Iray canvases ignoring progressive render settings
SpyroRue
Posts: 5,020
I had a 15+ hr render run through, I needed to run a Depth (or Distance) pass... but I see that it is ignoring my progressive render settings with canvases, giving me an under a minute exr render with lots and lots of noise. I retried with a beauty pass and let it run for a fair while, but it gave the same results as with the 1-min canvas rendered on its own. Is there somewhere to tell daz that I want canvases to follow the progressive settings so I can clear the noise?
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Is it noise or the natural breakup of the depth info because of DOF? While it does look a little sketchy, the "noise" is only in the silhouette boundaries, where we can expect a fuzzy appearance if the background is out of focus. You didn't post the beauty pass, so it's hard to tell what the scene contains.
Other than that, you could try rendering with both beauty and depth canvases, in that order, added to the work output. Hopefully you won't need to repeat your 15 hour render, but it'll probably need to be a good amount of time. Since you already have the beauty pass you want, set a lower Render Quality setting. Default is 1. Set it to maybe 0.5 and try that.
In the future, do such canvas passes together. There's no benefit to separating them out. Iray needs a beauty pass to best calculate convergence.
Yeah I already tried rendering for an hour or two with the beauty as I mentioned in OP. Sadly the Distance / Depth canvas rendered exactly the same quality as it did rendered alone. Its like a render that was canceled immediately after it begins, just a few seconds.
I ran a series of tests with a more simple scene set up for this purpose, and attached images demonstrates that the Distance canvas render alone vs the Distance rendered with the Beauty over 30mins (Beauty.canvas1, Distance.canvas2) left me with identical results.
I also did a quick Beauty render which I canceled after about 5 seconds, it appears to mesh quite well with the condition of the Distance canvases.
I'm not seeing noise, but a "blur" in the depth information caused by the DOF you are using. Try a render without DOF and see what that yields. I'm wondering if you'll see sharp outlines.
Since the depth canvas is designed for use in post filtering operations, whether or not the indistinct outlines are harmful/helpful in your process depends on how you're using this layer. If you need sharp, consider doing a separate depth pass with DOF off.
I use them for accurate masking essentially, it aids the digital painting side of things immensly I have done them in other engines for the same reson and theyve been an excellent addition to the workflow especially for the more serious and large scale projects. I never render without DOF, and it needs that DOF blur to be clear like the beauty render, but with the 5-sec-render noise makes them kind of useless for that purpose
Will have to use another engine then, or do oldschool by hand lol
Not to worry, thanks for the assistance
You could try rendering without the DOF and add a lens blur in post that uses the Z-depth canvas as input. Of course, the usefulness of the depth pass in Iray is questionable because it's based on geometry only (AFAIK), so there's no texture (trans map) info taken into account.
- Greg
Again, I'm not seeing any noise in the samples you provided. The unsharp edges of the silouettes is clearly from the DOF settings. Iray is feathering the edges of the depth mask according to the depth information.
There are many ways to get masks in Iray. You can do it by material ID, for example. I have a feeling all will be unsharp, however, but you might give them a try.
Feathering? I see a diffusion pattern that looks like under-cooked noise, as opposed to smooth blurring.
- Greg
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/113311/iray-canvases-why-only-exr#latest
I personally think the D|S iray canvases suck, as tried to say in this thread my other render engines produce useable images, have gotten nothing useful out of iray that apps that are not Photoshop can use.
If it's noise, it's the most well-behaved noise I've ever seen. You'd expect noise to have a variation in tone. The definition of noise is that it's random. Where do you see random tonality? All the gradations of tone between each of the objects are well defined.
Blurring (smoothing) or diffusion would suggest a change in tonality, which is not going to happen in a depth map for discretely spaced objects. If they make pixels lighter or darker, the depth map is no longer serving its purpose. The only thing they can change at any given depth is the population of the pixels. "Feathering" is what I'd call the technique in art, but regardless of the name, this appears to be Iray working-as-designed.
All I'm trying to say is that this does not look like the DOF you see from a camera:
For me, this (along with the fact that there is no transperency info taken in to account) severely limits its usefulness in post.
- Greg
Usefulness aside, Iray's method is to vary the density of pixels in order to provide a blend for the out-of-focus elements. As I pointed at before, this appears to be the way Iray handles this, and the visual result is not "noise" or pixel convergence. Trying to correct it by rendering longer isn't going to help.
I'm not sure if a mask created out of this particular depth map is useful or not. I think it would would depend on how the mask is used. The only time I ever used a depth map was to create a gradient for a special effect. I didn't have DOF turned on, but I don't think that would have mattered. As I recall, I applied a heavy gaussian blur to the depth map anyway.
I know this post is very very old, but I really hate when I am researching a problem with my software, and I come across a post discussing the very same issue but with no resolution. Therefore, I'm posting the answer I discovered today.
I am using the latest version of DAZ Studio as of March 2018. Using Canvases, I was getting grainy output which seemed to just do a few passes and then stop quickly. It turns out that if you have "Render Quality Enable" in Render Settings set to ON, then it negatively impacts Canvas output. At least, it did for me. So by turning this setting OFF, the Canvas renders started looking much better and converging at the Rendering Converged Ratio setting.
I really hope this post helps the next user who reads this!
omigosh dijitul, thank you so much! I've been trying to find a solution to this issue for weeks, and have been having to change my workflow to get around it until I couldn't today--you helped me BIGTIME!
I'm using Daz Studio 4.15, and this problem still exists.
So, like he said in the above quote. You can disable Render Quality Enable, so it keeps rendering the canvas until it looks good, or you can also double or triple the render quality setting, from 1.0 to like 2.0 or 3.0 (which maens leaving render quality enable ON, but just double or tripling the quality setting).
Someone should file this as a bug to DAZ, but filing a bug report takes so long, lol. It will probably be 4-5 years before they discover this bug on their own. I really should report it, but i'm so lazy.