Is there a way to avoid having to constantly restart Daz?

msk266

I'm not sure if this problem has always existed, but I believe not. Recently, I've been rendering quite a lot, and thus I encountered the issue constantly.
The thing is, Iray rendering fails more often than it does not.
Most of the time, the render fails outright, I just get a black output window. Sometimes, the rendering process just slows down to a crawl, and a render that usually takes, say 15 minutes is stuck at 2% after 10 minutes.
The only remedy for both issues seems to be restarting Daz Studio. Inefficient as the application is, the closing down process can take a minute or two, and then re-opening the scene takes another minute or two, in sum this wastes a ton of time.
As for what's causing the issue, I wish I knew, but basically, I thinks it boils down to using the GPU AT ALL. Using Iray preview can cause the issue (when the issue arises, Iray preview also becomes impossible, it just keeps loading indefinetly), using dForce simulation can cause the issue, making a full render can cause the issue.
It seems to me, something in Daz isn't "garbage collecting" properly and clogs down the CPU memory or something like that.
In any event, it's very annoying.

Does anybody know a workaround or remedy? If you were going to suggest something like that, I tried updating Daz (obviously I didn't try all older versions, I don't know if you can even download old ones. I THINK the issue did not exist some versions back), I tried updating my GPU drivers. No dice.

Thanks in advance.

Richard Haseltine

You are probably running out of memory on the GPU - which means that the render is dropping to CPU (and so is much slower) or stopping entirely, depending on Render Settings. Clearing the memory after that has always required an application restart.

msk266

Yeah, that's what I assumed as well. I disabled CPU rendering exactly for that reason, I don't want Daz to fall back on that, since it - quite obviously - takes ages in comparison.
Which is why I was hoping for some sort of workaround, because, let's face it, it shouldn't be neccessary to restart the application in this case.
If everything works again once I have started from scratch, something remained in the memory that should not have remained there.
Even if it always was like this, this is entirely the fault of Daz Studio, but I would have been fine with a third party solution, back in the day there were even tools to defragment the computer memory, so there should be SOMETHING out there.
Maybe not.

I guess I'll get a GPU with more memory at some point, but that might take a while. I'm sure prices haven't only surged where I live, so money can be a little harder to come by.

SofaCitizen

Defragging memory while the application that put things there is still running sounds like it would cause issues - although that is reminding me of the dark old days when we had to make special boot disks with EMM386 or whatever it was to move stuff out of the first 640K of memory. However, there is potential that it's not all down to Daz Studio itself - Iray is maintained by Nvidia and so if it's Iray-itself leaving stuff in the VRAM then not much Daz can do about it. Also, they are using an older version of QT which may not have such robust garbage collection (or methods for handling reserved memory) - they are working on moving to a newer version but it's one of those things that will change/break lots of things so is taking some time.

Anyway, there are some things you can do to work around the scenes exceeding the VRAM (which is also the cause of the forever-looping iray preview I believe) if you are not in a position currently to upgrade your graphics card.

• Make sure iray preview is off when launching your render & ensure that nothing else is running on the PC that would eat into the VRAM
• You can use something like Camera View Optimiser to analyse your scene and hide/remove things that are not visible within the selected camera. You can of course do this manually if you did not want to buy the script.
• You can use Billboards (where applicable) for background characters - there are lots of products that offer these and you can make your own if you have the time
• You can use one of the low-res style products for background figures - or make your own with something like Decimator
• Some figures had HD and non-HD versions and so you can use the lower-res one when not featured close-up
• You can use either "Resource saver shaders" to replace some materials with more efficient ones or "Scene Optimiser" to downsample selected map images used in your scene.
• If it will work with how your scene is setup, you can render your scene in "chunks" - there are probably a few ways to do this but one way could be to hide some parts (e.g. a figures' hair) and render out the scene and then unhide the hair and hide some other items and spot-render (making sure to set new window in tool options) a square over the hair, save that file as a PNG and then overlay it on the original image in an image editor
• Also, if applicable, you can render your background/environment and create your own HDRI from it, then use that as a background for any figures in the scene. I can't remember exactly the steps to do that but WPGuru has a video on YouTube explaining the process.

