Help with Rendering Please!
desireroad
Posts: 76
Hey pepz this is gonna be a bit of a long question but please bare with me. I have been messing with daz for around 3-4 weeks now and have been trying to learn fundementals. The problem I am facing is understanding the concepts of the ways I should be rendering something and how long those things should take. If I run through what I have been doing hopefully someone can point out how terrible my workflow is. For the project I am working on I am going to need to batch render a fair amount of images at 1920 x 1080 with the expection of a few renders which will be higher quality. My now budget computer specs are GTX 980 , 16 GB of ram, I7 4790k, running off of my SSD. So heres my learning process, my messing about:
My first attempt at rendering was jumping into daz, using the standard lighting from the HDRI and using perspective view , Making my own character and hitting render using base settings... That didn't have the effect I wanted. Took around 15 minutes or more to render and the lighting was not in the right places. The character looked plastic.
I then went to the store, bought some better models, clothes, hair ect jumped back in put my character together, tried messing with spot lights and other sources of light and bam... still awful. In fact I started getting fireflys on my poor renders... Dam.
Went and learnt the basics of lighting ( Very basics ) got confused with what a HDRI even was, put a camera in my scene, used its headlamp and tried closing in my Character to bounce light. Looked awful..
I started by developing my environment outside daz, imported it in as a dae file. Put my character in the scene. had him lay on the bed naked. used just my camera, watched a few tutorials on how to speed up rendering times. Bam... took 60 minutes to render this.
So I was starting to get to the point where I was getting what I wanted though an hour for 1 render is not really the timing I wanted so I decided to do some more research on how to lower the render time and how to improve my lighting a bit. I found scene optimizer and bought it straight away. and got these https://www.daz3d.com/studio-light-pro-hdri-iray-wow-lights , I thought this is it , surely I can produce something good here. I went in and halved my texture maps on my objects. I grouped together my items inside daz for my scene so I could hide items when rendering. ( Get rid of stuff outside the light.. ) I implemented a standard camera, kept the settings in the environment much the same.. and ugh... bam...
This took over an hour and its got so much noise I wouldn't be able to use it for the project. The lighting is amazing using the WOW lights. I love it but the rendering time is awful.
So my question is should I be rendering in this way for a project thats gonna need consistent renders? Should I render the character first then the environment ? Does it usually take this long even with just one character and a basic backdrop. Should I be doing something to get rid of noise? If you want my render settings just ask. Many thanks !
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Comments
HDRs are not suitable for indoor lighting, they are "outside" and blocked by the walls. You might want to use a ghost light (a plane that has the emissive preset appllied and the Cutout Opacity set to nearly, but not quite, 0) to fill in the shadowy areas then use the Tone Mapping settings and/or editing of the render image to get the final balance you want.
Please crop your images to exllude the figure's groin - adding a bar to the image isn't aceptable and the cropped version would work to show the issue.
I am really thankful for the reply Richard, Sorry about the nude photos, I assumed covering up the main element would surfice but then saw your locked thread, My bad. I saw that technique with the plane in a video and assumed it was a cheeky workaround. If thats generally how it's done though I will give it a go myself. I bought the Hdri pack assuming it was for indoors too because of the main images.It probably just meant that the lighting was coming through the window I had. I want to get the best renders possible with a timeline in mind so I am looking for whatever I can to help with that. If you do end up using ghost lighting do you tend to keep the headlamp on the camera or do you leave it turned off and just use that lighting ? Many thanks.
I suggest learning about iray section planes as an alternative. They create a virtual "hole" in geometry so that light from the hdri shines through. Paper Tiger has an awesome X-ray camera which is a camera with iray planes parented to so that you always get the light of the scene HDRI while you never see the hole. This explains how to set up your own: https://nabesaka.com/interior-lighting-tips-for-daz-studio-3d/
You're not going to like this, but if your finished images have too much noise, it's probably because you haven't rendered them for long enough.
On the Render Settings tab, go to Progressive Rendering and check the setting of Max Time (secs). By default this is set to 7200 - which means the render will finish after two hours, no matter how noisy it is. I would suggest setting this to zero, which tells it to ignore elapsed time when deciding it it's finished.
You don't have a very powerful rig (neither do I), so render times are going to be slow for anything even remotely challenging. I tend to set a render going and then go do something else for an hour or two, it takes longer if you sit and watch it!
Very thankful for the the information I will give it a good read through , Any other information about rendering or lighting you can give from your experience ?
Thanks for the information about rendering times, I guess when you start out you assume your gonna get something straight away. I need to be a little more patient I guess. The main thing I am trying to figure out is how to get quantity while retaining some quality. That image with the girls in the water, Did you render the background first then add the girls. did you do that HDRI thing to make the background. Any other general information for lighting and rendering would be greatly appreicated.
This image? There's an HDRI of a forest scene that's mainly used for lighting - you can't really see any of it directly in the picture, but the treetops are reflected in the water. Everything else you see is actual geometry. I did two renders: one with everything in it - figures and scenery - that I probably ran overnight, the other with just the scenery that I ran pretty quickly because I wasn't too bothered if it was a little noisy. I also generated a depth canvas (see my sig for a tutorial on them). In a graphics program, I applied some gaussian blur to the scenery-only picture (which is why I wasn't bothered about noise) and used the depth canvas to combine it with the main picture to blur the background. You can achieve a better depth of field effect within Daz by setting camera properties, but I wanted more control over where the blurriness would appear - and it's quicker to do it this way.
I don't often composite together multiple renders, it's not often worth the trouble. If you're going to do it, a useful technique to have in your toolbox is to fully use the spot render tool. One place where it's useful is when you finish a long render, then realise it contains some small mistake or other detail you want to change. Make the change, select the Spot Render tool, go to the Tool Settings tab and set it to render to a new window, then drag the marquee around the bit of your image you need to re-render. It'll render just that part of the image, leaving the rest transparent - making it easy to combine with the original render in post. The same technique can be useful when producing complex scenes from multiple renders.