Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part III
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I like it. I've always been a fan of the drama created by dark images with areas of high contrast. I looked at the larger image. I didn't think it looked terrible at all. Nice job.
First, three things affect when the render stops on it's own: Max Samples, Max Time, and Rendering Converged Ratio. Setting Max Time to 0 will allow the image to render until it hits Max Samples or Rendering Converged Ratio. I'm a stickler for quality, so my settings are always at 15000 Max Samples, 0 Max Time and 100% Rendering Converged Ratio. (I'm happy to end it sooner, but as I let these things render while I sleep, I figure it won't hurt to if it goes above 95%, especially as I have a penchant for dark images.)
Second, I only have integrated video on my computer so all my renders are CPU only. How long it takes is dependent on the complexity of the image. Most of my renders take from about 12 hours for simpler scenes up to four days for more complex scenes. Remember, complexity isn't just in the number of items in the scene. The hair for my avatar is pretty complex all by itself. And I think I read somewhere on the forums that using a lot of displacement also increases the render time.
Anyway, There are so many variables that affect the length of time to render an image, it's pretty hard to say what is "long."
...hmmm, I'm getting even 1,600 x 1,200 scenes rendering in a matter of 3 - 6 hours and I do some pretty complex stuff. I have convergence set to .99, max samples to 15,000 and max time set to 8 hours.
The only render that took more than 8 hours to complete was one I did using 3DL with UE, one of Dimension Theory's Yosemite HDRIs, My Genesis based Merida, the Motorbike Viking and a five frame motion blur. That took sixteen and a half hours to complete.
...yikes, that's nice. How long did that take?
I saw Titan X superclocked already for $1029 compared to $1280 last week and standard for $999
..so basically 100$ more than the standard GTX 980 for an extra 2GB of video memory, an extra 786 CUDA cores and roughly similar in performance and specs to the Titan Black.
Checked ebay and "buy it now" prices for the current 4GB 980 are still in the 600 - 800$ range. Titans and Titan Blacks are where I am seeing the drop in price (most likely though due to the Titan-X). Seeing a lot of Quadro 6000s (not the Kepler "K" series) for sale at around the same price too.
Read a post from one person here who reported that even with a Titan6G, rendering was very slow. Sounds most likely likely that the scene exceeded the GPU's memory and defaulted to the CPU. It didn't seem to be a very complex scene either (definitely no where near what I throw at a render engine). Seems like for my purposes, the Titan-X is still going to be the best choice.
...hmmm, I'm getting even 1,600 x 1,200 scenes rendering in a matter of 3 - 6 hours and I do some pretty complex stuff. I have convergence set to .99, max samples to 15,000 and max time set to 8 hours.
The only render that took more than 8 hours to complete was one I did using 3DL with UE, one of Dimension Theory's Yosemite HDRIs, My Genesis based Merida, the Motorbike Viking and a five frame motion blur. That took sixteen and a half hours to complete.
The image I let run for four days was 4000 x 5217 pixels. It looked pretty good at 95% except for the dark areas. Those were still grainy. As they were shadows on my character's skin, I just let it run. I wasn't too concerned about her black jeans but between 95% and 99.99%, when I stopped the render, they went from little more than black to obviously textured. She's looking straight into the camera, and both the irises and pupils looked much better for waiting; more detail and more contrast between the pupil and reflections.
I've left smaller images to render while I slept and had them reach 100% in 3-6 hours.
I'm running an HP computer with Intel i7-4770 3.40GHz,16GB RAM, and integrated Intel HD Graphics. Kinda wishing now I'd paid a bit more and gotten a faster cpu and double the RAM... lol
Not a distant light they're super bright just a spotlight but set the geometry to rectangle and scale up the size to something like 100x100, also set the spread angle up higher. It looks a lot there's something there reflecting the scene's light back, but since its actually emitting its own light it's much less noisy.
I tried adding one of these spotlights... two actually. And neither made a difference, at all, no matter how strong I made them or how close I put them to my character. Oddly, I also found out that the iray render will render part of the spotlight black--I'm guessing the area of the spotlight. Either way, nothing made a difference and I don't understand why. My scene was coming out exactly as if I hadn't entered the spotlight(s) at all. :(
I also, for the hell of it, added a distant light but turned the intensity down to 10%. Unfortunately, my character ends up being a bit washed out, and also blurry.
...hmmm, I'm getting even 1,600 x 1,200 scenes rendering in a matter of 3 - 6 hours and I do some pretty complex stuff. I have convergence set to .99, max samples to 15,000 and max time set to 8 hours.
The only render that took more than 8 hours to complete was one I did using 3DL with UE, one of Dimension Theory's Yosemite HDRIs, My Genesis based Merida, the Motorbike Viking and a five frame motion blur. That took sixteen and a half hours to complete.
