why are my Iray animations taking too long?
I was trying to do a simple 5 second approx animation but took nearly 7 hours to do almost 48 frames and it still wasn't done. My graphics card is; AMD Radeon HD 7700. I am suspecting this isn't enough unless there is something else I am doing wrong here or need something else. Pls someone help,
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"I am suspecting this isn't enough"
Assuming that you are using it, Iray is a proprietary Nvidia render engine that relies on Nvidia's also proprietary CUDA technology for GPU rendering. AMD cards do not support their rival's technology and therefore cannot use the Iray engine. In your case the render will therefore default to CPU only rendering, which is slower. The number of cores in your CPU and the amount of system RAM you have installed will also affect render times, not to mention the complexity of your scenes. Rendering 48 scenes with Iray in a row may take some time regardless of the hardware you are throwing at it. Alternatively you could use the 3Delight renderer, which should be faster, but you will need to ensure that you change from Iray to 3Delight shaders.
K thanks. Do you know roughly how long it would take with a standard Nvidia engine? straight off the bat can you recommend one?
Also what would be the minimal recommended syetem ram to use for it to work best? thanks.
You are currently going at a bit under ten minutes per frame - that isn't terribly slow. But it's impossible to set a time for an nVidia card - there's ahuge difference between soemthing like my 750TI and one of the new 10x0 series cards.
That really depends on what you are trying to render.
What I do is, I make a test render, to see how many iterations it takes to make the image look good. It doesn't need to be perfect, i.e. if you are downsampling later.
Then, use that number as "maximum iteration" per frame, instead of rendering an hour or more until it reaches the convergence of 95%. For example, this test image I stopped at 250 iterations. I then changed the maximum iterations setting in the render settings from the default 7000 to 250. Now, all the 120 images of the scene rendered each just 250 iterations. Using a Titan980Ti, the render of this very simple scene of 120 frames completed in under 100 minutes. Depending on your scene, you maybe just need 50 iterations to make the image look good enough.
Of course, if you have hair and fog, and other things that by default render a long time, 250 iterations are not enough and/or each iteration takes longer to render, driving up render times.
There also might still be some stray pixels if you limit iterations, but that won't matter in the animation:
And the resulting video:
Regarding the system minimums - you might find this post from the DAS CS useful: https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207530513-System-Recommendations-for-DAZ-Studio-4
System RAM - depending on the size of your scenes - 16GB is a good starting point. If you are looking at VRam, absolut minimum is 4GB, but as soon as the scene doesn't fir on the card you are back to CPU rendering. Even with the 6GB of to Ti, I have scenes going back to CPU. The new 10xx cards have 8GB, but they are currently only working with the new 117 version of DS 4.9 Beta.
I'm not certain, but isn't there a trick where you keep the textures in VRAM during multiframe rendering by using the iray preview mode and keep it that way while rendering an animation? Something to do with iray then not reloading the textures for each frame?
That's only useful if the scene isn't going to be too large. It can eat up memory very fast doing that and then you'll drop to CPU mode. Also it should be an image sequence direct to files.
I don't really understand why it would? I'd have thought the texture and shader build will be the same internal process in iray, regardless of it being in preview or final render? Using the preview to build the shaders first was just a way (that I read on these forums) to stop a refresh for each frame.
Iray also keeps the finished unsaved renders in memory (to allow for resuming)...and while the textures will not be duplicated, the load of the 'finished' frames and any movement will add up. So to keep it all on the GPU, if using the viewport, you need to save each frame as it's completed. Even not using the viewport, you should still save each frame as completed to keep the maximum available memory.
Can anyone recommend a decent graphics card for Iray animations/renders? just something fairly run of the mill and not TOO expensive. Ty.
Define "not too expensive". What kind of budget are you talking about? $100? $500?
From an older thread: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/78176/how-to-get-better-and-faster-renders-with-iray/p2
"Best performance? nVidia Titan-X. Cost $1000 + new power supply for computer.
Best bang for the buck? nVidia 970GTX. Cost $330 (maybe + new power supply)
Cheapest with decent performance? nVidia 740GT 4GB. Cost $100."
But that was before 10xx, so the prices for those cards might be higher now, or they might be unavailable, or the 10xx just flat out beat them.
The 740 is still available for around $100.
The prices for the 10x0 cards fall in around the 9x0 cards with greater availability and better chances of finding a sale/deal.