3D Software Help and Assistance. Ask Away.

[Jumbi]

I'm not sure if that's because of the headlamp. Anyway, check that 'Auto headlamp', under Render settings>General is set to 'Never'. Other than that, you can also check that your tone mapping parameters (Render settings>Tone mapping) have the default values. If you see any parameter there that is not on the default value, reset it (Alt + click on the dial).

 

[MissFortune]

hi guys I'm trying to figure out a problem I keep running into: when I create a new scene using Nvidia iRay as the default renderer for the viewport, everything looks fine but eventually iRay will randomly become super bright like this, I'm not sure what exactly I did to trigger it but it happened twice so far (I just restarted my scene from scratch) - it might've been that I changed between different viewport rendering engines but I'm not sure why that would ruin it. Edit - I think it's only with the perspective camera. I'm thinking maybe it's to do with the camera headlamp?
View attachment 3622570

Contrary to the above (which isn't wrong, just another way of doing things), I prefer keeping the headlamp on for the perspective view. Especially when initially setting up a scene (though this would apply to a standard camera, as well.). I typically just create a new camera (the little video/film camera looking thing above the viewport), and then turn off the headlamp in the camera settings pane (should be on the bottom right side of Daz by default.).

 

[cholil]

I'm new to Daz, I'm still learning the basics, I'm having trouble placing the shoes on my character, they are separated, I select my character and double click on the shoes or I tried to drag them and nothing, I don't know what I'm missing or if I installed wrong the file, help

 

[skwada]

I'm new to Daz, I'm still learning the basics, I'm having trouble placing the shoes on my character, they are separated, I select my character and double click on the shoes or I tried to drag them and nothing, I don't know what I'm missing or if I installed wrong the file, help

I think that might be a prop/decoration object rather than a clothing item

 

[amster22]

I'm new to Daz, I'm still learning the basics, I'm having trouble placing the shoes on my character, they are separated, I select my character and double click on the shoes or I tried to drag them and nothing, I don't know what I'm missing or if I installed wrong the file, help

You seem to use the shoes in the "props" directory. While not explicitely forbidden, generally wearables are not located here, but instead in the "People/genesis xxx/clothing" directory.
I do not have this asset, but if you look at the asset page

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you can have many information. The "readme" contains for instance the list of files (but you can also have it by looking at the zip content if you have the asset).
In this "readme", you can see that there are files located in "\...\People\Genesis 9\Clothing\devianttuna13\Cathy's Platform Stiletto Heels\" and this is what you are supposed to use to fit the shoes on a char.
There are also files located in "\...\Props\devianttuna13\Cathy's Platform Stiletto Heels\". Use them if you want to have shoes dropped on the floor, on a shelf, etc

 

[cholil]

I'm getting a message about missing files on several products when I upload them.
I checked the data folder and I have no NVIDIA MDL examples in the DAZ 3D directory at all.
can it be resolved?

 

[skwada]

hi how can I make my renders take less time? This one takes about 3 hours to get to 50% and then it just stops, I think because of the render time or total sample count hitting some default upper limit somewhere in the render settings.

I think this is happening because I'm using very high quality textures and volumetric lighting; I tried two things: 1) deleted all the props that aren't visible in the render (including her legs lol), and 2) I used scene optimizer to decrease the resolution of textures in the environment. This seems to have helped a bit - it got to ~40% in 75 minutes so far.

I'm wondering if there's anything else I can do to cut render time down? I feel like several hours per render is way too slow because animations will probably take weeks or months at that rate lol. I've got an RTX 3090 btw so I think a hardware upgrade would only cut it down by like 20% and still leave it at multiple hours unless I purchase a big cluster of GPUs

 

[MissFortune]

View attachment 3626202
hi how can I make my renders take less time? This one takes about 3 hours to get to 50% and then it just stops, I think because of the render time or total sample count hitting some default upper limit somewhere in the render settings.

I think this is happening because I'm using very high quality textures and volumetric lighting; I tried two things: 1) deleted all the props that aren't visible in the render (including her legs lol), and 2) I used scene optimizer to decrease the resolution of textures in the environment. This seems to have helped a bit - it got to ~40% in 75 minutes so far.

