OK, newbie questions on Rendering times....

solarview

So, ...how long is 'normal'? lol!

Doing my first render here. 3Delight at 'Best Quality' setting. Rendering to a PNG file.
I have a scene, no background, 2 V5 characters, no clothing, no props, hair on each.
UberEnvironment2, with 2 distant lights and 1 spot. No shadows are turned on with the Distant lights and Spot. Uber2 is a stock preset.
Render started last night. It's now 16 hours and still going, at 85%. Render window 'History' and timer says it's still working. I'm using Studio 4.5 RC2 64-bit, on an iMac i7 Core machine with 16GB of RAM. So about as much speed as currently available.
So, is this 'normal'???

I'm assuming adding more props and clothing are only going to dramatically increase the render times, right?

Going forward, is it better to render the characters separately and import them each into my Photoshop background scene? Or is it more time efficient to render the two together as I'm doing now? Just asking newbie questions here to possibly speed things up.
Or is this just the world of 3D rendering?
FYI, as a 15 year Photoshop user, I'm use to things dramatically moving along faster.
So just looking for feedback from you 3D veterans. :)

Thanks

- Sol

Richard Haseltine

I'm pretty sure you have ambient occlusion turned on in the light - that is fairly slow, and when you add the multiple layers of transparency in the hair it becomes really slow. One option is to use a shader like uberSurface on the hair and take advantage of its option to exclude the surface from occlusion calculations. You may also want to turn the occlusion distance on the light down - the value is in cm and it's usually 500, 5 metres, which is excessive if you aren't rendering a landscape or a giant space ship from a difference.

solarview

Richard Haseltine said:

I'm pretty sure you have ambient occlusion turned on in the light - that is fairly slow, and when you add the multiple layers of transparency in the hair it becomes really slow. One option is to use a shader like uberSurface on the hair and take advantage of its option to exclude the surface from occlusion calculations. You may also want to turn the occlusion distance on the light down - the value is in cm and it's usually 500, 5 metres, which is excessive if you aren't rendering a landscape or a giant space ship from a difference.

Thank you, Richard, for the quick reply. Much appreciated.

OK, I know, this is another obvious 'newbie' question here, but what exactly is 'Occlusion' in 3D world terminology? I've seen it mentioned some 50 times, both here in the forums, as well as in YouTube tutorials. But it's always mentioned as you just did, as in "turn the occlusion down". What exactly is it's effect and purpose in relation to 3D lighting?
Thanks for the suggestions. As my render is still going, I can't check those setting yet. But I went mostly with defaults, so you're probably right.

- Sol

Richard Haseltine

Ambient occlusion fakes the way, in the real world, recesses and niches get less light bouncing off other surfaces than areas that are more in the open - not direct shadows from a light source, but from indirect lighting. It adds realism but, because it needs to cast tests in all directions, it is slow.

solarview

Richard Haseltine said:

Ambient occlusion fakes the way, in the real world, recesses and niches get less light bouncing off other surfaces than areas that are more in the open - not direct shadows from a light source, but from indirect lighting. It adds realism but, because it needs to cast tests in all directions, it is slow.

Cool. Thank you. :)

Takeo.Kensei

For tthe scene you're rendering even with ambiant Occlusion and hairs it shouldn't take more than 1 or 2 hours even with high settings with your gear
If you render with Daz standard light without uberenvironnement and without raytraced shadows, your render time could go down to a few minutes
One other option with RC1 or RC2 is to use Scripted rendering and point Based Occlusion with Uberenvironement. It may be faster but I'm not sure. Anyway your 16h hours rendering is abnormal and you may have hit on a bug

fixmypcmike

What's the render size?

solarview

Takeo.Kensei said:

For tthe scene you're rendering even with ambiant Occlusion and hairs it shouldn't take more than 1 or 2 hours even with high settings with your gear
If you render with Daz standard light without uberenvironnement and without raytraced shadows, your render time could go down to a few minutes
One other option with RC1 or RC2 is to use Scripted rendering and point Based Occlusion with Uberenvironement. It may be faster but I'm not sure. Anyway your 16h hours rendering is abnormal and you may have hit on a bug

Well, that's interesting. I had read someone talking about his renders taking anywhere from a few hours to 24 hours. It wasn't indicated what all was in his '24 hr render' scene, but that's why I asked here. As I described, it seems like a fairly minimalist scene.

So let me add this to the equation. I am rendering these PNG characters to use on a Photoshop file background. Again, all this is a test. I had read that to use a jpeg file as a background in Studio 4, you need to set your render size to that size. So, my PSD backdrop image is 5000px x 3000 px background. Is my file overly large maybe?

