What happened to 3Delight?
Drogo Nazhur
Posts: 1,155
Several years ago, a 3Delight render took several minutes and an IRAY render took a couple of hours. I tried to do IRAY renders because the scenes looked more realistic but when ever I could get away with it, I would sneak in a 3Delight in. I haven't done 3Delight renders in a few years. I needed to re-do some scenes so I tried to run a 3Delight render and much to my superize, it was taking a few hours to complete which the IRAY render was runing much faster. Also, re-doing the saved scenes, the scenes look completely different -- what happened to 3Delight and how do I get the old look back to a 3DELIGHT render?
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Are you still using the same light sets? I never found 3DL to be particularly fast until Age of Armor released their Advanced Light sets.
...I did a test a few years ago to compare Iray to 3DL render times (using the CPU for Iray as the GPU I in my system had insufficient VRAM) and a reasonably heavy scene that took over 2 hrs and 40 min in Iray. In 3DL using Parris' IBL Master for the GI it took only about 12 - 14 min and looked pretty darn close to the results I got in Iray even back then.
To use 3DL make sure the CPU is checked in the advanced Render settings and I would uncheck the GPU. to see if that helps. I also used the progressive render mode instead of the default bucket render.
It will depend a lot on what is in your scene, I think. There are also tweaks and settings that can greatly affect render time. Sven Dullah is really the one to ask about all that. Deep knowledge, super friendly!
I'm using whatever the default is. What I'm trying to say is that years ago, eDelight would render in minutes. Now the same scene that I saved takes hours to render and Iray is faster.
We can always pull up Sven Dullah's thread on the subject...
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/303011/in-depth-tutorial-for-squeezing-the-best-of-3delight/p1
and the 3Delight Laboratory thread...
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/55128/3delight-laboratory-thread-tips-questions-experiments/p1
But if the SAME scene rendered in minutes years ago, why it it taking hours now?
Thank you
My guess would be some change in your render settings. I'll have some time later to go through and articulate the settings I find make the biggest difference. Frankly, I tend to set and forget, and I forgot.
One thing to note that with many of the shaders they would render quickly until some form of HD was introduced and then they would be really slow. The combination of HD and uber surfaces, for example, would be sluggish. But the Daz default shader would be quick.
Letting my ignorance hang out here ,where do I find how to check whether or not I'm useing CPU and not GPU?
The Advanced tab of the Render Settings pane.
What version of DAZ Studio are you running?
CPU/GPU only shows up in the advanced tab, if you've got Iray set up as your render engine,
If you're using 3DL, the advanced tab gives you options about "render blur" and "Render to RIB".
Thank you thought I'd broke something .......again
Here is another nice discussion of render settings...
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/37022/3delight-rendering-engine-for-dummies
Drogo, you're experiencing long render times. I could not replicate the choking you experienced - A minutes to hours shift. This is a start point for something to check. There are a lot of variables - lights and materials you're using, what's in your scene, etc. My system has a modest i5-12600k processor. I'm laughably impatient about renders - I want it in 2 minutes or less whenever possible. 30 minutes is for a final render or some huge scene. Often, I find a render can be stopped at 75-80%. YMMV. I hope some of this helps.
Pixel Size: 2000 - 4000 per side. I find more resolution gives better results and I downsize the final image to share. Smaller images cause their own problems at render time!
Progressive: Off. Progressive gives faster feedback but also sometimes leaves visible jagged alias artifacts. I guess those get smoothed out at the end? Don't need it.
Buckets: 32 or bigger. These follow the rules of squares, so 32, 64, or 128. I find 32 works best for getting a quick result and being able to see it form. I use the spiral pattern as it's aesthetically pleasing. The pattern has no effect on the final image.
Sampling: cranking up the samples, especially the raytrace samples, will drag down the render time! I have mine set to set raytrace: 8, x: 8, y:8, shadow: 16 That gives a nice result. Is it too much? I can't say.
Shading Rate: Less than 1 will drag out render times for very little visible gain. 1 gives a good quality render. 10 seems ok to me. For testing I may go to 20 or 30. Shadows may look rough, but it may not matter as I downsize the result.