I'm wondering if there's anything else I can do to cut render time down? I feel like several hours per render is way too slow because animations will probably take weeks or months at that rate lol. I've got an RTX 3090 btw so I think a hardware upgrade would only cut it down by like 20% and still leave it at multiple hours unless I purchase a big cluster of GPUs

Volumetric lighting is a cunt to deal with, basically guaranteed to double your render time. I usually add it in post with Photoshop. It doesn't look like it's especially necessary here, either. There's zero need for a 3090 to take this long on a render like this. While it's good, it's not 75 minutes detailed. I'm guessing your render settings are playing a pretty large role here.

1 - Hide all the glass. Reflections cause render times to jump, especially in bright scenes like this, where noise traps become especially prevalent. Select the "Surface Selection Tool" (Alt + Shift + W) > select the window > Surfaces pane > Cutout Opacity > 0.

2 - The circled parts of the hair can be fixed in Photoshop with the Content Aware Fill tool. It's faster and easier to deal with there.

3 - Are you playing with the Tonemapping settings? I'd look into ghost lights and spotlights if you aren't using them already. The image looks sort of blown out, leading me to believe the environment intensity is either much too high or there's been tinkering with the exposure value.

4 - Try doing the below with your render settings (left of image) and see if it helps (it's not shown in the image below, but make sure your denoiser is off as well):



I usually render at 4K, but these settings should apply fine to 2K and 1080, as well.

 

[skwada]

Volumetric lighting is a cunt to deal with, basically guaranteed to double your render time. I usually add it in post with Photoshop. It doesn't look like it's especially necessary here, either. There's zero need for a 3090 to take this long on a render like this. While it's good, it's not 75 minutes detailed. I'm guessing your render settings are playing a pretty large role here.

1 - Hide all the glass. Reflections cause render times to jump, especially in bright scenes like this, where noise traps become especially prevalent. Select the "Surface Selection Tool" (Alt + Shift + W) > select the window > Surfaces pane > Cutout Opacity > 0.

2 - The circled parts of the hair can be fixed in Photoshop with the Content Aware Fill tool. It's faster and easier to deal with there.

3 - Are you playing with the Tonemapping settings? I'd look into ghost lights and spotlights if you aren't using them already. The image looks sort of blown out, leading me to believe the environment intensity is either much too high or there's been tinkering with the exposure value.

4 - Try doing the below with your render settings (left of image) and see if it helps (it's not shown in the image below, but make sure your denoiser is off as well):

View attachment 3626248

I usually render at 4K, but these settings should apply fine to 2K and 1080, as well.

Thanks your suggestions were very useful, I really appreciate it cut the render time down by an order of magnitude pretty much! Finished rendering 100% in 20 mins versus not even making it past 60% after 3 hours when I had 0 optimizations and ~1.5 hours to get to ~60% with my previous optimizations. And I think I could get it down even more if I follow your advice about using other lights to achieve a similar effect

Also about the blowout: I think that was a result of the light just being too strong; I hadn't changed anything in the Tonemapping settings. I was mainly aiming for two things with volumetric lighting: 1) to get the bloom effect where the light coming in through the window makes the background really bright, and 2) to get the edges of her hair to be light brown. I'm gonna try to recreate it using a simpler setup and see how that improves the render times

 

[Pr0GamerJohnny]

Thanks your suggestions were very useful, I really appreciate it cut the render time down by an order of magnitude pretty much! Finished rendering 100% in 20 mins versus not even making it past 60% after 3 hours when I had 0 optimizations and ~1.5 hours to get to ~60% with my previous optimizations. And I think I could get it down even more if I follow your advice about using other lights to achieve a similar effect

Also about the blowout: I think that was a result of the light just being too strong; I hadn't changed anything in the Tonemapping settings. I was mainly aiming for two things with volumetric lighting: 1) to get the bloom effect where the light coming in through the window makes the background really bright, and 2) to get the edges of her hair to be light brown. I'm gonna try to recreate it using a simpler setup and see how that improves the render times

View attachment 3626360

Restrict the max path length to something that still looks acceptable, thatll dramatically cut down render time.

