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Help with render settings

Me2121Me2121 Posts: 0
in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

Hi, so first I would like to point out that I'm fairly new with Daz3d (started just a few days ago), apologies if I'm doing something wrong or if I don't understand this correctly yet.

PC specs might also be important so I'll just leave what I'm currently using here:
Intel Core i5 4670K @ 3.40GHz
16,0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 666MHz
3071MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB

At first, I followed a couple tutorials on youtube and managed to create my very first render which came out perfectly acceptable to me as a test (test1.png)
Then I tried something more ambitious, so I made a new scene with an environment (which included lights), a few props, and a fully clothed character.
Turns out my Iray preview started getting a lot noisier(?) yet I decided to try and render it anyway to test it out and in hopes that it would come out fine when it was fully rendered but it didn't (check render1.png).
Note: Both were rendered in preset full HD 1080p.

After a bit of tweaking in rendered settings, I managed to get this in my Iray preview (test2.png) but I have lowered the dimension to 720p preset. Now I don't see any noise(?) in Iray preview but it does seem a bit blurry in some places which makes me afraid of rendering. If possible, I would like to stick with 1080p renders and not go beyond that, so my question is, am I being held back by my pc specs, or am I just doing something wrong? I'm fine with leaving my pc on while I sleep in order to get 1080p renders lol.

Also worth pointing, I have enabled Post Denoiser, my current Max Samples is set to 15000, and Max Time (secs) was set to 100000 just a few minutes ago. Render Quality is set to 2.

My goal is to create 1080p renders (remove noise in render1.png) but if it's too much of a hassle for a new user like me I'm fine with sticking with 720p, but in that case, I'm curious if the blurring could be an issue or if that's just Iray preview. Sorry if I'm not explaining it right, I can also post more screenshots if needed. Thanks in advance!

test1.png
1920 x 1080 - 3M
render1.png
1920 x 1080 - 5M
test2.png
1920 x 1017 - 866K

Comments

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 100,747

    If your GPU has only 3GB of RAM that is going to be very limiting. When the scene exceeds that amount of RAM it will, by default, drop to using the CPU - but that is much slower, increasing the likelihood that the render will take more than the default two-hour maximum duration and so it will appear noisy. If you are aiming for 1080p then you can almost certainly reduce the texture sizes (e.g. using Scene Optimiser from the store, or just manually and reapply the new maps) but if possible you do want a new GPU with more memory - ideally an RTX model with 8GB or more.

  • Me2121Me2121 Posts: 0

    Richard Haseltine said:

    If your GPU has only 3GB of RAM that is going to be very limiting. When the scene exceeds that amount of RAM it will, by default, drop to using the CPU - but that is much slower, increasing the likelihood that the render will take more than the default two-hour maximum duration and so it will appear noisy. If you are aiming for 1080p then you can almost certainly reduce the texture sizes (e.g. using Scene Optimiser from the store, or just manually and reapply the new maps) but if possible you do want a new GPU with more memory - ideally an RTX model with 8GB or more.

    Hmm... So you're saying that giving a try to Scene Optimiser is the best possible outcome for what I want to achieve? I'll definitely give it a try and see it myself but I'm not sure if I'd be satisfied with reducing the textures too much. Still, thanks a lot for the suggestion, will give it a try for sure!

    Just to make sure, could I possibly reduce or completely remove noise if I increase the render times by a lot in some way that I don't know or would that just be an infinite loop of getting noisy renders? I would be fine with not getting the most accurate Iray outcomes as long as the final render looked fine :/

  • SpottedKittySpottedKitty Posts: 7,232

    Me2121 said:

    Just to make sure, could I possibly reduce or completely remove noise if I increase the render times by a lot in some way that I don't know or would that just be an infinite loop of getting noisy renders?

    It's in the Render Settings pane.

    Iray rendering has three default stop conditions (there is no such thing as "the render finished" in Iray). The default time is two hours (measured in seconds). If you set this to zero, the time limit is ignored and one of the other stop conditions (no. of render iterations or % convergence) will be hit instead.

    I would be fine with not getting the most accurate Iray outcomes as long as the final render looked fine :/

    Note that it is still possible for a render to be allowed to run well past the default stop settings, and still not quite look "finished". This usually means the lighting and/or materials settings need to be adjusted for best results. If you get to this point, post again and someone here is sure to have good advice for you.

  • xialiubeixialiubei Posts: 71

    Me2121 said:

    Hi, so first I would like to point out that I'm fairly new with Daz3d (started just a few days ago), apologies if I'm doing something wrong or if I don't understand this correctly yet.

    PC specs might also be important so I'll just leave what I'm currently using here:
    Intel Core i5 4670K @ 3.40GHz
    16,0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 666MHz
    3071MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB

    At first, I followed a couple tutorials on youtube and managed to create my very first render which came out perfectly acceptable to me as a test (test1.png)
    Then I tried something more ambitious, so I made a new scene with an environment (which included lights), a few props, and a fully clothed character.
    Turns out my Iray preview started getting a lot noisier(?) yet I decided to try and render it anyway to test it out and in hopes that it would come out fine when it was fully rendered but it didn't (check render1.png).
    Note: Both were rendered in preset full HD 1080p.

