general question, how do you keep DAZ workable ?
william VV
Posts: 21
I'm still on a very early beginners level in DAZ. (been in poser for decades, but decided to give DAZ a go as I can't get genesis to work properly in poser :)
ofcourse i'm always compairing to poser when i'm in DAZ (latest version)
So some things make DAZ unworkable for me :
rendertime : I've been able to 'reduce' rendertime to approx 1.5-2hrs. (i've seen discussions here where rendertimes of 12-15 hours, even days are mentionned)
still, one to two hours is too long for me (e.g. in poser12 takes a firefly/superfly render at an acceptable decent quality setting (for me) 15-60minutes (depending on the complexity of the scene)
with renders in an average of 20-30minutes i can live , because if something needs to be fixed, it can quickly be adjusted en rerendered. In DAZ, waiting for an hourandahalf only to find out rerendering is needed is too much timeloss. Also because while DAZ is rendering , work can't continue in the scene. (in poser you can continue working while rendering)
second thing is Dforce simulation (one piece of clothing or hair takes at least 45 minutes to simulate.
so , counting all this, a few clothing items, hair and rendertime takes up to 5+ hours just for 1 render. (which can be totally off and has to be redone.)
meanwhile I can go cook a 5course dinner including the grocerieshopping :D :D )
I know my system isn't state of the art, but if I can achieve decent quality renders in about 30minutes in poser and continue working meanwhile, I would expect something more or less similar in DAZ but atm you can see that DAZ doesn't lend itself to a fluid workflow at all ...
so my question is , is everyone experiencing DAZ this way ? any tricks tips, to speed up things, to continue work while rendering at least ? (I have searched the forums and found some interesting usefull tips here and there (render settings/Dforce settings,...) which make a difference somehow, but not anything that makes the 'woww yesss!!'difference. (e.g opening a 2nd instance of DAZ always ends op in freezing/crashing sooner or later)
just like to know your opinions/workarounds/solutions on this :)
thanks already :)
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Understood! Fully understood! Unfortunately in most cases, 'Woww yesss' or 'Yayeee' really depends on your hardware (esp. graphics card) and the scene you're working on... Shall we first have some info. of your hardware spec..?
I would say that render time really depends on several things - mostly making sure you have a supported nVidia card and the scene you are rendering fits within the memory of that card. If you have to drop to CPU rendering then that will drastically increase the render time. Therefore, some general tips would be to use one or more of the optimisation packages to reduce the footprint by removing/hiding items that are not visible from the camera's view and/or reduce textures for assets that are further away from the camera etc. That's in addition to utilising things like instances in favour of duplication where possible when building the scene.
Also, in case you were not aware, Daz Studio does have a spot render feature. So, depending on what you need to fix in a rendered scene, you can make your fixes and then just render the area that has been updated. Providing you set that to new window and save it as a png then you can merge the files in Photoshop or other graphics package.
With regards to doing other things on the same machine while rendering - I would generally never do this as it will negatively affect the render time. However, I am in a fortunate position in that I can leave my Windows machine rendering while doing something else on my Mac but obviously most people are not in this position.
So what render engine do you use? I'm kinda missing that in your post: there's quite a difference between Iray and 3Delight for example. And in addition I'd also like to mention Filament which, though less detailed than Iray, can still be a very useful engine for creating "quick" renders. Maybe not as detailed, but you can definitely build some solid renders with it.
That can also be done in Daz Studio: you can change the viewport's render engine to either Filament or Iray. While this doesn't necessarily help to reduce render time you could use it that way by telling Daz Studio to merely use your viewport as render output. Still, my rendering time heavily depends on the scene at hand. That and the render settings, these can make quite a difference as well. Generally speaking my rendertime is approx. 40 minutes using Iray which is IMO not too shabby.
Can't comment on dForce because I seldomly use it, not much of a fan of that.
Apples and oranges IMO: workflow doesn't necessarily have much to do with the rendering process because that's mostly dependand on your engine and its settings. Workflow, to me, would be the way you set up your scenes, how you bring your assets together and the time you take to actually pose and model them. That's the part that confuses me here because generally speaking (again) it takes me waay more time to set up my scene than to render the whole thing.
Which, once again, is where workflow comes into place IMO: being able to quickly center a figure to check my pose from multiple angles, being able to quickly (un)hide other parts of my scene to make this checking easier, being able to quickly move assets around without necessarily havving to drag 'm, being able to quickly pose parts of a figure or, in extension: being able to group items together.