Can you please tell me what lights you have in your scene? As I posted just above, spotlights for some reason are making no difference, and I feel my render shouldn't be taking more than a couple hours. My settings are like yours. All I have in this scene is a big tree, my character, and a rim light. (and of course an iray environment).
I am not testing it by increasing the intensity/brightness of the environment itself. I hope it goes faster, because adding any other lights is just messing the whole scene up.
I tried adding one of these spotlights... two actually. And neither made a difference, at all, no matter how strong I made them or how close I put them to my character. Oddly, I also found out that the iray render will render part of the spotlight black--I'm guessing the area of the spotlight. Either way, nothing made a difference and I don't understand why. My scene was coming out exactly as if I hadn't entered the spotlight(s) at all. :(
I also, for the hell of it, added a distant light but turned the intensity down to 10%. Unfortunately, my character ends up being a bit washed out, and also blurry.
Are you sure, that you´ve set your spotlights to "photometric" ?
For distant light I do not change the intensity when using IRAY - I turn down the luminance if necessary.
The intensity settings are not working in Iray. You need to change the amount of light through lumiance.
For all lights except Distant lights, try starting at a setting of 45.000 units. For distant light, between 10-15 units is a good amount. Standard is 1500 units, which usually is doing zilch.
The light color is changed by "temperature". 6500 is the color of bright daylight. Lower temperatures make the light more reddish, higher make it more bluish.
I just ran into the same thing Drow! And am echoing what Lee said! :)
These two videos helped me.
DAZ Studio Iray: Undercover Way Of Lighting V6 While Getting Stunning Results Quickly & Easily
Creating And Lighting A Scene With Iray In DAZ Studio
I'm still having trouble here and there but those vids helped me figure it out in about an hour rather than a day of trial and error. lol!
I'm a complete newb to DAZ. I just seriously dug into it for the first time around the middle of the month and entered the newbie monthly contest. Since I was up against the deadline, I didn't want to add learning 4.8 and lray to the mix, so waited until I finished my entry, then of course dove right into lray. I'm such a glutton for punishment. lol!
I'm an author so I'm looking to DAZ to help me out on book cover creation and I just managed to get a decent lray render this morn. I definitely notice a big difference the more translucency that goes into a scene, the longer it takes my laptop and I've got an ASUS ROG gaming laptop. Of course it is a year old now so it needs an upgrade. One test render I started took an hour to get 20% then another hour to get to 23%, so definitely cut down on the size of the image upon seeing that. %-P
So please excuse the romance cover haha! But I have an audiobook in production that needs a cover. So by the time I finish this, the producer will probably have the audiobook done.
But here's my very first render in lray. And there's so many things wrong with it, I don't know where to start. lol! The biggest thing is the hair. The hair on both the hero and heroine wasn't set up for lray. I applied the uberbase to the hair but didn't help. Any suggestions for that? The heroine is supposed to have black hair and the hero brown. And I'm not sure what's up with her right hand. That wasn't there on previous renders. I did have to move her hand a little because I realized her thumb was poking into the middle of his arm. Are those black lines the mat seams on her fingers maybe?
And upon trying to post this, I had to resize the image (one side was over 2000 pixels) so pulled it into Photoshop real quick to adjust that. The image is a lot darker in Photoshop than it was on my render screen. hmmmm.... so it will probably be difficult to see but it was a lot brighter 10 minutes ago. Curiouser and curiouser.
But at least I've got the first render over and done - now for the rest of the mountain.
Cheers,
Kathryn
I am having another problem that is not a lighting issue, nor seemingly a camera issue (I think).
When I was first rendering my scene, I had the DOF on, but I am well experienced with both focal distance and F/Stop in DAZ. So I do not understand the blurriness around my character--for example, her nose, her headpiece, and her arm, and just all around--she is very soft and blurry. For the heck of it, I shut off DOF altogether and rendered again: same thing. She is really blurry. Also, the problem is not the rim light, because I tested it.
Please, if someone knows the problem here I would be so appreciative! I've seriously been working on my "first iray render" for like 3 days now! ~_~ I feel so completely stupid.
By the way, this render below was going for 3 hours. It's not that big. This is another 'problem' I'm having. Even LUX renders faster than this for me!
Are you rendering using "Bloom"? That would explain the effect, and the higher render times.
Sorry posting again: It seems the blurriness was being caused by the bloom effect!! I thought bloom would be necessary to soften all the bright, almost pure white light in the picture... but I guess I'm wrong?
Still playing with hair textures.
Fiora Hair, but with pure Iray shader, no diffuse textures
Tattoo was applied in photoshop cc but importing the .obj and painting direct on the texture in 3D mode, works great, just can't paint across seams.
