Got a couple of questions about rendering

wildbillnash

I've been using Daz for some years now. Now I'm wondering about rendering settings. What does the following settings do except speed up or slow down rendering? I can't tell the difference.

Max Samples?

Rendering Quality Enable?

SofaCitizen

Max Samples is one of the methods to terminate a render - e.g. when that number is reached the render will stop, even if it is not "complete".

wildbillnash

So, what makes it complete? I've done max rendering at 200, 500, 1000, and 5000 and the only thing I can see different is how long it takes to render.

SofaCitizen

Well, that is a bit of a fuzzy answer - I guess I would say when the image looks as expected and no longer has any artifacts or fireflies in the darker areas?

EDIT: This also depends on what the render is for - if it's a stand-alone image then you probably want it to be really good, if you are making an animation, visual novel, comic or something where you need to churn out LOTS of renders in a short amount of time then you can probably stop earlier as each image does not have to be as perfect.

I believe there are three ways a render auto-terminates: When the max samples is reached, when the max time is reached or when the convergence ratio reaches the value that is set. Obviously a user can terminate the render manually if they think it is good enough.

If you are doing an comparisons then make sure you are doing so one the exact same conditions each time. If you are using different scenes then comparing the time to render is pointless as there are plenty of reasons why one scene renders quicker than another.

As for the Render Quality option - hopefully, someone smarter than me will provide an answer there.

wildbillnash

They're the same scenes. I have another question, though. With the max rendering set at, say, 1000, would the image file size be larger than if it was set agt 200? Haven't tried that comparison yet.

prixat

[problem with attaching files]

If you look in the render progress window you'll see the number of 'Iterations' done. Those are the same thing it refers to as 'samples'. They really should change the wording in Render Options!

Richard Haseltine

The usual stopping condition is convergence - how many pixels have reached a "final" state, with the strictness of final being determined by the render quality. Turning Render Quality Enable removes convergence as a stoping condition, it will keep going until it runs out of time or iterations.

Phatmartino

Just to answer one question the OP asked that might not have been noticed, I don't believe the number of iterations (or "Samples") performed will change the file size very much, if at all. The filesize (other than the possible compression used), would mainly be affected by the number of different "colors" (Hue, Saturation, Brightness, etc) that are represented in the set of pixels that make up the image. Iterations or "Samples" are just passes the render engine is making to determine what each pixel's value should be, taking materials, light, shadow, etc into account.

 

I personally leave Convergence turned off. I never really want DS to decide when a render is done, unless I'm doing multiple shots from a Scene and I determine how many iterations look like enough. Then I'll set the Max Samples to whatever that number is. Otherwise, I leave Max Time set to like 250,000 (this will pretty much ensure the Max Samples will always be what stops the Render if it's not me stopping it), and Max Samples set to 15000. Even a dark scene in my experience shouldn't need that many iterations, so I leave it set there unless it does. This way, I never have an image render for a long time and then have it not actually be done, when it's "done".