Lighting and Rendering Problems in Updated Daz Studio

Epic82

Hello everyone. Before some of Daz’s latest updates, I rendered a portrait of a figure from mousso that I purchased from Renderosity and converted to Genesis 8 called Yara for G3F. That portrait is the first render that I’ve uploaded below. As you see in that render, there is no noise. The lighting and skin are pretty much perfect, at least to me. But I recently rendered another portrait of the same scene and figure with different clothing and there’s a bit of noise in it, as you can see in the second render I uploaded below. I use Dimension-Z’s N.G.S. Anagenessis shaders every time I render a figure, and I apply the glossiness presets in these renders. The lighting and background come from Dimension Theory’s iRadiance Crystal - Sparkle Rich HDRIs for Iray. 

I’ve tried to reduce the glossiness, but this either makes the figure too dark or does nothing to reduce the amount of noise on the skin. Does anyone know how to reduce the noise on the skin so the figure looks like it does in the first image?

Moogoo

not sure but the noise is something to do with the light coming from the right as the noise is not in the shadows, maybe take things out 1 at a time (like hdri's, shaders glossiness etc) and see if the noise persists 

barbult

Nvidia made a change to the way Thin Film works in Iray. Does your shader use that?

psfilipe

One thing I would try is playing with the Firefly Filter (see attached image).
It will change your light values slightly but not in a way that you can't correct with a few adjustments.

 

 

Richard Haseltine

Are you sure the render is using the GPU? The new version of Iray has a higher minumum driver version; if yours is high enough for the old version but not for the new it may be dropping to CPU, and then stopping for max time instead of convergence.

MelissaGT

To go along with what Richard said, I'd noticed that over time since DS 4.11, each version seemed to use more and more system resources...lowering my resource pool to render on the GPU as a side-effect. Before I built my new system, when I had 32GB of RAM and was rendering on a 1080TI, I could not render much successfully on the GPU on DS 4.15. Scenes I had been able to render out on the GPU in older versions, no longer fit and would drop to the CPU. I believe this is less a fault of Daz and more the fault of NVIDIA pushing the new RTX infrastructure. After moving to a new system with a RTX card, I haven't come across a single issue rendering directly on the GPU...and Daz crashes very infrequently. 

Epic82

Below are screenshots of my graphics card's performance when I render the image I've uploaded. I don't fully understand what's going on with it, but it does seem that my driver is dropping to CPU. But if that's the case, I don't know how to stop it from dropping to CPU.

I've played around with a few of the tabs in my render settings, and I enabled the Post Denoiser. The Post Denoiser does remove the noise in my render, and you can see the result in the render I uploaded below. But my only problem with the Post Denoiser is that it takes away some of the detail on the skin, specifically, you can't see the pores in the skin. If anyone knows how I can create a render that allows me to remove the noise and still see the pores in the skin, please let me know.

TimberWolf

It's pretty clear from those screenshots that *both* the CPU and GPU are being used for the render. You generally cannot trust the GPU activity as reported by Windows but in your case it does appear to be reasonably accurate. Another clue is that your GPU's temperature is well over 60 degrees C so it's definitely doing the rendering. Also, the denoiser *cannot* run on the CPU; it's a GPU post-process only.

What you've done, I think, is set the render to use both the CPU and GPU. There's not a lot of point to doing this as the CPU will contribute only a tiny fraction of the iterations of the GPU and will tie up your PC. In the settings allow the CPU to act as a fallback but don't make it an active part of the process (see below). Tick your graphics card(s) but uncheck the CPU.

The denoiser is a fancy schmancy blur and will, therefore, smudge out very fine details depending on how many iterations you let your image render. You could try Intel's denoiser which works outside of Studio (I think it's better, others may not), but if you want the detail you'll just have to let it run without denoising.

Hope this helps.

 

Richard Haseltine

Looks to be using both GPU and CPU. What is selected in the Advanced tab of Render Settings?