That is what I'd consider workflow, not the rendering process.
Not for me, no. Like I said: the process to build my scenes using my own poses and sub-sets which I then bring together in my main project takes way more time (and effort) than the rendering process. As for speeding up... well, Filament comes to mind but maybe also making less complex sceneries?
Of course I have to guess but the more assets you add to a scene the more work this is going to be for the render engine. Do you really need all of that to make it work?
Hard to give advice without knowing what your system specs are. I used poser for years before movimng to Daz Studio, can't imagine going back to it. It is unrealistic to expect Daz Studio to be comparable to poser and vice versa
Your render times will really vary based on how complex your scene is and your system specs. You can forget about the working on another scene will rendering, DS doesn't work like that and it's not a good idea to try and have two versions of DS open at the same time.
If you are able to use the Iray preview mode, you can see changes to your scene as you go and get a better idea of what the actual render will look like.
I have an older i7 6700K system with a 2080ti and scenes with 2 figures, hair and some clothes with a average detailed environment usually takes about 20-30 minutes and I usually use dforce hair and clothing so I am used to setting up the simulation and then doing something else until it is done.
Personally I export to blender and work there. Or you can use the scene optimizer if you really really want to stay with daz studio.
https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com
https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
First of all, thank you all for so much informative feedback and very useful information !!
@crosswind :
I knew I forgot to mention something
Win10
HP workstation Z23O 32GB ram
NVIDIA Quadro K2200 4GB
(not much, i know, but it runs poser smooth as silk (yes, still making that mistake of comparing DAZ to poser :D )
@Sofacitizen :
indeed that is perhaps the case that it drops back to CPU .. my scenes are not that complex (at least not in build) it's just 1 or 2 character, clothes, hair and a very basic room setting with only some very basic furniture (e.g 2 chairs, table, simple obj cupboard closet and perhaps a picture on the wall.) . I still keep it as simple as possible just to tryout DAZ and experimenting with lighting etc.
Very good to know about spot render. will surely make a big time difference :)
it is not my intention to do other things while rendering. that I have never done in poser as well.. it's perhaps my luxury habit that i could continue work in poser's scene while it was rendering both in background and in Queu manager. In DAZ i can twiddle thumbs or leave it running at night.
I have a second pc indeed, but that one is even lighter than the workstation and still on w8.1. it runs poser, but has difficulties with complexer scenes like outdoors or 5+ MV/V4 characters etc... so i'm not even gonna bother installing daz on that one :D
@ Shelluser :
I render in lray but i switch to 3delight occasionally just to see if it makes difference in time. (also not fully understanding lighting as well.. as for instance, some require dome or are HDRI lights but regardless DOME is activated or not, these lights never load (at least , there's no visible change in the viewport.. but that's perhaps another topic :) )
I've only seen filament as a viewportpreview, .. Do i have to select that for filament rendering ? or where can i find it ? sure is something to try out. And I would be more than happy with 40minute renders :D
the few clothing sets I have are mostly Dforce, as well as the hair. it seems to me Dforce clothing can't be posed (or is very limited to be adjusted by sliders to the figure's pose). Do you have only non Dforce cloth sets or how do you do it to 'avoid'/workaround Dforce? (as that would be a major timesaver ofcourse
Sorry about the confusion of 'workflow' .. I only intended it as comparison of DAZ to poser. for the rendering ... my system runs easy and smooth working in poser scene while it's rendering in background and simultaneously in queue manager . I tought something similar would be possible in DAZ as well ... that is what i meant with 'workflow' . Ofcourse, what you understood under 'workflow' is for DAZ vs poser indeed apples-oranges :D
i'm totally not in complex scenes, just basic try-and-error 'get to know daz' minimalistic scenes
@ FSMCDesigns :
totally agree on that one .. allthough i achieve very realistic character/portrait rendering in poser, they're still stuck on V4 and M4 for decades now. only newer figure there was LaFemme. I tried and tried to get genesis to poser but it always gave somewhere bugs, flaws mesh/posing/clothing issues, so I finally gave up and continued with good ole V4
so my next step would be getting V4 into DAZ and somehow copy my custom characters to genesis8-9 (I did already some research but it seems a steep long path...)
