3D Software Help and Assistance. Ask Away.
- Thread starter Lt. Aldo Raine
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I render with a RTX2060 card with 8GB ram and have rendered many scenes with many characters. Hopefully the explanation below will assist.
There are two components to rendering a scene:
- Geometry Memory Consumption
- Texture Memory Consumption
When rendering a scene these two will pop up in the windows indicating rendering progress. Firstly note that the numbers quoted here by no means add up to the GPU VRAM actually consumed. From my experience the actual GPU memory consumed is roughly 2 x the sum of these values.
With a 8GB card you will typically need to keep the Geometry Memory Consumption to roughly 1GB or less as it appears on this window and the Texture Memory Consumption to 2.5GB or less. As soon as you go above the GPU VRAM availability and revert to CPU rendering you are basically wasting your time. Note that if you only have the one card, you need to be careful about what else is using your GPU memory (Chrome for example is a VRAM hog).
To reduce the Geometry Memory Consumption, you need to reduce the polygon count in the scene. This may be done via the following:
- Hiding everything that is out of camera view.
- Reduce the Render SubD Level (0 = 1 x polygons, 1 = 4 x polygons, 2 = 16 x polygons, 3 = 64 x polygons etc.).
- There are assets out there that will reduce your base polygon count, however this should not be necessary and the results are unlikely to be satisfactory.
- Remove extremely high polygon assets (refer to Powerline75 advice).
To reduce the Texture Memory Consumption you need to minimise the number of textures called up to render and also the size of these textures. To reduce this do the following.
- Hide everything that is out of camera view.
- Instance rather than duplicate items in scene. An instance uses the texture maps of the original item.
- Reduce the texture map sizes where appropriate (Scene Optimizer if a useful tool for this).
- Remove Bump / Normal / Displacement maps where appropriate (Scene Optimizer if a useful tool for this).
With 8GB VRAM, you should be good for most scenes and should only need to apply a couple of the techniques above to get below the VRAM threshold.
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- Sep 24, 2017
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Well, at least I can confirm it's definitely not a memory issue. It failed to allocate exactly 64 megabytes of about 3.5 gigabytes of available video ram. I don't understand what's going on here. And I'm very tired of butting my head against a wall with this problem. I could just shrug and hope the next scene doesn't have this problem but I really want to know what's going on here. I guess I'm going to have to seek help on the daz forums. There are daz forums... right?
From what I can see, you most likely have the HDRI active that came with the background asset. It could also potentially be an artificial sun within the scene. To determine which, you just need to navigate to Render Settings \ Environment \ Environment Mode.
In order to utilise Daz3D effectively, you need to learn about scene lighting from the numerous sources on the web. In general the terminology follows that used in photography, so even if you don't master Daz, your Xmas pictures might be better. There are also some lighting tips in the thread linked within my sig. Best of luck with your experimenting with 3D rendering.
From what can see it definitely looks like a memory error. Firstly your Geometry Memory Consumption is about double what is desirable and it gave up half way through trying to push the Textures through to VRAM. Follow the suggestions I made above and you should be able to resolve your issues.
Keep in mind that you need to take Daz3D error messages with a pinch of salt.
- Sep 24, 2017
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Sorry didn't see your reply when I went to write my last. Uhm, I did reduce the goemetry quite a lot. And I actually _deleted_ anything that wasn't visible from the camera perspective because somewhere I read that hiding it doesn't keep it from taking up memory (which seems unlikely... but I got desperate). I don't have the exact details but like... any item that is small in the camera view i made sure was no more than subd level 1... and bigger things like the body meshes for the characters I constrained to subd level 2 (shalborg himself defaults to 5). Reduced the horns to 1. etc. Basically nothing above 2 and almost everything at 1 or 0. Then I cut the larger (in the camera view) textures down to half resolution followed by cutting everything else down to 1 quarter resolution.
According to Iray Memory Assistant this reduced the memory needed from ~30 gigs of "sysram" to ~6 gigs. And when I rendered it behaved much the same till it got to the above point in the log and then the Daz renderer errors out complaining that 3.5 gigs of ram isn't enough for it to allocate 64 megs of ram from. So I duno. I just don't know.
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- Sep 24, 2017
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Ok is it the _default_ HDRI that's a problem or all HDRI? Cause without HDRI the jewelry in the scene renders as flat black. I've spent quite a lot of time learning about scene lighting already... obviously there's always more to learn and I'm still new to this but still. I'm using three large meshlights for general scene lighting and two distant lights (for highlights and editing without iray turned on). The only reason I keep HDRI aroudn is for the metal shaders to not turn flat black. Auto-Headlamps are disabled.
- Nov 7, 2019
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Rule of Thumb, to efficiently reduce geometry load.
1) If it's smaller than a finger, then you can safely keep subD to zero (exceptions for some highly ornated jewelry, that you render up close).
