rendering time
Hi guys, as stated, I'm a new user and thus have a lot of questions coming up during my.... yeah, that's the first one, how much time should a (for my understanding) simple render take? Actually I talk about a
G2 female face with 'beautiful skin', a tattoo, 'myEyes', hair and some torus-primitives with metal surface as earrings, 3 light sources, 5500x5100px on a
early 2008 MacPro, 10GB RAM, NVIDA GeForce GTX 680 4GB?
Am I limited to a final size? Somehow I have the feeling that everything works too slow here? Sometimes I think, my Mac may have a bug?? ;)
Any advice is welcome. Thank you already now.
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My understanding is that some renders can take hours to complete. Literally. I have heard of renders that took all day. I think Iray may take a lot longer than the others, but don't quote me on that as I am very new. I can generally render 3delight in a couple minutes for something simple but have also had renders take overnight, especially using IRAY. I have a new pc with a huge amount of memory and the most current Nividia card which may be why my 3delight renders so quickly. But my laptop, which is older and has much les ram etc. takes much longer to render than the new pc.
"Somehow I have the feeling that everything works too slow here?"
You neglect to mention exactly how long the render is taking. In an age where instant gratification seems to be the expected norm, long becomes a relative thing. As Sonja said, some renders take longer than others, and "simple" can be deceptive. The simplicity of a scene does not necessarily relate directly to the number of content elements from the render engine's perspective - transmaps can make a big difference, for example. You should also mention whether you are using Iray or 3Delight, BTW.
Yes, sorry, I should have mentioned that I render with iray.
And the rendering time for the described and attached scene was 3 hrs (showing a progress of 20% in the bar).
... and again, I forgot to mention, that affter 3+ hrs I canceled the render.
Sonja, your graphic card will give you better render times for Iray. And it will matter if the VRAM ( the graphic card's memory) is big enough to hold all of the textures&scene. Otherwise, the graphic card will do zilch and all rendering will be done by the CPU. Basically, any NVidea graphic card with just 2GB of memory is pretty much useless for Iray rendering. In Advanced render settings, it sometimes helps to check OptiX acceleration. If your card doesn't hold the scene, then the same rules apply as for 3Delight in regards to CPU, with the exception that Iray rendering will eat up lots of extra memory during render. I had scenes crash on me when my card ciuldn't hold it, and CPU was used instead.
3Delight is mostly influenced by the CPU and the number of cores you have. The faster the CPU, the more cores, the faster the render. Memory is only useful in regards to the size of the szene you can set up before the thing crashes.
generally speaking, in Iray, you can get better render times by using fewer light sources which are stronger, like Sunlight, or HDRI only. More light sources will mean more calculation time, and longer renders. That said, for rendering, especially in Iray or Luxrender, render times of several hours are not uncommon, especially if you render by CPU. The default settings in DAZ Studio will cut off the render after two hours in Iray, but LuxRender goes on until you stop it. You will get fast render times if you have at least a NVidea GTX980 Ti, better two or more. For those of us who can't afford them, it's more like "wait an hour or more before things look good".
For Iray, this thread has a couple of useful resources: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/56788/iray-start-here
Thank you. That makes sense. I will have to have a look at the card. I generall try and go with something that allows me to play the big rpg games with no lag (I bought the new computer right before I found daz lol.) My renders seem to generally take a bit less time on the new pc than what I am hearing from a lot of people so I am guessing its got whatever it is it needs lol. The laptop is a whole nother story, I use it when I need to be in bed with my foot propped up (I had a pretty severe tendon ligament injury in July and have spent a lot of time with it propped up lol). It takes much longer but it is also several years old and doesn't have nearly the goodies the new pc does. But it still gets the job done and if it takes all night for it to render, well, that's okay too.
ok, to make it less a game of words, I opened a new scene, put a G2M right out of the box and started rendering. Render time in 3Delight = 2min, time with iray (GTX 680 only, Dome and Ground off) = 35min. Does that look long?
no that is not long at all, quite fast actually
...forgot to mention, aspect ratio = 1500x1300. took the figure frontal and zoomed in until the fingers and the top of the head touched the edge.
Hi there folks,
I'm new to Iray but reading posts here and being experimental, I've learnt some basic stuff that might help the beginner. Also, it's easy to be put off a bit because of how long renders seem to take. My first bit of advice is to get rid of all light sources and read on...
Interior lighting can be difficult to start with but my tip here would be to use primitive emitters with the camera headlamp OFF. The attached file was shot using a single torus emitter. You can just see it reflected in her eyes. To make a primitive emitter you start with a primitive shape. I use a torus for portraits and a cylinder, flattened to a disc (I don't know why but it's similar to a reflector used in the film industry) for other stuff. I even use this method now for exterior shots as it is infinately easier to manage than the dome/sun thing.
Select it in the scene menu, go to the surfaces menu and select it there. You will notice the typical Daz parameters there for ambient light etc. Now you find the Iray Uber defaults in your content library if you have them there it's usually under shader presets or under 'I' in the products menu. Double click on '!Iray Uber Base and in the surfaces menu you'll see that the available parameters have changed to show the Iray parameters (mostly blue in motif).
Spool down to 'Emission Color' and change it to white.Look just below it for Luminace units, set that to lm (lumins) and set the luminance value to at least 2000000 (yes that's two million).
And you're done with that.
Because Iray works like a conventional film camera, the next place to go is to the Render Tab and then to 'Environment'.
Select scene only environment mode.
Go to Tone mapping and set shutter speed to 100, f/stop to 16 and film ISO to 200 (film speed).
Go to optimisation and select memory over speed (I've done this on advice and I'm not sure what the difference is yet but I digress).
Leave Alpha for another day... I have.
Progressive: These parameters have a big effect on the render in particular, how long the render takes. I shall explain as best I can; Iray goes back over the render time and time again improving it each time. These passes are called 'iterations'. In theory, it could 'iterate' forever but it is limited by default to 5000 passes. There is also a time limit on the render engine defaulted at 7200 seconds.
At this point, I don't know enough about the other fields to offer advice right now but here's the big news; you can limit how long the render takes using these two parameters! The example picture was set to a limit of 2500 iterations but I could have stopped it at 1000 as in my opinion, it would not have looked noticeably better at 2500 than it did at 1500 iterations.
Try those tips and mess around with them, see what you think, If nothing else it will help you get bold with Iray. Remember, you can have more than one emitter.
Finally. All surfaces including figures must have the Iray character or Uber Base applied.
The example photo was used in a comparison test on my machine to see what difference GPU vs CPU vs GPU/CPU made (set under the advanced tab).
My PC runs on an Asus Z79P MB. i7 4790k CPU. Asus GTX970 GPU. Here are the results for 1280x720 image at 2500 iterations limit:
GPU + CPU..........5mins 18 secs
GPU only..............5mins 47 secs
CPU only.............. Stopped test when it exceeded other arrays.
Sorry for so much content but I am so excited to finally be able contribute that I got carried away.
My thanks to all those contributors here who have stopped me going into therapy while I got to grips with Iray.
Good rendering
G
As a Noob, I thank you.
I'll give it a try.
Gray
Resolution has a lot to do with render times. 150x130 will take WAY less longer than 1500x1300 for example (I am not suggesting you render to that size). This is why I usually set the render size I want, lock the Aspect Ratio, and then cut the render size down to something small for tests.
2-3 hours for that first 5000x5000 ish sized render you first mentioned is NOT beyond the pale for Iray especially for the rig you have described.