Anyways, any suggestions on what I should do here? Should I re-install 4.5 RC2?

fixmypcmike

That's fairly large, so that might also be contributing. You want the aspect ratio to match the backdrop (or put the backdrop on a plane primitive with the same aspect ratio), the size doesn't have to.

solarview

To follow up.
I just checked back over to the file. It was on 94% 5 minutes ago. Just now when I looked, it suddenly showed 21%. Then it just jumped back up to 40% a couple minutes later. So having never done a full render before, does the 'History' box always look like this? Multiple lines of > Rendering Image, Rendering.... < as you see in the screen capture? Or should you see this one time? So is it stopping and starting over, or is this normally how it looks?

solarview

And one more thing here.
When I was using 3D Bridge to Photoshop, the preview rendering was fairly instantaneous, and they showed up in PS as png renders with no background from DAZ Studio. Once I added the UberEnvironment2, I started seeing a solid blue background when I hit 'Update Image'. Is it possible that it spends time rendering that blue background too? I've assumed the 'save to png' render will leave out that blue background.

solarview

back up to 60%

solarview

Hey Guys,

Based on the recent replies here, I cancelled out of the render.
Upon doing so, I noticed the history box saying something about 'Movie Render Cancelled' Once it closed I looked over the settings in the Render Settings tab, and sure enough, the 'Render To:' pull-down was set to 'Movie' Start Frame: 0, End Frame: 30.
Now as this is my very first render, all I can guess is that it defaulted to that, maybe.
I changed pretty much nothing except for naming and where to send the png file.

So anyways, I'm going to try some of the suggestions here and I'll give you guys an update later.
Thanks for your help and suggestions on this.

- Sol

Jaderail

As your first time to use render you just made a mistake. This is save as file.
The Bottom two are Name of file/type of file (jpg png) and then Folder on system.

solarview

Thanks, Jaderall.

Hey question, what is 'Bucket Order'?

Jaderail

That determines which direction the Render Buckets are caculated compaired to the next one. I never touch it Default is best in my book. Horizontal is top to bottom, Vertical is left to right and so on and so on...

Edit: They also display the way you set it.

solarview

Thanks.
Haven't touched that one either. Another new 3D term I have no clue about.
Figure if I don't know, stick with 'Default'. :)

Jaderail

Sol765 said:

Thanks.
Haven't touched that one either. Another new 3D term I have no clue about.
Figure if I don't know, stick with 'Default'. :)

For fun do a BOOT render. Just Boot DS and let Genesis load, you should get a grey genie and a built in light (it will not show in the scene tab but it is what lets you see as you load stuff untill you add your own lights). Set Render settings to New Window and change the Bucket Order. It pretty much explains itself as it goes. You can then close the window or cancel as it does the render, then change your settings and do it again. You will soon know what it does, and learn as you go.

fixmypcmike

I've never used it, but if you think about what areas of the image are most important or that you're most concerned about being just right, the bucket order can sometimes help to get those areas rendered earlier, so you can cancel the render if they aren't right.

Jaderail

Good tip. Never looked at it like that. Thanks!

ZamuelNow

Richard Haseltine said:

I'm pretty sure you have ambient occlusion turned on in the light - that is fairly slow, and when you add the multiple layers of transparency in the hair it becomes really slow. One option is to use a shader like uberSurface on the hair and take advantage of its option to exclude the surface from occlusion calculations.

How exactly do you set this up? Hair is usually the thing that drags down my render speeds drastically.

Richard Haseltine

ZamuelNow said:

Richard Haseltine said:

I'm pretty sure you have ambient occlusion turned on in the light - that is fairly slow, and when you add the multiple layers of transparency in the hair it becomes really slow. One option is to use a shader like uberSurface on the hair and take advantage of its option to exclude the surface from occlusion calculations.

How exactly do you set this up? Hair is usually the thing that drags down my render speeds drastically.

Select the hair model, and all of its surfaces in the Surfaces pane (Window>Panes (Tabs)>Surfaces). Find the uberSurface Base in your content library - I think it will be in DAZ Studio Formats>My Library>Shaders>uber Surface, but I'm not sure as I moved mine. Hold down cmd(Mac)/ctrl(Win) and double click on uber Surface Base - a dialogue box should open, under Map Settings you want to choose Ignore. Now go to the Edit tab of Surfaces and scroll down - at the bottom of the parameters you should find four buttons for turning various features off, including Occlusion.

ZamuelNow

Thanks, that does make a noticeable difference.