How Can I Speed Up Renders?
bueller1998_df4ca4b697
Posts: 161
I'm just coming back to 3-D after a five-year hiatus and am wondering if there are some ways to speed up high quality Iray renders in Daz Studio. I purchased a 6 core I-7 processor and a pretty expensive Nvidia graphics card that has that new CUDA technology.
Yet my high-quality renders are often taking over an hour. Am I doing something wrong, or is that the price you pay for quality?
Since I'm learning Daz Studio it's especially frustrating. And I don't want to render in 3Delight or poor lighting because I'm trying to learn how to make things look good.
Any suggestions?
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Comments
How 'high' is high-quality?
What is the exact make/model of the video card?
What operating system?
Processor--Intel Core i7-5820K Haswell-E 6-Core 3.3GHz
Video card-- ASUS GeForce GTX 970 STRIX-GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5 4GB 256-Bit GDDR5
Windows 7 Professional
I have been back doing this for only a couple of weeks after several years away. The actual render time has been eating into my learning curve on the Daz Studio. (I last used Poser 2012). Maybe I have some settings that are making things take extra long. I am not sure the actual resolution of my renders other than under my Photoreal Devices, botyh my CPU and card are selected.
Should have asked before...what's the typical scene--which figures, number of items, types of lights, that sort of stuff.
Now if the render is bigger than 3840 x 2160 then an hour may not be unreasonable...but if it's 1024 x 800 or something and isn't simply packed with people and props, it could be a bit more than unreasonable.
Some examples would be nice, too.
A couple of quick tips...make sure that all the materials are Iray materials and that you aren't doing things like using a physical dome to try to do lighting.
Currently I am coming up on 2 hours rendering a single person image of a woman on a couch. Friday Hair, Natasha skin, dx Pumps for G3F, "Z Modern Living Apartment" for Daz studio from Renderosity.
I Added "Light it Up!" Iray lights from this site to the pre-loaded scene. I'll post when it stops or gets above 90%.
I used Poser every day from 2006-2011, but haven't done any 3d since. I am new to Daz Studio. I am not sure my render resolution. The panels are confusing me. Lol. I didn't see where under render settings it tells you that.
Thanks for the help, interest and questions. lol.
Well, my uploads keep failing. Maybe I have too few posts to upload an image after midnight on a weekend. Lol.
Anyway, specific would be great but some general tips or general thoughts on my problem would be nice. I don't mind reading or watching tutorial videos. But some direction so I am not watching the laundry list of Daz videos on Youtube would be great.
I can't imagine Daz designed their software so every quality single frame renders take an hour, or maybe two on fairly high-end machines . It's clear with their complicated lighting system I am doing something wrong... over and over with different scenes.
I am hoping some people who have overcome this obstacle can share.
I have a GTX 970 as well. I can tell you that there are a lot of factors that go in to how long a render takes, and it isn't unheard of for a semi-complex scene to take an hour or more to render on my system (i7 4790 @ 4.8GHz, 32 GB RAM, GTX 970 video). For example, I just stopped a render that had been running for close to 4 hours. It wasn't so much that it was complex as that it had 100 or so grapes in it that were all translucent with lots of sub surface scattering. This resulted in an enormous load of calculations to be performed, far more than a typical render might require.
I'm not familiar with the set your using (Z Modern Living). However, as mjc1016 said above, making sure you've converted all the materials in the scene to the Iray Uber Base at a minimum might help. If there are lots of windows in the scene (on or off camera), that can add to the time, too. Try using the thin glass shader on them since there's a good chance they were modeled as planes with no thickness.
Another thing you can do is download a little app called gpu-z from techpowerup.com. You can use it to monitor your video card while rendering to make sure the card is actually being used. If the scene you're rendering is too large to fit in the 4GB of RAM on the card, Iray will revert to CPU rendering, even if you don't have CPU checked as a device in the advanced rendering settings.
Make sure you don't have the architectural or caustic filters turned on as they tend to add a bit to render times. Also, the OptixPrime acceleration doesn't always result in faster rendering, and in some cases can take longer when it's turned on (advanced render settings). Another thing I've found is that selecting both CPU and your video card as devices in the advanced settings can cause renders to take longer than they should. I just leave the video card only selected. CPUs, even fast ones, aren't really optimized for the kind of calculations required for using a physically based render engine, so throwing it in to the mix is sort of like trying to help a Formula 1 race car go faster by pushing it with a Ford Mustang.
I didn't realize that about windows! Thanks shape shifter from "Deep Space 9". :)
I also was very frustrated trying to learn DAZ3d. So I gave up on the fancier stuff for now and decided to learn how to optimize old fashion 3Delight (which is none too shabby) on my computer and learn all the surface types and all the render settings etc. that way. Wow! Learning render interation times went way way down. A decent render cranked out in 5 to 10 minutes seems to be a much better learning tool than one a day. And the fancier stuff that seemed just frozen now can be set up to render in less than the life of the Universe time. And I found settings that would crank out even VGA frames for animations fast enough to play with that (where renders in seconds are nice if you expect to get through learning some animation where everything is repeated hundreds or thousands of times).