I staunchly disagree with the other guy saying to restrict denosier - the difference with detail will only be noticeable at lower render convergences, which you're not going for anyway. Don't take my word for it, test it yourself, run two renders one with one without for say 60% convergence and compare the quality - ive only seen it noticeable at low convergences where things like fine strands of hair get mucked up by blurring.

 

[skwada]

Restrict the max path length to something that still looks acceptable, thatll dramatically cut down render time.
View attachment 3626374
I staunchly disagree with the other guy saying to restrict denosier - the difference with detail will only be noticeable at lower render convergences, which you're not going for anyway. Don't take my word for it, test it yourself, run two renders one with one without for say 60% convergence and compare the quality - ive only seen it noticeable at low convergences where things like fine strands of hair get mucked up by blurring.

Thanks I'll try the Max Path Length setting out

When you guys are talking about the denoiser, do you mean turning the Firefly Filter Enable on/off? Or do you mean the Noise Degrain Filtering setting? I've had those on their defaults thus far (Firefly on and Noise Degrain Filtering 0)

edit: with Firefly Filter Enable off, it took ~11 mins for 100% but a lot more white pixels left

 

[Pr0GamerJohnny]

Thanks I'll try the Max Path Length setting out

When you guys are talking about the denoiser, do you mean turning the Firefly Filter Enable on/off? Or do you mean the Noise Degrain Filtering setting? I've had those on their defaults thus far (Firefly on and Noise Degrain Filtering 0)

Neither, I'm talking about the Post Denoiser. Firefly I would assume is some algorithm to get rid of pixels with radically different neighbors - the red or yellow error ones.

I speak up on it because there seems to be this widespread misconception about what it does - and thus you see the advice oft-repeated to never use it. I wish i had used it from the start. Like I said before, only at lower convergences will it distort details - at higher convergences it will look identical or better than the non-denoised render.

The only other downside is if you're doing a bunch of spot renders you need to blend the borders as they wont naturally match with this on, but if you're not doing that ignore this.

 

[MissFortune]

I staunchly disagree with the other guy saying to restrict denosier - the difference with detail will only be noticeable at lower render convergences, which you're not going for anyway. Don't take my word for it, test it yourself, run two renders one with one without for say 60% convergence and compare the quality - ive only seen it noticeable at low convergences where things like fine strands of hair get mucked up by blurring.

I speak up on it because there seems to be this widespread misconception about what it does

The biggest issue with using the in-built denoiser is that it is the only copy you get. If you render the 'noisy' version, you're able to use an external denoiser and blend/layer mask both versions to get the best of both. Whereas, if you're using the in-built denoiser, you're getting rid of the noise, but losing the skin/hair/etc. detail with it. That's a pretty huge downside, imo.

There's no misconception to be had as that's the inherent science of denoising. In the most absolute basic terms, denoising is the blurring of nearby pixels (e.g. gaussian blurring, typically) to both remove noise and blend in with the rest of the image. If you're blurring images, what's going to happen? A bit of an extreme example:



What happens if you add small amounts of gaussian blur to a render? Gradual detail loss.



That's exactly why it's repeated ad-nauseum that you shouldn't use a denoiser (especially Daz's in-built one) if you can avoid it. Seeing as he/she has a 3090, there's zero actual point for them to be natively rendering a fully denoised image. They can always use an external one later if he/she needs to.

There's a reason many experienced devs will tell you that the only time you should be using the in-built denoiser is for animations.

 

[skwada]

View attachment 3626401
Neither, I'm talking about the Post Denoiser. Firefly I would assume is some algorithm to get rid of pixels with radically different neighbors - the red or yellow error ones.

I speak up on it because there seems to be this widespread misconception about what it does - and thus you see the advice oft-repeated to never use it. I wish i had used it from the start. Like I said before, only at lower convergences will it distort details - at higher convergences it will look identical or better than the non-denoised render.

The only other downside is if you're doing a bunch of spot renders you need to blend the borders as they wont naturally match with this on, but if you're not doing that ignore this.

The biggest issue with using the in-built denoiser is that it is the only copy you get. If you render the 'noisy' version, you're able to use an external denoiser and blend/layer mask both versions to get the best of both. Whereas, if you're using the in-built denoiser, you're getting rid of the noise, but losing the skin/hair/etc. detail with it. That's a pretty huge downside, imo.