 

PerttiA

SofaCitizen said:

Anyway, there are some things you can do to work around the scenes exceeding the VRAM (which is also the cause of the forever-looping iray preview I believe) if you are not in a position currently to upgrade your graphics card.

• Make sure iray preview is off when launching your render & ensure that nothing else is running on the PC that would eat into the VRAM

Actually one should not use Iray preview at all during the session one plans to do rendering (if one frequently has problems rendering on GPU) 

SofaCitizen

PerttiA said:

Actually one should not use Iray preview at all during the session one plans to do rendering (if one frequently has problems rendering on GPU) 

Oh, absolutely, enabling the preview once will most likely reduce the amount of VRAM available for future renders that session. I was thinking more about other ways to reduce the need to restart Daz - which would include the building of the scene and then rendering it out without restarting. In those instances, at least for me, means there will be times where I need to pop back and forth between iray preview and textured preview to check a few things before I am happy to actually render out properly. Then, if you are left with a scene that no-longer renders/previews on the GPU and do not want to restart then there are some other options to try to reduce the resources required.

Unfortuantely, those sugestions do mostly involve taking time to do anyway so if the scene is only a little bit over the VRAM then a restart of Daz just before running the render is probably still the best/quickest solution.

jjoyner

One of the products that I bought in mid-2023 to help with preview/rendering/VRAM issues is Render Throttle for Iray (https://www.daz3d.com/render-throttle-for-iray).  With it, I can click a button to change the viewport to Iray preview resolution in Low, Medium or High.  The scripts change various settings so that the resources used for Iray preview mode are reduced. This makes navigating an Iray viewport less demanding.  Three other buttons let me choose rendering in Iray Low, Medium or High.  When selected, each button automatically shifts the viewport out of Iray preview mode and renders the scene.  A final button allows me to turn off Iray preview.  Last week, I was able to get Render Throttle for 3Delight (https://www.daz3d.com/render-throttle-for-3delight) that does similar things and I immediately noticed how it decreased render times when I want to do a 3Delight render.  Unfortunately, neither product is currentlyon sale (I only purchase products when they are on sale.)

If you're using a Windows PC and don’t have TechPowerUp GPU-Z (https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/) installed already, I recommend downloading and installing it to monitor RAM and VRAM usage better than the Window Task Manager can.  It's free and has been recommended by several posters in other threads.

iaunpom

msk266 said:

I'm not sure if this problem has always existed, but I believe not. Recently, I've been rendering quite a lot, and thus I encountered the issue constantly.
The thing is, Iray rendering fails more often than it does not.
Most of the time, the render fails outright, I just get a black output window. Sometimes, the rendering process just slows down to a crawl, and a render that usually takes, say 15 minutes is stuck at 2% after 10 minutes.
The only remedy for both issues seems to be restarting Daz Studio. Inefficient as the application is, the closing down process can take a minute or two, and then re-opening the scene takes another minute or two, in sum this wastes a ton of time.
As for what's causing the issue, I wish I knew, but basically, I thinks it boils down to using the GPU AT ALL. Using Iray preview can cause the issue (when the issue arises, Iray preview also becomes impossible, it just keeps loading indefinetly), using dForce simulation can cause the issue, making a full render can cause the issue.
It seems to me, something in Daz isn't "garbage collecting" properly and clogs down the CPU memory or something like that.
In any event, it's very annoying.

Does anybody know a workaround or remedy? If you were going to suggest something like that, I tried updating Daz (obviously I didn't try all older versions, I don't know if you can even download old ones. I THINK the issue did not exist some versions back), I tried updating my GPU drivers. No dice.

Thanks in advance.