I found out the hard way that two little things make a difference. Do not use progressive rendering for a final output or even test renders. This may apply only to 3Delight. And for shadows try using Ray Traced only and be careful how many lights you set shadows on for. In my case the graphics card is much more limited so shifting to RayTraced lights made a nice improvement. The big Macs only pretend to have two graphic cards it seems. One renders and the other works as a custom calculator engine apprently.
Also it may not be a good idea to mix surface types. Just one rogue surface type can really slow down a render. One super slow render time was traced to a single setting on a particular hair for instance. And Displacement masks seem to make my poor little Mac cringe in terror. Deleting the Displacement image to shut down a displacement at least temporarily can make a big difference. Progressive is nice in the little side window to see the hidden features of surfaces that only appear when rendered where you have a neat start and stop button. But seems to be a nightmare for rendering the big window. Maybe I just do not know how to use it. But turning it off for main renders was DAZ life changing. Every little setting can count big time it seems.
Struggling with render times on a much weaker MAC, I made a very simple setup of two lights and one camera and just put stock characters in front of it from A3 to G3F framed the same and in the default pose to get some idea of a baseline and how to fiddle with all the settings. I found my particular computer liked a specific Bucket Size for instance. Improved up to a point and then stalled and got slower.
And make sure your RAM is not being hogged by other things. Macs can be very bad about leaving any program you open idleing in the background. I found a tiny memory clean app that has proven very reliable and it has shown me a LOT about managing RAM. The number of drives mounted can make a difference. They each want their chunk of RAM for business purposes.
I try to run DAZ3d and ONLY DAZ3d and as few disks as possible mounted to get renders with what little I have. If you make a stock test setup with a few surfaces, a couple of lights (one of them shadow casting) and then use that as a fixed reference set and render over and over fiddling with the render settings and surface types you will rapidly discover what is helping and what your system could seem to care less about in terms of impacting its render times.
And the little memory clean app or a similar application is very revealing about what RAM you actually have to use and what is being hogged by something or other. I went from an average of 2.4 Gbytes of RAM available to over 5 with DAZ3d running by just fiddling with things on the desktop. It was amazing how the RAM was coming and going on the Mac behind the scenes. And how much was being rat-holed away even after a program was closed. The clipboard is possibly a major offender. Out of RAM seems to be a great way for Hexagon especially to throw in the towel and just crash.
I also moved all of DAZ3d content library onto a second drive and off my solid state system drive (the default content locations). So only the running program guts of DAZ3d programs and plugins are on the solid state system drive now. BTW I broke DAZ3d multiple times in the process before I got it right, so it is a good idea to archive your ZIPs so you can slip them back into a reborn copy of DIM in case you hopelessly confuse DAZ3d and have to re-install from scratch. (Hours of removing orphaned file references gets old fast). Then I used a small well connected second solid state drive for all the various cache files DAZ3d wants and the same for Premier. Every fiddly bit matters. Sometimes it is worth a few more buffers in RAM to keep things moving along. I improved my render times by over six fold just fiddling around with such things. By far the biggest hit for my setup however was - Turn off Progressive Render. Sigh. Wish I had discovered that months ago.
Watch out for materials. Often programs will come with materials for several render types and now they are mercifully putting icons on the thumbnails so you can tell them apart. And often things are for several generations of charaters, identical looking thumbnails side by side but if you over the mouse over them with the right preference settings the path will pop up and you will see from the path name if it is for Genesis or G2F, or for lray or 3Delight etc. So you can load the right one. One surface not ready to play nice with others and there goes your render time.
Just some things I have found out the hard way in the last nine months of trying to learn to work with DAZ3d on a rather low horsepower computer. In the hope some of this makes sense in your situation in spite of being from someone who is "CPU flop challenged" with a graphics card confused by the simpliest shadows.
Aloha
Im learning as well. What I have learned thus far:
Collissions - the lower the better. Check all your objects. The less collissions the faster the render, however you may notice problems crop up, such as skin protruding through clothes.
Smoothing - more smoothing - longer renders. Less smoothing, faster but may not give you the look you want. Some items look better with less smoothing.
Render SubD Level - 1 is fastest, lowest quality; go up to 5 and it may not even render and crash depending on your scene. Check all items.
Hair - Hair is especially tricky when it comes to the above parameters, especially with light. Scattering, translucency, along with ray tracing all add up. If you want to check a render and can afford to do it bald - turn the hair off to check your scene then do a final overnight render.
Ray Trace Bounces - How many bounces for reflection, refraction, they all add compute time.
IRay will rely in many ways more on your CPU than your GPU in terms of "time processing". I am running Dual Titan Cards - Each with 6 GB of VRAM in SLI; on a Dual Xeon 48 Core Hyper Threaded Machine - and the system spends about 1/3 - 1/4 time on GPU processing then kicks the compute cycles over to the CPU.
This render of a model Ive been working on inbetween projects was done (both images are taken from the same comp) at 5000x10000 and I let it run about 5-6 hours before stopping and saving. But the collisions were set high, as was smoothing, and nearly all the light is bounced to acheive the look I wanted. The hair is terrible and has since been swapped.