There's no misconception to be had as that's the inherent science of denoising. In the most absolute basic terms, denoising is the blurring of nearby pixels (e.g. gaussian blurring, typically) to both remove noise and blend in with the rest of the image. If you're blurring images, what's going to happen? A bit of an extreme example:

View attachment 3626430

What happens if you add small amounts of gaussian blue to a render? Gradual detail loss.

View attachment 3626438

That's exactly why it's repeated ad-nauseum that you shouldn't use a denoiser (especially Daz's in-built one) if you can avoid it. Seeing as he/she has a 3090, there's zero actual point for them to be natively rendering a fully denoised image. They can always use an external one later if he/she needs to.

There's a reason many experienced devs will tell you that the only time you should be using the in-built denoiser is for animations.

Thx for the advice guys. After reading your explanations, the main thing I'm wondering is: how do you acquire such knowledge?

Also MissFortune, how did you get such fine details in that render? Is it mainly from having a high quality texture?

 

[MissFortune]

Thx for the advice guys. After reading your explanations, the main thing I'm wondering is: how do you acquire such knowledge?

Also MissFortune, how did you get such fine details in that render? Is it mainly from having a high quality texture?

Reading/watching and a lot of putting it into practice. There's not a lot that's more valuable than getting the experience of actually doing the thing you just read or watched.

The details largely lie in the normal maps and are accented/brought out further by the lighting, especially for Genesis 9. Which is what that render is. Think it's Van Helsing skin with either a Victoria 9 or Tara 9 normal map. Forget exactly which one, though I'm fairly sure it's former. G9 tends to react fairly well to larger/softer (larger the light = softer) light sources, which was used there, with the rest of the illumination/ambient lighting coming from a toned down HDRI.

 

[skwada]

Reading/watching and a lot of putting it into practice. There's not a lot that's more valuable than getting the experience of actually doing the thing you just read or watched.

The details largely lie in the normal maps and are accented/brought out further by the lighting, especially for Genesis 9. Which is what that render is. Think it's Van Helsing skin with either a Victoria 9 or Tara 9 normal map. Forget exactly which one, though I'm fairly sure it's former. G9 tends to react fairly well to larger/softer (larger the light = softer) light sources, which was used there, with the rest of the illumination/ambient lighting coming from a toned down HDRI.

Thanks btw do you have any reccs for resources, e.g. youtube channels or blog sites?

 

[Pr0GamerJohnny]

The biggest issue with using the in-built denoiser is that it is the only copy you get. If you render the 'noisy' version, you're able to use an external denoiser and blend/layer mask both versions to get the best of both. Whereas, if you're using the in-built denoiser, you're getting rid of the noise, but losing the skin/hair/etc. detail with it. That's a pretty huge downside, imo.

Agreed, that's fair, it's always better to start with something that has more information, not less, and modify the stream, whether it be images, audio, or video.

There's no misconception to be had as that's the inherent science of denoising. In the most absolute basic terms, denoising is the blurring of nearby pixels (e.g. gaussian blurring, typically) to both remove noise and blend in with the rest of the image. If you're blurring images, what's going to happen? A bit of an extreme example:

View attachment 3626430

What happens if you add small amounts of gaussian blue to a render? Gradual detail loss.

View attachment 3626438

That's exactly why it's repeated ad-nauseum that you shouldn't use a denoiser (especially Daz's in-built one) if you can avoid it.

Here's where we start to diverge. It's a post-denoiser, meaning it's only being applied after the set iteration count. If the original output image is as noisy as your examples, I'd much prefer a smoothed image. Whereas in most cases - people are churning out a sufficient number of iterations prior to the denoiser even being applied. The images you posted are not what the daz post-denoiser looks like at high convergences.

Below is a G8.1 against a basic HDRI, first is with no PDN, render quality 3, 95% conv, second is same, but with PDN applied post #10.



If you can tell a difference in details, your eyes are better than mine.

 

[MissFortune]

Thanks btw do you have any reccs for resources, e.g. youtube channels or blog sites?

I'd say IT Roy's videos normally, but his channel just went poof.

