Render speed slow
super_joel
Posts: 118
Can anyone give any tips about making rendering speed up? It takes about an hour per render for me here ...
DAZ 4.7 used on
Win7-64bit
AMD E-450 dual-core
AMD Radeon HD 6300
4 GB DDR3
Inside the virutal studio I'm using 3 spotlights, no backdrop color (indeed I can't figure out how to change that), and rather light on the number of props.
It makes it hard to check-render to see if my lighting is right or the colors work ... pretty much just set everything up, hope really hard, hit render and walk away and eat or sleep or something. Come back tomorrow to see how it looks.
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Sadly, there's not enough information here for us to work with since we have no idea what is in your scene. But, I will say that 4Gb isn't much in the way of RAM for 3D rendering work. Your PC is having to store a lot of texture information TWICE. Once for Daz Studio, and again in optimized form for the render engine. It's also using up a lot of memory for caching different types of data, such as subsurface scatter pre-calculations.
In short, when your PC runs out of physical memory it starts to use your HDD instead. This is slow compared to RAM, and I mean very slow. Even an SSD is slower compared to RAM and you'll feel the impact of it through longer render times. The first thing to check is how much memory your scene is using. You can do this by running Task manager with your basic scene and clicking on the Performance tab.
If the scene is lightly populated, it shouldn't be too memory intensive, but it be aware than HD morphs bring the total polygon count into the millions and have huge memory overheads as a result. So, if my suggestions haven't helped much post details on your scene and what's included so we can help you out. Click the 'Scene Info' tab and post it here so we can get an idea of how big the area is you're trying to render.
It's also worth noting that different quality settings will also impact render times, so lower them a bit for draft images and raise them again for your final piece.
Well, so ... I did not find a 'scene info' but there was a scene tab. It did not let me copy+paste all that it said.
So I will try to cut down on the background (a grassy ground, two trees, two benches, a fountain, and a columned wall). Leaving just the two genesis figures, their clothes+hair, a Base Camp Base 1 for them to stand on, three lights, and the default camera.
Now, I will do another render and compare speeds.
If the difference was not noticeable or noticeably slight, then I guess we can assume neither render was loaded to a degree as to make any difference and look for other changes that I can make.
If the difference is noticeable, then I can assume it is just too darn old of a computer to take pictures of walking in the park and find different subject matter to keep me occupied until an upgrade is feasible.
Some tips of what will slow renders down.
(1) Transparency maps, often used in hairs and in trees and bushes.
(2) Many lights and reflections.
(3) Maximum Trace Level (in advanced render settings) Above 4 can be slow and unneeded, unless you really have 4 surfaces to cross.
(4) Shading Rates below 0.1 can be really slow.
(5) Size of the rendered image.
Then it's about the amount of textures and meshes you have in the scene which takes memory.
4GB is fairly slim (I have 4GB on my laptop that I sometimes use when not at home and I usually refuse to render on it as it just runs out of RAM all the time.
Remember that todays textures are 4096x4096 or sometimes even larger, add 40 if those and you'll use a lot of RAM. So, unless you have a figure visible, sometimes using a low res texture can save the day. Why waste a 4096x4096 texture on a couple of eyes that are about 5x5 pixels large at the final render?
And no copy/paste needed. The easy way is to simply take a screenshot either using the Printscreen button or the Windows snipping tool. Et voila.
off the top of my head, you might want to consider a few things. I have found that using the lights that come with Daz3d natively aren't very efficient when it comes to lighting render times. I switched to AoA Advanced lights a while ago, and that made a lot of difference when it came to render time. Another thing that might help you is Adjusting the render quality on the render tab. If you're just doing test renders, change it to a lower setting and then when you're ready to do your final render you can turn the quality back up.
As to your hardware, I know you probably don't want to hear it so close to the holidays, but you're going to want to prepare for a few upgrades. Dual core processors are fine for a laptop, but they are going to hamstring you for anything 3D, especially something like Daz Studio. You really want to look for something with a quad core processor or above if you're going to want to really improve those render times. I was dying when I first started because my render times were taking forever. A lot of that changed when I really upgraded my hardware to support what I was doing. Daz and 3Delight use the CPU to render so a new video card won't really give any sort of recognizable speed boost. You have to get a good processor, motherboard and RAM to give you a better chance of rendering with speed.
A couple of years ago, I really upgraded and now most of my renders take about 4 to 7 minutes. The only time it takes longer is if I add a lot of characters to the scene.