Render Time Confusion

redeyedrobot

Hi,

I have some basic room construction pieces with low-resolution stucco textures on them. The thing I most appreciate about them is that they take next to no time / processing power to render.

I thought I'd try to do something more stylish and used Daz's layered image editor to put a flat color layer over the textures, to try and build a an untextured room that's still visually interesting by virtue of the color palette.

...But now the room takes absolute ages to render, and I don't understand why. Is there anything I could do instead of just trying to add a flat color layer to try and fix this? Does Daz for some reason just not handle a bunch of flat colors very well?


I thought it might be a cost associated with the layered image editor, so I went and manually edited the textures of the objects so they were just flat, bold colors. So the actual textures sizes are completely identical. 

Same problem. Suddenly Daz just takes ages to render. 

I am just extremely confused about what's happening & why. 

kpr

Check the texture sizes you've created.

I'd be surprised if you had made 4k textures, but maybe you did?

(Photoshop or similar will inform you, if you can't work it out from file properties)

DrunkMonkeyProductions

For the most part, you don't need to mess with LIE if you want a color swap, just change the Base Color(surfaces tab) to something other than white. Other shader settings, can also change the color of the asset at render time, but are not always visible in the viewport.

 

An increase in render time is fairly normal, as it's more computationally complex to do color instead of just white or black.

As a quickie example, a 5 meter plane with a base color of white, takes 9.8 seconds on my gpu with no textures applied and no hdri.

Switch to green(0.22,1,1) and the render time increases to 12.65s, with no other changes to the scene.

Not particularly significant, but if you do that with a 6 sided structure(box) the render time can increase rather significantly.

as another quick example, a 5 meter box, with a single point light at 25000 lumens, takes 2m10.9s with white as the base color, whereas with the same green, it's 4m 7.62s, just shy of double the render time.

Depending on lighting and other assets in the scene(and their material settings), the render time jumps exponentially when you just do this one change.