I switch to lray preview often.. i've been able to reduce previewrendertime drastically, but it's sadly not continuously usable while working. Or are you perhaps able to work on the scene while in lray preview?
that 30minute rendering including Dforce sim would be very welcome for me as well :D but I guess only solution is to upgrade my system :D
@Padone
thanks for the tip on scene optimizer, will check it out and consider it ...
never used blender, but since i'm learning daz, i might take blender on as well :D
Sorry all for replying this way, but this was the fastest easiest way as the server disconnects often
That card is as usefull for Iray rendering as any generic GPU that one can buy with pocket change. You are rendering on CPU alone, and that is why your renders are taking hours.
The practical minimum for Iray rendering is having an RTX GPU with minimum 8GB's of VRAM.
Get yourself an RTX 3060 12GB and your renders are done in 5-15 minutes.
This was rendered on RTX 3060 12GB in 5 minutes and 5 seconds.
I think PerttiA has already given you the main answer - the video card not being able to take advantage of iray is unfortunately going to be the biggest culprit and any other advice I could give is largely irrelevant :(
If upgrading is not a possibility for you then there are some cloud-based render services available. I have no experience with any of them and obviously not something to help if you are just testing things out currently but perhaps it might be handy to know they are there incase they would be useful in the future.
Even with a decent graphics card in my main machine I do not have iray preview on continously either. I mainly use the textured preview and flip to iray preview every so often to check a few things. Not sure there is a way to actually test it, but it is commonly suggested that using the preview takes up a bit of the card memory and so when you come to do your actual render it's best to restart Daz first. Again, not something too relevant unless you can upgrade that card but something to note for the future.
To be fair, those are all game assets ripped from RDR2 and made to work with G8, so they are not nearly as resource heavy as similar outfits purchased from DAZ. Cool image though.
Probably the only problems I have using Daz are due to VRAM and render speed of iray preview. I have 2080TI with ~12GB and I always go over VRAM and then have to split up render into chunks, even without multiple characters in scene. Optimisation is an option, but that too takes time. Im thinking of getting a 3090TI or 4090 for 24GB VRAM, but those are very expensive and not sure it's worth it for me.
I dont think I would have the patience to use Daz (or Blender etc) if I was stuck rendering on a CPU. I was doing that when i started Daz in 2017 and it was too restrictive. Having a card that can render Iray Preview and complete a render to decent iteration count within an hour or so made things so much more palatable.
Filament or porting to Blender and using Eevee may be options for people who cant use Iray.
Previously had a 2080ti. The view-port feedback speed improvement alone was worth the upgrade to 3090 24gb. Big step closer to real-time feedback so you don't have do something else for a bit.
Will skip the 4090 or that's the plan. Some of the rumors about 5000series sound like another big step, though obviously really early, so we'll see. 2 years away approx eta.
had my suspicions already the card might have something to do with it
the RTX you mention is fortunately within my budget. however, will my workstation be compatible with the card ( e.g .. workstation is DDR3 while the card is DDR6) or will it run at far less capacity than it's full potential ? want to be sure of that because a whole new pc is not so much within my budget
(intel xeon CPU E3 1226 3.30ghz - motherboard HP1905 32GBRAM)
nice render btw ... :)
as said earlier to Perttia, a new graphicscard is within budgetrange :) ... however, on the other hand, .. can items that require iray be rendered in 3delight as well ? (e.g. lights, shaders, character textures etc ... (same question for Dforce ... can anything that requires Dforce be posed without the Dforce animation as well ? like a conforming clothing or hair ? (yes, poserhabit again :D )
approaching my midsixties .. (damn how did they get here suddenly so fast ?? 
thanks for the tip on online rendering, but not so keen on doing things online... i'm an oldskool, , so I like to arrange things myself.. that's why i'm not very fond of smartcontent as well... I have even never used things like onedrive etc .. :D ... yes call me prehistoric ..
The type of RAM on the motherboard doesn't matter but if it has just 400W power supply, you need to get min. 650W (I prefer 750W+)
You can use 3DLight or Filament, but it's not just a matter of selecting an other renderer. DS can convert the textures on the fly and does a pretty decent job at it except for transparent and mirror surfaces, but for example the lights work differently and probably need to be changed.
At one year shy of sixty, I have considered myself a youngster here as there are people here that have been working with computers for a living in the 60's and 70's
ahh good to know , thank you ..
ok thanks, i'll try(and error :D ) with that ...
I'm autodidact when it comes to computers... been in artistic branche all my life (painting, drawing, sculpting ...) so i tought to give it a go on computers as well :D started early 2000 with computers as a 'deeper' interest and poser 3, 4,.... not considireing myself 'old' but it feels sometimes like waking up in the morning and 'what the heck ?? 64 already ???" :D