...one of the biggest banes of 3DL are transmaps (hair, foliage, etc) as they tend toclow rendering eown, particularly if you are using Uberenvironment for global illumination. That is why I sugggested Parris' IBL Master. It doesn't create boucnce light but that is easily "faked" by a low intensity light source under the ground plane with "cast shadows" turned off.
I mostly use the stock 3DL plastic shader and standard lights, getting them to do whatever I need. I have the uber shader pack bundle and haven't really used it. I want to. There's some neat-looking stuff there. I tend to do whatever makes rendering fastest while getting the look I want. I figured out how to make fiber hair work in 3DL and render in a matter of minutes. I wanted fast-rendering body hair. But as with most things I do, I don't recommend doing what I do. >_> Mostly, I spend a lot of time massaging texture maps and materials so that they look the way I want them to look, and then the render is fast. Happily, the supplied maps are often capable of doing what I want (but not always).
I'm experimenting more with the uber shader so that I can bounce back and forth between Iray and 3DL.
..is that just the built in Uber Shader or Wowie's Awe Shader system?
A lot of the works Sven is posting on that 3DL images thread are created with the latter.
When I want fast 3DL renders for the purpose of postworked renders, I go for the DzDefault set. Those render so fast it isn't funny!
I haven't really got into the awe shader. I've experimented with it a lttle. I know Sven uses it a lot! I'm talking about the uber shader pack, https://www.daz3d.com/uber-shader-pack
...ah, thanks.
Hello, did you solve the problem?
If I recall correctly, 3DL was updated from version 11 to version 12 with DS 4.8, no significant changes though so that would not explain a sudden jump in rendertimes from minutes to hours. As has been suggested, I suspect your render settings. I guess it could be possible that some product you use in your scene has been updated to use HD morphs, which could have an impact on rendertimes? There is also a rare glitch with 3DL...it sometimes starts useing only one single thread for rendering. I doubt that's the case here, but if you suddenly see a drop in performance, shutting down DS and restarting should solve it;) Also, I assume you use RSL shaders and not IRayUber? If you render IRay shaders in 3DL, it is possible that an update to the shader would impact your rendertimes? Pure speculation on my side...
If nothing of this makes sense, start troubleshooting by turning off hair and/or hiding your character(s) and testrender! You know the drill:)
Just some additional info:
The DS 3DL renderer consists of two modules, REYES and the Raytracer. They are totally different in behaviour. With progressive OFF you use the REYES. module. It uses the pixelfilters to assist with antialiasing, and it uses shading rate for sampling the render. When you turn progressive ON you tap into the raytracer (actually the built in pathtracer). It does not use shadingrate! It bypasses the pixelfilters (reset to box 1x1) so will be jaggier and noisier. Progressive mode is used for quick previewing and is not meant for final renders. It will use every trick in the book to speed up previewing, including decreasing diffuse- and specular depth, and a number of other things not known to mankind.
Raytrace depth: 2 is good, 8 is overkill:) I doubt you use 8 reflective/refractive materials layered on top of eachother very often?
Pixelsamples: 8x8 is a good number for stills, I like to use 10x10. With heavy DoF you will need more. For animation 5x5 will probably be good enough.
Shading rate: I'd never go over 1, expect shading artefacts. 0.5 is a good starting point for stills IMO. Thats upsampling by a factor of two. In practise I use 0.1 to 0.2 for stills.
Finally - to use the pathtracer with pixelfilters in non progressive mode you will need to use scripted rendering. Then you can also separate diffuse trace depth from specular trace depth, which is not possible with REYES.
Hmm, coming to think about it... There were changes to progressive mode, it now only uses 5 render passes, and there were some other things I'm not fully updated on. It was not an improvement, as it renders the IPR mode useless, but that's another story. But if you used progressive mode this could make an impact.
Good information! Thanks Sven.The points about REYES vs Pathtracer is interesting. I don't usually use reflection or refraction because they're so slow and the surfaces in my scenes haven't required them. Even then, I'd rather use reflection maps, but must use the uber shader to get spherical reflection mapping. I don't think my raytrace setting used to be set so high, and I don't recall setting it there. Makes sense to lower it.
Also, thanks for chiming in here :)