture (f-stop), ISO, and Shutter Speed separately. Personally my choice is to adjust the lights at the light itself rather than using EV (tonemapping), but even with photography you don't always have the option of adjusting the light, so have to adjust to what light is available whether that is using EV or adjusting exposure manually via setting ISO, Shutter Speed and Aperture.
Turning off progressive rendering is not going to help with the issue as I understand it. You could try doing small area renders to test small regions to see if the settings and lights are up to snuff and then do a full image render. Also, why are yiu stuck with CPU rendering? Lack of video card? Using a Mac?
Noise is a by product of the render engine. Lighting plays a huge role, generally having more light in a scene helps a lot. I like to say that darkness is Iray's enemy. And when you think about it, digital cameras totally suck in the dark, especially older ones. You have to think of Iray as being sort of like a digital camera, as the photons of light must reach the sensor, they need to reach the camera in Iray as well. You can use tone mapping to adjust brightness if you need to. You can also increase render quality and increase all of the stop conditions.
It is possible that you are hitting a stop condition before your render is "complete" like you want it to be. Iray has multiple stop conditions, and if it hits any one of them it will end the render regardless of what the other stop conditions are.
Convergence is the obvious one. You can take this to 100%.
Time is another, you can increase this to a maximum if you want to. There is no option to render for unlimited time.
The iteration count is the last. This one can lead to renders ending prematurely, especially with fast GPUs. Some scenes can render fine with a low iteration count, but some others (often dark scenes, yep they strike again) can take many thousands of iterations to reach a high convergence. There is a max iteration count as well.
But if you want to truly kill noise dead without render forever, the best way is to use a denoiser. The denoiser included with Iray may do the trick for you. If it does not, then I recommend using the Intel denoiser with mcasual's script. The Intel denoiser is amazing, it not only kills all noise, but does a great job of preserving most of the details that the Iray denoiser may not. No other denoiser I have tried come remotely close. You are open to try others if you like, but I bet you would be very disappointed like I was. However the Intel one is like freakin magic as it is designed for computer rendered images. Don't let other denoisers put you off.
Mcasual even made versions for both PC and Mac.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/334881/a-i-based-open-source-de-noiser-for-daz-studio-pc-and-macs/p1
Some notes:
The higher the resolution of the render, the better denoising works. More pixels means more data for the denoiser to use, and this is the most important rule to remember. Denoisers are only as good as the data they can access, more is always better.
Most people are using the denoiser to speed up rendering, as they only render the image to like 50% or less and then denoise. So the pic examples in the thread might mislead you a bit, because some detail is lost if you look close at them. But if you let the render finish and THEN denoise, again you have more pixels for the denoiser to work with. So render big and render to completion, then denoise, and you should get some good results.
There kind of is a setting to render for unlimited time. Turn the Max Time to zero. Basically turns it off. At least, that's the way I've always understood it.
What you're referring to is 'bucket' rendering - a small portion of the image is calculated then the renderer moves on to the next 'bucket'. Usually there is one bucket per core/thread. Iray just does not work that way, so no, you can't turn off progressive rendering (not to be confused with the photoreal/interactive render modes).
A trick to coincide with the use of a post denoiser; render at twice the desired resolution. You won't need to render to the same convergence, so the larger render size shouldn't negatively impact render time - in fact you might not need to render as long. Denoise the oversized render, resize to the final dimensions and you should be goood to move on to postwork. You can also keep the pixel filter set as guassian which can help with some noise, being a somewhat blurrier filter than the (my) preferred lanczos. Experiment and you'll get a handle on how much noise you can leave in the render.
Also, as others have said, iray loves light: get your lighting set up as you want, then crank the cm^2 factor but stop short of blowing out highlights. Colour correct/colour grade in post.
Yeah, on a Mac. No Nvidia on a Mac. Apple doesn't support it. They've used Raedon for some time, but I don't know whether they are still using Raedon with the M1 chip.
No, they are not. They are using their own GPU in the M1 chip.