What do you do when you need to add more people to a scene and Daz says "No"?

cdemerit

I'm putting together a dance hall, and have about 15 people in it already.... I'd like to add about 10 more, but it is clear I'm at the limits of my system and Daz is Baulking as it is. It is taking 5-15 seconds to click from one to another character, and it took over 30 minutes just to load the scene from the saved file. I haven't even tried a Higher than Draft Test render yet, I expect it to take most of the night...

First, Let me get this out of the way.... I'd love to buy a new system, but it ain't happening right now... :)

I'm thinking breaking it down to groups of 4 characters, and merging them in Gimp post render, but I'm dreading doing this. But I think this is the most realistic option... anyone have any other suggestions?

Serene Night

I would use either gen 3 figures in the background or render as many as possible in stages and combine them in photoshop

Karibou

Render them in layers and put them all together in postwork. Not ideal, but with a little extra work, you can usually make it pretty seamless.

Havos

You should also try to convert any figures whose pose you consider to be final into a prop. You can no longer adjust that figures pose, but it will drastically reduce the memory that figure uses in DS.

Mattymanx

The easiest way to do this WITHOUT using post work is simply to set up one character at a time and then load it all into a single scene to render

The Girls Dorm
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/48862

You will need to save out your set as a single scene with the camera, save your lights as a single scene and then start saving each character by itself or with one or two others. You will also want a stripped down copy of the scene with no textures so you can just load it up quickly for setting up each character.

As you set up each new character, you may want to load in one or two others that have already been done and stript them of everything including textures just so you have them as a reference. Dont forget to remove all unwanted stuff from each new girls saved scene.

Once you get all the characters done you will start merging them altogether. I found it best to save that as a seperate scene as well. Before you do though, make sure that they characters are visable the way you wanted them to be.

THe above image was rendered in 3 hours with needing post work to put them altogether. It took no time to save the scene but it did take about 30 min to load it.

sriesch

Perhaps you can use Texture Atlas to greatly shrink the image maps used for the materials and reduce the memory needed. And/or maybe you can use procedural shaders in places instead of the image maps.

Also, I can't remember for certain, but possibly using the eyeball icon in the scene tab to hide bits of your figures that aren't visible (under clothing, off camera, facing away from camera, etc.) will help? maybe not though.

If any of your figures are identical in both appearance and pose, you can use instancing.

Havos

Sean Riesch said:

Perhaps you can use Texture Atlas to greatly shrink the image maps used for the materials and reduce the memory needed. And/or maybe you can use procedural shaders in places instead of the image maps.

Also, I can't remember for certain, but possibly using the eyeball icon in the scene tab to hide bits of your figures that aren't visible (under clothing, off camera, facing away from camera, etc.) will help? maybe not though.

If any of your figures are identical in both appearance and pose, you can use instancing.

Whilst reducing the textures will help a bit, with Genesis 1 and 2 the figure itself takes a lot more memory than the loaded textures, so it is likely that reducing the textures alone will only save a small portion (10% or so).

Depending on the morphs you have installed in your data folder a loaded Genesis character can easily eat up 1 GB in memory. Converting the figure to a prop should reduce it to 150 MB or so.

My understanding is (and I am not certain) that texture atlas is more useful when trying to load the scene into graphics memory in order to do a GPU render using something like iRay.

provencial

I would suggest rendering out all your background characters separately as .png image sequences with transparent background so they are essentially pre-keyed footage. Then add them to the scene in Adobe After Effects or Blender Video Editing.

This is a awesome way of adding Icone characters to a Daz scene as well.

Good Luck!

cdemerit

Thanks for some good ideas, looks like it's gonna be the hard way....

However, I think I really made my computer cry when I realized I had forgotten to turn on the shadows from the 6 spotlights.... 35 minutes now and only 17 %.... I hope it can handle the render when I turn up the settings.

mjc1016

If it's a 3Delight render then stuffing as much RAM as you can fit on the motherboard into the machine will help with the size of the scene, but won't do much for speeding up the render. Iray will behave somewhat similarly, in CPU mode.

mtl1

Convert your figures to objects and/or decimate. Someone already mentioned texture atlas too :)

Havos

If your PC is swapping memory in and out of main store whilst rendering, then adding extra RAM, or trying to reduce the amount of storage you need as mentioned above will speed up the render. Having said that, if you have a complex light set up the render is going to take a long time. I normally render with a single advanced ambient light to provide the bulk of the fill light, plus a few advanced spot lights to highlight the areas of the image you want to light up brighter. Having large numbers of individual lights to make sure you get a good spread of light will drastically increase the render time.