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,

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(not entirely Daz, but some good/more advanced stuff littered throughout his channel),

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,

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+ his features on the official Daz YouTube channel, and if you're willing to pay/pirate, Dreamlight offers some really good lighting basics (if you're struggling with it) coming from actual videography experience. His

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tutorial set (there's three parts) is basically a must-watch for beginners (if you're already experienced with lighting it's probably not worth watching, and I'd also ignore his advice on render settings as they're aimed at speed/lower-end hardware).

I'm not much of a reader myself unless I have to, which is usually the case for the more niche stuff out there.

 

[skwada]

I'd say IT Roy's videos normally, but his channel just went poof.

You must be registered to see the links

,

You must be registered to see the links

(not entirely Daz, but some good/more advanced stuff littered throughout his channel),

You must be registered to see the links

,

You must be registered to see the links

+ his features on the official Daz YouTube channel, and if you're willing to pay/pirate, Dreamlight offers some really good lighting basics (if you're struggling with it) coming from actual videography experience. His

You must be registered to see the links

tutorial set (there's three parts) is basically a must-watch for beginners (if you're already experienced with lighting it's probably not worth watching, and I'd also ignore his advice on render settings as they're aimed at speed/lower-end hardware).

I'm not much of a reader myself unless I have to, which is usually the case for the more niche stuff out there.

thx!

 

[amster22]

The biggest issue with using the in-built denoiser is that it is the only copy you get. If you render the 'noisy' version, you're able to use an external denoiser and blend/layer mask both versions to get the best of both. Whereas, if you're using the in-built denoiser, you're getting rid of the noise, but losing the skin/hair/etc. detail with it. That's a pretty huge downside, imo.

There's no misconception to be had as that's the inherent science of denoising. In the most absolute basic terms, denoising is the blurring of nearby pixels (e.g. gaussian blurring, typically) to both remove noise and blend in with the rest of the image. If you're blurring images, what's going to happen? A bit of an extreme example:

View attachment 3626430

What happens if you add small amounts of gaussian blur to a render? Gradual detail loss.

View attachment 3626438

That's exactly why it's repeated ad-nauseum that you shouldn't use a denoiser (especially Daz's in-built one) if you can avoid it. Seeing as he/she has a 3090, there's zero actual point for them to be natively rendering a fully denoised image. They can always use an external one later if he/she needs to.

There's a reason many experienced devs will tell you that the only time you should be using the in-built denoiser is for animations.

MissFortune post is very interesting, but may lead to confusion. Denoising indeed is a low-pass filter (like a gaussian blur), but it is only applied to outlier pixels. An outlier pixel is supposed to be significantly different form all its surrounding pixel. The first denoisers used a more or less large neighborhood and an empiric threshold to decide if a pixel is an outlier or not. Recent ones use an AI training on a large region and are extremely accurate. For instance, they would not consider skin pores as outliers.
But they can still do errors and misclassify a pixel.

To minimize these errors, here is how I proceed.
1/ I render the image at twice the desired resolution, but with a limited number of iteration (around 300-400 depending on the lighting). I generate the image as a png, to avoid lossy compression artifacts (that are basically low pass filters).
2/ I denoise in post process using an external denoiser. As the image is twice the final size, and that only single pixel outliers are suppressed by the denoiser, even if a pixel is wrongly denoised, its impact on the final image will be very weak. Again, I save the image as png.
There are two main (free) denoisers: intel and nvidia. I prefer intel, because I mostly postprocess on my laptop (without a GPU), but both denoisers are very good (and better than daz integrated denoiser).
3/ I do the downsizing and generate the final webp image.
All is done with command line tools (denoiser or ImageMagick) and to limit all manual operations, I have a script that applies steps 2/ and 3/ to all images in a directory if denoised images are non-existent or older that the rendered ones.

Besides its interest in terms of denoising, having a double sized image is very useful. For instance, if you are not completely happy with the framing and need to do some cropping, or want to do a close-up on an image. And of course, if I need to do some post processing (retoning, darkening, blurring, blending/adding images, etc), I also do that before downsizing.

For animations, I proceed similarly, but I generally reduce the number of iterations (say 250), and I downsize more aggressively (generally x3). If I want to add some video effects (zooming, pan, etc), it is obviously better to do that on the full-scale image. Ditto if you want to retime your frames (for instance for slow motion).

The main drawback of this method is that you can have to keep several large png images on your disk.