I found an alternative or option to having to close DAZ and reload it and load the scene with the time it may take depending on the scene. I don't assure you that it works, I don't use it much because when it happens to me I close and reload DAZ and the scene and each GPU has its characteristics. If you have a system resource meter installed where you can see if the GPU is processing or GPU memory usage, when you launch a render and only the black screen comes up and the render ends, if you have put in the Render tab setthigs in the General section, Render target: New Window, the window in which the rendering you make is displayed. After finishing the rendering with a black image or 0 itinerations, you can hit Resume to relaunch the Render, the black screen will still appear, but it usually frees up part of the GPU memory I don't know why, you close the window or close it saving the black image, I don't know which option gives better results to empty the GPU memory,  and you do the Render again. It usually works for me.

iaunpom

iaunpom said:

msk266 said:

I'm not sure if this problem has always existed, but I believe not. Recently, I've been rendering quite a lot, and thus I encountered the issue constantly.
The thing is, Iray rendering fails more often than it does not.
Most of the time, the render fails outright, I just get a black output window. Sometimes, the rendering process just slows down to a crawl, and a render that usually takes, say 15 minutes is stuck at 2% after 10 minutes.
The only remedy for both issues seems to be restarting Daz Studio. Inefficient as the application is, the closing down process can take a minute or two, and then re-opening the scene takes another minute or two, in sum this wastes a ton of time.
As for what's causing the issue, I wish I knew, but basically, I thinks it boils down to using the GPU AT ALL. Using Iray preview can cause the issue (when the issue arises, Iray preview also becomes impossible, it just keeps loading indefinetly), using dForce simulation can cause the issue, making a full render can cause the issue.
It seems to me, something in Daz isn't "garbage collecting" properly and clogs down the CPU memory or something like that.
In any event, it's very annoying.

Does anybody know a workaround or remedy? If you were going to suggest something like that, I tried updating Daz (obviously I didn't try all older versions, I don't know if you can even download old ones. I THINK the issue did not exist some versions back), I tried updating my GPU drivers. No dice.

Thanks in advance.

I found an alternative or option to having to close DAZ and reload it and load the scene with the time it may take depending on the scene. I don't assure you that it works, I don't use it much because when it happens to me I close and reload DAZ and the scene and each GPU has its characteristics. If you have a system resource meter installed where you can see if the GPU is processing or GPU memory usage, when you launch a render and only the black screen comes up and the render ends, if you have put in the Render tab setthigs in the General section, Render target: New Window, the window in which the rendering you make is displayed. After finishing the rendering with a black image or 0 itinerations, you can hit Resume to relaunch the Render, the black screen will still appear, but it usually frees up part of the GPU memory I don't know why, you close the window or close it saving the black image, I don't know which option gives better results to empty the GPU memory,  and you do the Render again. It usually works for me.

I've been reviewing the steps to be able to render without having to restart DAZ and in order to give it a resume you have to change some parameters after the black image appears in the render window, such as adding a samples in max samples in the progressive render options. As I have already said it usually works for me, I don't know if any other parameter of the render settings allows the memory to be freed if it is activated as progressive Aux canvases.

 

artxtap

you disabled cpu fell back, which is why you are getting white/blank renders; daz has no where to go when your scene won't fit/ fells out of the GPU.

you have to close any renders you are done with, and even then all the memory is not fully released.

the more renders you do per session the more GPU memory is taken up.

iaunpom

artxtap said:

you disabled cpu fell back, which is why you are getting white/blank renders; daz has no where to go when your scene won't fit/ fells out of the GPU.

you have to close any renders you are done with, and even then all the memory is not fully released.

the more renders you do per session the more GPU memory is taken up.

What I explain is not a foolproof method, and as long as the GPU can render the scene just opened DAZ and loaded the scene without previewing Iray. Now I don't know if it works if you don't have the CPU enabled for rendering, even if it's only one or two processor cores.
When attempting to render if the GPU memory is full and not sufficient, it renders the CPU if it is enabled, and if it is not enabled it does not iterations. I've tried this way lately with a CPU enabled for rendering.
When I see that the render goes to the CPU I stop the rendering and do the process I have described. When the CPU has made an itineration I stop it, I change some parameter of progressive render, and then clicking resumes, a large part of the occupied GPU memory is freed, I don't know if to the RAM of the system, You stop rendering again, close the render window(s) and click Render or the equivalent command again. And the GPU renders regularly, just having to wait for the time it processes the image and tries to do a iteration.
But I guess every GPU operates in its own way. 

Pickle Renderer

You could try one of those scene optimisation products, that halve the size of textures, etc.  Unless you're doing face portraits you won't see the difference in fine detail anyway.