How many Daz House Cats can you render?
Pitmatic
Posts: 916
in The Commons
Hi
I realise that might be a weird question but I recently tried to have 5 daz housecats in a scene which resulted in Daz Studio having a bit of a disagreement with my GTX1050 so I cut my scene of 5 house cats and 2 G8Fs to just the one House cat with or with out the G8Fs so I was wondering if there is a clever way of having more housecat in a scene? and what is housecat doing thats so heavy on the system?
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Are you using just the cat or with dForce fur? Because the cat itself shouldn't use that many resources...
Have you tried using instances of house cats - they are a bit limited,
because each instance has the same pose,
but you could easily fill the scene with the cats. Instances use a very little of memory.
I am using the furry cat and different poses and textures are needed so instances wont work as all cats are different :)
I ended up rendering the scene in 5 passes and comped the cats together but i wanted to create an animation :(
So you were basically using the equivalent of 5 dForce hairs in the scene. It's not that surprising that it would use a lot of resources...
I've never used dForce hair much, so not really sure how you can reduce the resources it uses.
This is where using photo editing layers would be your friend. Make a background scene with no cats. Then do a render for each cat (placed and posed). All renders as PNG format with transparency (no background) and all light with the same lights.
Put all these images as layers in your photo editor. The lighting should be okay.
You may need to add some fake shadow if you did not render a canvas of the shadows. https://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-effects/cast-shadow/
GIMP and Affinity Photo can do this same thing as Photo$hop.
You could have a haus phull o'katz!!!!! A real cat house
Even rendering the dForce hair for a Genesis character as a separate image and assembling in photo editor layers can improve workflow time.
Think of it like paper dolls with additional cut-outs for different dresses. https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Paper-Dolls
I gave this a shot with my RTX 3090/64GB system. I had not tried multiple Daz cats but definitely ran into issues with multiple Daz wolves one time.
So here's a G8.1F with five Daz cats, from a single render with no postwork. Three of the cats have long fur, the other two are standard fur. It took just under nine minutes to complete.
It's worth pointing out that this otherwise simple scene was a non-trivial effort for this computer. Daz crashed every time I attempted to use Nvidia Viewport with all five cats visible. (To put that in perspective, Daz doesn't hard-crash if I accidentally use Nvidia Viewport with an Ultrascenery object.)
A GTX 1050 has 2GB of VRAM and RTX 3090 has 24GB of VRAM. To use the Nvidia GTX 1050 Card for rendering everything needs to fit within the 2GB of VRAM. Pitmatic would be better served by rendering elements of the scene that fit inside the 2GB and assembling in photo editing layers.
I would also recommend considering some of the following items to make best use of the hardware resources:
V3Digitimes Tools:
https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
https://www.daz3d.com/scene-analyzer-organizer-simplifier
https://www.daz3d.com/map-manager
MMX Resource Savers:
https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray
https://www.daz3d.com/mmx-resource-saver-shaders-collection-2-for-iray
https://www.daz3d.com/mmx-resource-saver-shaders-collection-3-for-iray_Mattymanx
https://www.daz3d.com/mmx-resource-saver-shaders-collection-4-for-iray
https://www.daz3d.com/mmx-resource-saver-shaders-collection-5-for-iray
https://www.daz3d.com/mmx-resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-genesis-9-and-iray
I did say I did it by rendering each element out and compositing the result I am saving up for a 3060 system which will be a massive improvement over what i am doing now.
@paulawp nice render :)
Cats are like potato chips-you can't have just one.
The most I ever had at a time was four- a combined litter of two brother-sister pairs. They were such a fun, lovable group and I still miss them a lot.
BTW: Sorry for your loss. One of my current two was recently found to have a recurrence of her cancer, so I know how hard it can be.
As other people have already said, it is the dForce hair that consumes a lot of resources of the House Cat, not the model and textures.
However if you tweak the parameters and settings as I have, you can manage the resources better.
1) Ensure Render Line Tesselation in the Simulation is set to 1. This is the default, but before Daz 4.21 some people would increase this to get more realistic hair. This is no longer necessary after 4.21 since the hair uses curves generated by the renderer, so a value of 1 is best. This ends up using a lot less resources then a setting of 3, which many human dForce hairs are given by default.
2) In the surfaces of the dForce hair, reduce the "Additional PR Hair Density(cm^2) setting. This is 1500 for some of the cat furs by default, which is really high and will generate a lot of individual hairs. I reduced this for all cats to 300, except for the orange one, which I set to 500. The value of this is one you need to tweak until you find a setting you are happy with. A high value will give a more dense hair covering, but at a far higher cost in system resources.
When I rendered the scene attached it used 5.1GB of VRAM on my 2060 Card (8GB). This might sound a lot, but when I render just the wooden floor without the cats, it used 3.4GB, so the cats were consuming 1.7GB of VRAM themselves. On that basis, I should in theory be able to add a further 8-10 cats without blowing the VRAM limit, but I have not tried this.