Actually, it's supposed to cause light-blurring effects:
http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/new_features/4_8/bloomsettings2.png
It's explained on the New Reander setting feature page.
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/new_features/4_8/start#bloom_filter
Thats a cool effect on the hair i have to try that. There was a guy who posted a render to the gallery like a week or so ago said he used one of the car paint shaders on the hair and fiddled with the colors and metal flake settings looked pretty convincing too.
Daniel
Thanks for that information. I was not sure what the maximum HD level was.
From the memory used while rendering, I'm guessing some characters/morphs use level 2 and some use 3. Is there any way to know?
The 3Delight render seems to set this automatically, so the information must be stored somewhere.
Im not sure you understand the use of the term indirect in this case.
If I recall correctly, there is no geometry in this scene other than the figure and its props... The background is provided by the HDRI in the render settings....is that correct?
If so, the light is NOT indirect. Indirect in this case would mean that there is geometry between the camera and the light source (ie camera is within an enclosed room, light source is outside the room).
Of course I could be misremembering the setup.
...hmmm, I'm getting even 1,600 x 1,200 scenes rendering in a matter of 3 - 6 hours and I do some pretty complex stuff. I have convergence set to .99, max samples to 15,000 and max time set to 8 hours.
The only render that took more than 8 hours to complete was one I did using 3DL with UE, one of Dimension Theory's Yosemite HDRIs, My Genesis based Merida, the Motorbike Viking and a five frame motion blur. That took sixteen and a half hours to complete.
The image I let run for four days was 4000 x 5217 pixels. It looked pretty good at 95% except for the dark areas. Those were still grainy. As they were shadows on my character's skin, I just let it run. I wasn't too concerned about her black jeans but between 95% and 99.99%, when I stopped the render, they went from little more than black to obviously textured. She's looking straight into the camera, and both the irises and pupils looked much better for waiting; more detail and more contrast between the pupil and reflections.
I've left smaller images to render while I slept and had them reach 100% in 3-6 hours.
I'm running an HP computer with Intel i7-4770 3.40GHz,16GB RAM, and integrated Intel HD Graphics. Kinda wishing now I'd paid a bit more and gotten a faster cpu and double the RAM... lol
...I'm currently running with an older Nehalem i7 (2.8GHz) 12 GB 1333 memory in Tri Channel mode, with a 1GB Nvidia (Fermi) GPU. The possibility of why I get such good render times with the memory I have is due to being in tri instead of dual channel mode which offers more memory bandwidth. At the time it was more expensive than dual channel but the performance is worth it. Quad channel just increases the bandwidth even more (and DDR4 is almost twice as fast as DDR3).
Looking to upgrade to 24 GB (maximum the board can support) however need to upgrade to Win 7 pro (or Win 10 through the free upgrade offer) as 7 Home only supports a maximum of 16GB and memory sticks must be installed in multiples of 3.
...hmmm, I'm getting even 1,600 x 1,200 scenes rendering in a matter of 3 - 6 hours and I do some pretty complex stuff. I have convergence set to .99, max samples to 15,000 and max time set to 8 hours.
The only render that took more than 8 hours to complete was one I did using 3DL with UE, one of Dimension Theory's Yosemite HDRIs, My Genesis based Merida, the Motorbike Viking and a five frame motion blur. That took sixteen and a half hours to complete.
Can you please tell me what lights you have in your scene? As I posted just above, spotlights for some reason are making no difference, and I feel my render shouldn't be taking more than a couple hours. My settings are like yours. All I have in this scene is a big tree, my character, and a rim light. (and of course an iray environment).
I am not testing it by increasing the intensity/brightness of the environment itself. I hope it goes faster, because adding any other lights is just messing the whole scene up.
..for my IRay scenes I am using mostly the Sun/Sky. Most of the HDRI's I have tend to not have a "sun" element (or a very good one) so the shadows are very diffuse as if on a cloudy day. I did create one interior scene where I converted a skylight into a mesh light, added a photometric spotlight, and a plane primitive converted into a mesh light (as a soft box) as well as turned a set of ceiling lights into mesh lights.
I have to correct you my friend
Indirect Light is a diffused light, as opposed to the direct rays of the sun
Indoor it is called usually Ambient light
A cloudy sky will produce indirect light also areas in the 'shadows' on a sunny day is called indirect light areas
You can create an Indirect light effect with Areal light panel like in a photo studio where the light is diffused
also all geometry with emissive shader will produce indirect light as opposed to spot or point lights
Im not sure you understand the use of the term indirect in this case.
If I recall correctly, there is no geometry in this scene other than the figure and its props... The background is provided by the HDRI in the render settings....is that correct?