    After a bit of tweaking in rendered settings, I managed to get this in my Iray preview (test2.png) but I have lowered the dimension to 720p preset. Now I don't see any noise(?) in Iray preview but it does seem a bit blurry in some places which makes me afraid of rendering. If possible, I would like to stick with 1080p renders and not go beyond that, so my question is, am I being held back by my pc specs, or am I just doing something wrong? I'm fine with leaving my pc on while I sleep in order to get 1080p renders lol.

    Also worth pointing, I have enabled Post Denoiser, my current Max Samples is set to 15000, and Max Time (secs) was set to 100000 just a few minutes ago. Render Quality is set to 2.

    My goal is to create 1080p renders (remove noise in render1.png) but if it's too much of a hassle for a new user like me I'm fine with sticking with 720p, but in that case, I'm curious if the blurring could be an issue or if that's just Iray preview. Sorry if I'm not explaining it right, I can also post more screenshots if needed. Thanks in advance!

    Have you tried rendering in 3Delight yet?  You can bypass the noise altogether, and it's better for underpowered PCs like yours that don't have the RAM to handle iray.  Just make sure you're using 3Delight shaders.

  • MalandarMalandar Posts: 776

    Until recently, I was on an I5 with a 1060 with 3 gigs of ram as well, I tried to do IRAY renders as well for a while until I just got too frustrated with the render times . I shifted back to the 3Delight renderer and I got renders done WAY faster. You have to use non IRAY optimized textures and lights, but it renders way faster and still looks good. If you just want to use IRAY, be prepared for long render times with that setup.

  • deepswingdeepswing Posts: 152

    I think Iray render times affect all of us, and we are all keen to get them down. A few things which might help you in the beginning:

    • Try to limit yourself to only a few light sources, or considering using a dome if possible. Keep in mind that every light source has an effect on all objects of the scene, so the render engine has to compute how each pixel is affected by the light sources in the scene. The less you have, the better it (normally) gets.
    • What I have learned way too late is that stuff which is not visible in the scene is still affecting render times. For example, if you have posed a model on a balcony, looking from behind her shoulders into the wilderness, but the whole house with 10+ light sources are behind her and thoug not visible, they will still be considered during rendering, negatively impacting render times. For my renders, I try to delete as many objects as I can from the scene before I render. 
    • The type of light source has an effect as well, if you use the predefined spotlight, distant light etc it normally works pretty fast, if you combine this with emitting surfaces, the render times will go up. I achieve best results with a dome only normally, where I keep the "Environment Lighting Resolution" at the standard of 512 (some vendors chose to increase this to 4096, and this again increased my render times).
    • In the advanced section of your Iray render engine (Render Settings -> Advanced), there are two texture compression thresholds you can choose. The higher these values are, the more memory will be consumed during rendering, with your GTX 1060 I would definitely stay lower here, otherwise it's doing the CPU fallback and this will take longer during rendering. But it depends a lot on your scene on what the values should look like, if you do portraits or in general close-ups, they should not be too low as then it will look cheap. If the model is far away, where her dress doesn't really matter, you can lower them (this thread I liked very much about it: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/333711/texture-compression-still-don-t-get-it) 

    I am still not an expert, so anybody knowing it better, please feel free to chime in. 

  • Me2121Me2121 Posts: 0

    deepswing said:

    I think Iray render times affect all of us, and we are all keen to get them down. A few things which might help you in the beginning:

    • Try to limit yourself to only a few light sources, or considering using a dome if possible. Keep in mind that every light source has an effect on all objects of the scene, so the render engine has to compute how each pixel is affected by the light sources in the scene. The less you have, the better it (normally) gets.
    • What I have learned way too late is that stuff which is not visible in the scene is still affecting render times. For example, if you have posed a model on a balcony, looking from behind her shoulders into the wilderness, but the whole house with 10+ light sources are behind her and thoug not visible, they will still be considered during rendering, negatively impacting render times. For my renders, I try to delete as many objects as I can from the scene before I render. 
    • The type of light source has an effect as well, if you use the predefined spotlight, distant light etc it normally works pretty fast, if you combine this with emitting surfaces, the render times will go up. I achieve best results with a dome only normally, where I keep the "Environment Lighting Resolution" at the standard of 512 (some vendors chose to increase this to 4096, and this again increased my render times).
    • In the advanced section of your Iray render engine (Render Settings -> Advanced), there are two texture compression thresholds you can choose. The higher these values are, the more memory will be consumed during rendering, with your GTX 1060 I would definitely stay lower here, otherwise it's doing the CPU fallback and this will take longer during rendering. But it depends a lot on your scene on what the values should look like, if you do portraits or in general close-ups, they should not be too low as then it will look cheap. If the model is far away, where her dress doesn't really matter, you can lower them (this thread I liked very much about it: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/333711/texture-compression-still-don-t-get-it) 

    I am still not an expert, so anybody knowing it better, please feel free to chime in. 

    Hi again, thanks to everyone for the replies, very helpful information. I've been hitting render -> pausing (when I need to use my pc lol) -> resuming for a while now on a few renders and the results started to slowly get better, it just takes time.

    About your 2nd point. Should I delete stuff that doesn't show up on my final render or is it enough if I hide it on the scene tab? I've been trying that on some renders but I always hide it just for the sake of not making too many saves of the same scene if I want to pose things differently. I could always delete some of the stuff right before I hit render and not save it in case I want to change stuff, just really want to know if hiding is enough or deleting it the way to go.

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