Slow rendering issue
Hi all,
Im new to Daz3d, recently got addicted to it. I've been rendering a few scenes but i do feel that the rendering is pretty slow, especially after reading the benchmarking post ! it takes 2 hours to render a scene and i'd like to understand if there's any way i can improve it.
Note that i am currently writing this while a scene is being render hence i cannot really go to the render config, but from what i remember selecting :
1 - disabled CPU rendering (since i have an RTX card)
2 - rendering using photo(something)
3 - rendering UHD (4k?)
those are the things i do remember fiddling with. I will attach a few screenshots of my system and the rendering screen.
my system is an Intel based 13th gen i9 with 64gb ram and an RTX4090 (see screenshots). CPU is at 14% usage, the memory at 33% (including all of the other stuff i have already running) and the GPU is at 99% but only use half of the VRAM.
i am on the newest nvidia driver (released July 12th)
I also cannot paste a screen of the scene due to NSFW reasons.
Is there anything i am possibly missing here, because i would think my rig would be able to handle the workload (?)
thanks !
Comments
What is the scene, and how is it lit? If you have an enclosed, or mostly enclosed, space lit by an HDRI or Sub/Sky then you are relying on light bouncing in through any openeings and then reaching the corners of the room - that kind of very indirect lighting is inevitable slow to converge (reach a colour value for the specified proportion of pixels).
I am rendering a new scene right now (just for testing) with two point light in a hallway with no external lights and see how it goes. i did have a skybox on all of my other scenes and point lights in enclosed space so it might be it.
Also the convergence setting says 95% @ 1 rendering quality setting.
right now the scene i am rendering is this one https://ibb.co/cC58MjH
so far 1922 iterations in 17 minutes and 5% done so that will take a while.
and this is how it looks like in the rendering screen : https://ibb.co/QpN2GtH
p.s: i hope this is an acceptable way to post pictures because i couldnt attach anything to these posts using the 'choose file' button, seem to say 'uploading...' and nothing happens. Let me know if theres another better way to embed.
thanks much for your help !
EDIT : It finally completed the rendering and took about 45 minutes but the rendering screen isnt much different than the one i attached earlier. unfortunately the little popup window disapeared and i cant really give you any stats such as how many iterations it did or the exact time.
Default pointlights are still fairly limited - the light is literally coming from a point, so there will be a lot of areas that get only bounce light (which is slower as it gets a smaller number of hits). You can use the Shape group in the Parameters or Light panes to make the lights into spheres or discs, which is closer to how physical lights behave and may help a bit. Generally the more contrasty the light the slower convergence is likely to be.
A "skybox" is something used for 3Delight renders and not Iray. In Iray, the skybox will block all light sources that are outside the skybox (like the HDRI light or the sun-sky light). If you are rendering a completely enclosed area anyway, that probably doesn't matter, but it you had openings like windows, it would be a good idea to delete that skybox and use an HDRI or sun-sky light for your exterior light. HDRI and sun-sky are configured in the Render Settings pane.
Completely enclosed areas are normally slower to render, because of issues Richard described.
Your 95% convergence and quality 1 settings are OK. Have you tried enabling the denoiser in Render Settings? That might get you a satisfactory image sooner. The default denoiser setting of 8 iterations will cause the image to look horrible at first, but it will improve as rendering continues. I usually increase that value of 8 to something like 800, but you might try something around 500 (or just leave it at 8). When the image looks good to you in the render window, you can cancel the render and save the image.
Image attachment in the forum is broken and has been for at least a month. Attaching a link to an externally hosted image, as you did, is the recommended procedure for now. You can make that image visible in your message here by clicking on the little icon in the forum message header that looks like a landscape picture. Then enter your image URL and adjust the image dimensions to no more than 800 pixels for the forum.
i've started a tutorial about lighting which i think will be beneficial. as a matter of fact, my last rendering was at most 25 minutes and the only change i did was to do what Richard mentioned by adjusting the light geometry to a rectangle and that did improve the rendering speed. i get that different setting will alter the rendering speed no matter the hardware we throw at it but in an ideal situation with proper lighting on that scene i have posted a picture of, how long would you think this could take on hardware similar to what i have. I am probably asking alot here so no worries if this cannot be 'estimated' !
I think the first time i rendered a scene (which took 2h to do), I beleive it was a lighting sphere (?) the filename says uberenvironment or something like that. I searched 'sky' in my library (very limited) and that was the only one i had (for the moment at least).
i'll look into HDRI, thanks for the tip! as for the denoiser, i do see 'post denoiser available' is disabled. When i turn it 'ON' i see the start iteration config set to 8, let me try adjusting to 500 and see !
Regarding the picture sharing in posts, i did try the image button, but all i got after putting that url and setting up the width and height was a big rex X picture, i guess my picture is bigger than 800px so ill try later on with a picture less than 800px.
thanks for the help !
That sounds like perhaps the URL you added was not a direct link to an image or the image was missing? When you add an image link to the URL field it should show a preview in the window below and fill the width and height with the current dimensions. Changing the width and height only adjusts how the image will appear within your post.
yes, thats because i used that imgBB website, maybe there's better out there but anywya i was simply able to right click on the image and open in new tab and take the link of that image.
thanks guys for all the help, this is resolved and i can't believe what i am able to do with Daz3d.. what a crazy piece of software
Not familiar with that image hosting site but sounds like the same thing with the one I use. Glad you got it sorted :)
Just FYI - you might want to switch off the iray preview in the viewport while doing the actual render. I don't know for definite, but I would imagine that the preview would take away some resources from the rendering process.
Anyway, good luck on your journey there is so much to learn and master!
Got it, will do, thanks for the tip !
uberenvironment is another 3Delight concept. It will not help you with Iray lighting. Starting with Daz Studio is hard, because there is so much old legacy content and infrastructure around. It sounds like you are making good progress. Be sure any tutorials that you watch are for Iray and not 3Delight.