If so, the light is NOT indirect. Indirect in this case would mean that there is geometry between the camera and the light source (ie camera is within an enclosed room, light source is outside the room).
Of course I could be misremembering the setup.
All quite correct. But for this particular image, none of the light (from the perspective of the render engine) is indirect because it is all coming from either the HDRI or the distant light with no intervening geometry.
Granted this is a very reductionist view of the technical term 'indirect light', but I did say 'in this case'.
Because what he is describing Is most certainly not indirect light. If he was outside in the shade talking an actual photograph, OK...its indirect light. But in this 3D instance he has a huge spherical light source surrounding his subject and nothing to interfere with that light reaching his subject. Indirect implies bouncing. There's no bouncing here because there's nothing to bounce off of.
OK .. In this case NOT
only HDRI plug in Iray environmental spheres will produce indirect light or the light that bounce from the model surfaces when using Sun Sky mode
I see some people still use custom sphere domes in the scenes to plug in HDRI maps WOOOT! the brains are still programmed for 3Delight !
All quite correct. But for this particular image, none of the light (from the perspective of the render engine) is indirect because it is all coming from either the HDRI or the distant light with no intervening geometry.
Granted this is a very reductionist view of the technical term 'indirect light', but I did say 'in this case'.
Because what he is describing Is most certainly not indirect light. If he was outside in the shade talking an actual photograph, OK...its indirect light. But in this 3D instance he has a huge spherical light source surrounding his subject and nothing to interfere with that light reaching his subject. Indirect implies bouncing. There's no bouncing here because there's nothing to bounce off of.
I ran into an Interesting problem and wanted to check here before opening a ticket.
If I try to render on Interactive mode, my computer stays stuck on 0% Indefinitely. It doesn't completely freeze as I can cancel the render, but never moves above 0%.
I haven't had any real trouble with Photoreal, and have CPU, GPU, and OptiX enabled.
Has anyone else come across this?
The same but only if my OptiX is disabled or the scene take more memory than my card allow
is your CPU selected together with Optix ?
Yes it is, all three are selected.
Seems strange, I tried several different scenes and they all rendered fine in PhotoReal mode, and froze at 0% in interactive.
I was tinkering with settings, trying to see if they helped with the Mask and Multipass Toolbox before it dawned on me I had to select the 3Delight engine to get the black and white masks.
Turns out I'd turned on Interactive mode and suddenly my spot renders were ending with one iteration. I tried a full render and had the same issue. I was able to "resume" after changing Max Time to a value other than 0 (for unlimited time) but it still stopped after a few iterations. I did not have OptiX enabled.
In my case, the renders didn't get stuck, they actually finished, but without enough iterations to produce a usable image. I have not tried it with Optix on. Perhaps there are some other settings we need change to use the interactive mode.
Not sure how you arrive at that conclusion.
The 980 Ti is roughly similar in performance and specifications to the Titan X, except for the VRAM size. The standard 980 is already very close to the Titan Black performance for GPU acceleration. The Maxwell tech is significantly more efficient than Kepler. The 980 Ti will romp past the Black and hover just below the Titan X.
Even for Iray users, that extra VRAM on the Titan X is bloody expensive. The 980 Ti is an inadvertent golden CGI gift from Nvidia. There's plenty of folks who will take the much cheaper GPU acceleration grunt and live with some scene discipline.
However, I won't be one of them. A Titan X has been settling in to my system since Saturday evening. Even though I got a very good deal, it was still a lot more than I knew the 980 Ti was going to be (a reliable leak). I have no regrets though, and the reason is future compatibility. The humongous 12GB of VRAM on the Titan X means the card will stay useful in a rendering machine way longer than a 6GB card. Given I don't upgrade graphics cards very often, the big X marks the spot for long term value for me.
Looking forward to testing Studio 4.8 this week (still setting up all the software).
As Rashad says; "fun, fun!"
.
without Optix ON my interactive mode does not render at all as I am not using CPU for rendering
I was tinkering with settings, trying to see if they helped with the Mask and Multipass Toolbox before it dawned on me I had to select the 3Delight engine to get the black and white masks.
Turns out I'd turned on Interactive mode and suddenly my spot renders were ending with one iteration. I tried a full render and had the same issue. I was able to "resume" after changing Max Time to a value other than 0 (for unlimited time) but it still stopped after a few iterations. I did not have OptiX enabled.
In my case, the renders didn't get stuck, they actually finished, but without enough iterations to produce a usable image. I have not tried it with Optix on. Perhaps there are some other settings we need change to use the interactive mode.
Yeah I should have tried rendering with Optix off and also another with CPU off as well.
I'll have to troubleshoot it some more when I get home later today.
It's interesting that Interactive mode is the less resource intensive of the two modes yet is the one that stalls out.