Working with a low end PC
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Posts: 8
I basically have a slow and bad processor but I've been told that it's good enough to make renders. I was wondering what are some ways that I can render decent artwork without it being too hard on my PC. For example, if i currently stick to using genesis models are they less work to render? And what are some general settings to tone down the resources used when rendering but still produce ok art work. I realised im not going to able to do anything stellar but im just currently learning the program and messing around and want to render what i do, and not have it take literally hours, like it currently is.
Specs are: AMD A4 4020 3.2 GHz cpu, 8 gig ram, gt 610 gpu
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There are two main render engines in DAZ Studio, Iray (the default) and 3Delight.
Iray will use your CPU (all cores) and your GPU if you have a suitable nVidia card. 3Delight uses CPU only, so the more cores your processor has the better.
Which engine do you currently use? How many cores (threads) does your processor have?
It's a dual core, I have no idea how many threads, how do i actually look that up? The few times i attempted to render i tried using Iray.
On Windows look in Task Manager under Performance, and see how many boxes there are under CPU Usage History. If each core has a seperate thread available, you should see four boxes, and Iray will use them all (like having four processors). It may only have two.
The render times in Iray may be a lot slower than 3Delight depending on the Scene and lighting. Try 3Delight to see if it serves you any better. In 3DL, you can turn the Shading Rate up from the default of 1.0 to 2 or even 4 for quicker renders, but they will not be as good. There is no simple way of reducing the render times that will give really good results, I have an four core i7 with 8 threads, and renders can still take a while in 3DL with a large scene.
For rendering you really need to get a better PC to get much better results, mine is at least 4 years old, and if I want to keep up, I will need to think about getting an expensive nVidia card, a better OS, and some more RAM.
If you can post details of what is in your scene, and how you are lighting it, we could maybe help more.
It has 2 boxes. Im not making any particular scene at the moment just looking for general advice, I'm still just messing around and learning the basics of the program. Just wanted general advice for making renders less resource heavy I guess, does using older models help, like V4 and genesis, other Genesis 2 and 3? I'm obviously going to avoid scenes that are overly large and have many models in it at this stage.
Lower end machine doesn't neccissarily mean you can't make good renders, it just means it takes a bit longer to render and with 8 gigs RAM you won't be able to put as much stuff in our scene at once (but still a pretty good amount, I started with 8 and was able to do quite a lot.)
The older models like V4 and M4 actually had a lot more polys than Genesis. V4 has about 70,000 and Genesis (original, at base resolution) has about 19,000, so using older models is not a help actually. The number of polys in a Scene will count of course, but it all comes down to the fact that rendering takes time. Iray can do some very quick renders with a suitable nVidia (high end) card. To speed up renders dramatically really requires more, and better hardware. Once we get our machine the way we want it, we start to do bigger and better renders, and then the cycle starts all over again.
I hope I am not depressing you? We are always here, and there are a lot of forum members that can help yu get the most out of your setup. Build a sccene, render it, and then post an image of what is in the Scene, and your Render Settings, and there will be someone who can help.
When I started I had a geforce gtx 460 nvidia card, 8 GB Ram and an AMD athlon II x3 (3 core processor running at 3.2 Ghz) and had no troubles making some pretty good scenes.
Now, well I still have the same processor but upgraded to 16GB RAM and a GTX 970 card and the only difference is renders are faster and I can fit more into the scene if I need to (8GB still holds quite a bit of stuff in a scene)
The actual quality of the render doesn't change except through practice :)
» Once we get our machine the way we want it, we start to do bigger and better renders, and then the cycle starts all over again.... «
Well said Jimmy, haha
Reminds me on my first Mac that would cost like 15 Macs nowadays back in the early 1990s.
A simple Gaussian Blur in Photoshop 1.x on a screen size resolution pic took me 2 hours back then.
I can remember Adobe invented a small preview window in an update and that was like APPLAUSE!
I see, no you aren't depressing me, I do intend to upgrade my PC later anyway, or buy a new one in the next few years. But I'd like to ask more about the models, you said v4 is actually WORSE than genesis, so what are the best models to use, what generation? Are G2 and G3 better to use than genesis or is genesis level models the best to use at this point, I just want to start buying models in the range that I can best render easily. I guess I'll start asking specific questions about render settings on a scene by scene basis when i start doing stuff. I actually thought that v4 and m4 WERE genesis 1 though lol, I'm pretty new to all this, when do the models start being genesis 1?
Victoria 4/ Micheal 4 have a LOT more polys than any of the Genesis figures, I know Genesis 3 has less than Genesis 2. I don't know if Genesis 3 has more or less than Genesis 1 but it's probably close enough to not matter. So.. unless you want to use a specifically low poly figure (that won't look good close up) choose Genesis 1 or Genesis 3.
Stay away from HD morphs, those will take your machine forever to render.. or at least turn then off until you're ready to render your final image (preferably while you're sleeping). There are a lot of things you can do to speed up rendering without an obvious quality loss, much more than one could fit into a single post, and I'm sure many more ways than I know of.
One of my machines is an ancient Intel core 2 duo (that's six years older than yours!) It is slower and has no turbo. Renders takes much, much longer but there is no difference in the quality of output.
As to the model choice, you get the Genesis1, Genesis2 and Genesis3 bases for free. Converting between them is relatively trivial. The need to settle on a specific model is really only a hangover from the bad old days when conversion was much more difficult.
Genesis 1 is the base for V5.