Grain and “high ISO” look

KuroFish

Attached is a screen shot of "Hashimoto" sitting on a chair (upper thigh/buttocks). Well, part of her. I've just loaded the figure and didn't mess around with and of the settings, just hit the RENDER button.

Any ideas to help solve? Render settings etc???

Thanks,

- Bryan

Gordig

Physically-based rendering like IRay works on largely the same principles as a real camera. To solve a problem like you're experiencing, there are three main approaches to solving it:

a) Add more light
b) Increase the number of samples
c) Increase render time

b and c are related, as by default DS will render for two hours or a certain percentage of convergence, whichever comes first. Increasing the number of samples means that a render will take longer to converge, but will do a better job at resolving issues like yours. In order for that to work, you may need to raise or eliminate the time limit. To do the former, increase Max Samples in Render Settings -> Progressive Render; to do the latter, set that to -1.

As for adding light, it's a balancing act because you may find it harder to get the specific lighting you were shooting for, but you'll get a better render. Tonemapping and post-working can make a well-lit  scene look dark and moody a lot more easily than you can clean up a noisy render that natively shows the light that you want.

ArgleSW

Have you tried the denoiser? At first I hated using this, but now I can't render without it. If you have not tried it out, I highly recommend it. 

Render Settings Tab -> Filtering

• Enable Post Denoiser Available
• Enable Post Denoiser Enable
• Leave other denoiser settings default.

When you render with denoiser enabled, you will notice all the grain disappear after 8 iterations (This is set by the default Post Denoiser Start Iteration value which is 8). At first the render will look a bit strange with lots of texture compression, but if you just let it keep running a bunch of iterations the qualiity will signifigantly improve to the point where you won't really notice any drawbacks of using the denoiser. But with the added bonus of zero noise or grain. 

Also if you are new to rendering, be sure you are always rendering on the GPU only which will make rendering times signifigantly faster. If you click on the Render Settings tab, at the top click on the hardware tab. By default Daz will use both your CPU and GPU to render. Using the CPU will signifigantly slow down progress. Just uncheck the CPU at the top and bottom and only have CUDA checked. Do this for both the Photoreal Mode and Interactive (biased) mode. If you also disable Allow CPU Fallback at the bottom, it will make sure the render will not fallback to CPU if you run out of VRAM. If you get a black screen when trying to render, that means your GPU ran out of memory and did not fallback to the CPU. If you see the black screen, you just need to optimize your scene to make sure it fits within your VRAM. If you have a low-end PC then you might have no choice but to use the CPU, but I highly recommend you try GPU only rendering unless absolutely necessary. 

KuroFish

Thanks Gordig and ArgleSW. Those are definitely the way to steer in this project. 

I'll be posting (what's allowed) as soon as the renders come out well. A lot of render time, but I'm in no hurry. I would rather wait a while longer for better results. 

Thanks again!