More Ram or Better Graphics card?

taraque2013

HI, I'm using Daz for it's animation abilities.  I was told before that it doesn't really use my graphic card when rendering. Or when I'm just moving a lot of figures and objects around on a scene.  I render in 3delight.  So I'm wondering would more ram help me, or would a better graphic card actually be more useful as far as rendering.

BeeMKay

If you render in 3Delight, the graphic card is pretty much useless for the rendering. You'd want to invest into a fast multi-core CPU, for faster renders, and more RAM for fitting more stuff and allowing the system some breathing space.

taraque2013

ok, but what about if i render in I ray?

BeeMKay

• If you render in Iray, an nVidea card with a decent VRAM (absolut minimum 4GB, better 6GB or 8GB) plus regular RAM would be the best combination. AMD cards don't do Iray = waste of money for this purpose.
• Rule of thumb, the more CUDA cores and the more VRAM, the better, but the newer cards have less CUDA cores that are faster.
• Important: The entire scene has to fit on your card's VRAM. Otherwise, you are back to CPU rendering an glacial render times.
• Another rule of thumb, a Genesis character with hair and clothing can land you anywhere between 1.5GB and 3GB. So, if you have a lot of people in a scene, chances are that you will drop back to CPU.
• Highly recommended purchase: https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
• Also, Iray often renders longer than 3Delight, though that would depend on what is in your scene a lot.

nonesuch00

Scene optimizer isn't so needed but instead to optimize your scene do these simple instructions:

1) Render the environmental elements that don't move in your animation as 1 frame without any of the moving models in the render.

2) Render the elements that do move in your scene as many frames as you've created to animate them on an alpha transparent background, have the moving elements cast shadows

     a) You have 3 characters that are animated you need to render 3 different animations to be composited in post into the background on step one if it's the case they never cast shadows on one another.

3) Composit those two elements in 1 & 2 together

Hints:

a) Render a small HD size like 1280x720 and not FHD like 1920x1080 and you iRay render will render pretty quickly.

b) Try to design your scene so that the models that are being moved only cast shadows on the ground otherwise you will have to render possibly multiple non-moving elements in multiple frames which will slow down your render alot. Of course that may not be possible but try.

c) Avoid water, glass, emmisive lights, other light sources, and as many reflective and refractive elements in your scene as much as possible. Basically, use Sun & Sky light as you only light if possible.

I have a 2011 i7-3630 with 16GB RAM an intel HD Graphics 4000 and no discrete GPU and I was any to animate 150 frames at 1280x720 in about 2 hours and 45 minutes but that would have taken many days had I not hidden all elements not animated when I created the animation.

When you save as an animation in DAZ Studio I recommend the Microsoft Video codec at maximum instead of the other codecs. You can also render to image stills and have a 3rd party program combine those images to create an animation but I don't know which 3rd party stills to animation to recommend to you.  Off-hand i'd recommend Blender to do that.

taraque2013

Wow, thanks alot.  I was wondering why I don't see many Daz 3d animations posted anywhere.  Now I know.  It takes too long to render.  Thanks for the advice, very useful.  I have great stories that I wanted to tell using animation.  I think I'm gonna use two computers to render the scenes.  I just can't believe it took over 6 and a half hours to render 530 frames at 1280 X 720.  Maybe if I don't use the raytrace shadows.

Seven193

Faster CPU!  That's exactly what I need.  There are some insanely fast CPUs out there now with 20+ cores, but they cost more than your entire computer.  The most anyone can afford comfortably is like 4 cores.