I am 'lost' in Rendering, need advice
ggrancharov
Posts: 39
Hey, the Daz3D bug just recently bite me and I just fell in love with this platform. Coming from AI / PS I never really had experience with rendering scenes.
I left everything at default, but it takes about two hours to render one image. Is that 'normal' for my configuration? Here it is:
iMAC, Late 2013 3.4 GHz Intel Core i5
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM (Kingston HyperX)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M 2048 MB
I attached the image that took approx. two hours to render to this post.
Is there anything I can to to speed up the rendering or do I have to change hardware? Thanks a lot for your support.
George
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Comments
Please attach an image with a clothed figure. Nudity is not allowed, per the Daz 3D Forum TOS
I apologize, - sure, just give me an hour to render it ^^
Hahaha!! I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing with you. That's a bummer to have to go through it again but yeah, rules... I struggle with render time too and got just as frustrated at first. I'm working with an i3Core and 4GB and mine take about 2hrs. I have asked some advice about it here too and most of the feedback is to upgrade my system to speed it up. That said, I haven't adjusted anything in the Render Settings either. I am happy with the quality (most times) of IRay and would prefer to wait for a decent render than sacrifice my finished product for speed. But if you're just experimenting and learning the ropes for now, switching to 3Delight isn't too bad. It's certianly a different picture but if all you're doing is checking poses for accuracy or to get a feel for things, it's good in a pinch. Just go to Render>Render Settings>and in the drop down where it says Iray, select 3Delight. Hope that helps. Hang in there.
2 Hour time sounds like you are rendering on CPU only - Is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M ticked off under Render Settings - Advanced ?
Although I think you only have 2 GB of graphic memory on that card it should be enough to render at least a nude figure even if the card is powering your monitor.(I had a similar card on Windows 8 & could do that but not much else without it falling back to CPU )
There may be something extra you need to update with Mac Drivers as I seem to remember reading it on here once but I use Windows & have a bad memory for things I don't need to do personally so maybe someone else will know the answer :)
To get CUDA running (which is needed for GPU render), you need to download CUDA from nVidia (here).
Pick the version for you OS X version.
You can also see if the GPU is active if you look at the advanced render settings in the Render Tab (see attached pic). The machine that the fist screenshot is taken on doesn't have any nVidia card, so it says CPU onlym the other has a GTX 780 card.
OMG!!! I looked in my advanced settings and I had been using CPU ONLY!! I just had an awesome render I've been screwing with for a week trying to get right. My CPU was doing the best it could. But I clicked the (and I'm a Windows user) an option I didn't see that said Optix Prime Exceleration and I turned out an awesome render in 1hr. Cut my time at LEAST in half!! I have a slow system so an hour is GREAT! And it actually looked pretty freakin good after about 30mins. I just didn't want to interupt. This thread was a God Send!!
Yes Yes Yes! You guys are awesome! I went from 2 hours to 10 minutes rendering the same scene. Lots of thanks and virtual beer! :)
You're welcome ;-)
What are those texture compression thresholds- what do higher or lower numbers do? And what are the pros and cons of using that Prime Acceleration? I am all for speed, but do any of these affect quality?
Compression thresholds are image sizes of texturemaps before they are being compressed down before being sent to Iray. This is the hard part for me as I like details in a closeup and at the same time huge scenes...
Prime accelration seems to work now, but was a little buggy in the first iterations of Iray, I always tend to avoid "shortcuts" as they always have one downside or the other.
I have tried different compressions but can never see any difference in the resullting render whatever I set that at but perhaps I just don't notice things others would or it matters more if you are rendering very large resolution? I would be interested to know what differences others see so I can look again.
I tested speeds using Prime Acceleration & it is working in 4.9 to reduce render times (In 4.8 it did not seem to do anything for me) - On very simple stuff (1 figure-start up HDR) its only a couple of seconds of time saved but I assume its saving me more as I add more things to render - I do not think using Prime acceleration will reduce quality since thats controlled by our "completion settings" & prime acceleration just gets you there faster.
Any kind of optimization is done through "cutting corners", instead of doing this complex calculation that takes xxx ms we simplify it and save xx ms / iteration, that is what it is. If it doesn't cut quality it's fine, but you never really know. Not saying it's bad though, just that it's how it works, otherwise it would be in the default Iray codechunk, if it was just performance optimization of code. As it is an option, it is performance optimization by cutting corners.
Totte, I had never looked at it like that until now but that makes perfect sense :)
Hmm, I feel I should change my name. We have TOTTe and TOTTallou. Anyway, thanks for the advice Totte!