2) If it's smaller than half a figure, you don't need subD higher than 1. Can even be down to zero, if it's simple furniture we're talking about. (exceptions apply as above)
3) If it's simpler than a classical, carved piece of furniture, or a well detailed figure, no more than subD level 1. Walls, floors, simplified furniture can well apply, because, on flat even surfaces, you don't need as many vertices anyway.
4)If your item (figure or prop) comes with high detailed normal maps, subD can be as low as possible, as normal mapping will add some of that lost detail back. There's no direct easy answer, run close-up nvidia previews on aux viewport, to find out the best balance.
To get on top of the geometry memory consumption you need to trial render with different portions of your scene to determine which is the offending item. To do this hide half the objects in the scene and render and monitor the geometry memory consumption. If it's greater than 1/2 the previous value, the problem is in the visible objects, otherwise it is in the hidden ones. Keep doing this until you determine which item is the offending item. Note that using a Render SubD Level of 0 in items in the background is fine as is reducing the texture map size by a factor of 4.
To resolve the material memory consumption, Scene Optimizer is your friend. It will list the number of texture maps and also the texture map size (pixels x pixels).
Many assets released for Daz have horrific optimisation (geometry / textures / instancing / lighting). The creator often tests on a higher spec machine and never includes more than their asset in the scene they are rendering. I have had to correct a number of assets I have paid good money for, because the creator did not make the effort to provide something that was immediately functional for use.
Lighting is something that takes a long time and a lot of practice to get a handle on. One general rule I live by, is that every single light within a scene has to have a purpose. Some of the best images produced utilise nothing more than a well selected and manipulated HDRI.
The reason metal (reflective) surfaces appear black is a result of the ray tracing engine. A spotlight or emissive light emanates from a source, hits the surface and then bounces back to the camera to appear in the resultant image. Thus it will only show up as a pixel on a highly reflective surface when the angles are just right (think of it like bouncing a ball off a wall - person A (light source) bouncing ball to person B (camera) off a wall). A HDRI is different in that it is incident on the scene from every angle as a result of the HDRI sphere around the scene. Whilst technically the ray tracing calculates several bounces, after the first couple, the ray intensity is typically too low to have a real effect on the image.
In relation to scene in question, I would actually light via a single studio HDRI utilising iRay Interior Camera. I wouldn't use any additional light sources at all. I am not going to explain it here, however I have explained several times previously (including within this thread).
- Sep 24, 2017
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?
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?I honestly didn't think the hairs could be the culprit since they weren't effecting the solo renders much with my new rtx 2070. But:
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No, I won't be doing many animated scenes. I had really really wanted an animated title and outro screen where the main animation is the MC's hair blowing in the wind. But that's not mission critical. I had also planned to design my animations for unity in Daz and export them to unity via the daz-unity bridge... I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish that, however.
That said, I absolutely am going to have a lot of action scenes. By that I mean characters in poses where hair absolutely would not maintain it's "idle/standing" shape. And, from observation, posing/shaping sliders are useless when you need hair to look right while a character is upside down or horizontal. The game is focused on a fighting arena, after all.
That said, I realize I'm talking to the developer of Calisto... which I just got done playing. It does not escape me that there are fully animated sparing scenes in your game.
TEACH ME YOUR WAYS OH WISE ONE!!!
- Sep 24, 2017
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Well you know your shit, that's for damn sure. Geometry Memory Consumption = 976 megabytes? Renders no problem. Goemetry Memory Consumption = 1016 megabytes? Runs out of memory. I realize there's some variance there depending on what else is getting shoved into vram... but I found it humorous that it worked out that way after what you've said. Texture memory consumption is 1.5GB, btw.
Also it turns out it's _not_ the dForce Side Bob Hair by Linday that is the real issue here. It's the
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by... wait for it... Daz Originals. That hair accounts for ~750 megabytes of the geometry memory consumption pie... almost half of the total memory consumption of the entire scene. Nope. I'm, not joking. The Side Bob Hair used on the red succubus, and the dForce C1 Spiky Hair by Cake One on the more colorful, multi-boobed succubus on the ground there each clock in at ~275 megs. So not at all cheap... but certainly manageable given they are major characters and most scenes with them will focus almost entirely on them (letting me reduce the complexity on everything else in those scenes as much as I want).But the other? It's the hair I picked out for the MC. In fact, I've already tried to find a replacement for this hair once before because I wanted to use it on another character... then tried to find a different hair to use on the other character. Ended up using this hair on both characters cause I simply couldn't find a good alternative. And now I have to anyway. ::cries::
Do all dForce hairs have ridiculously complex geometry? Cause I'm feeling pretty well fucked if that's the case. And not in a good way.
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The Studio HDRI Lighting is just one of the options available to use with iRay camera. lexx228 utilises
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in a number of his renders and they have some of the best lighting of images posted on this site. There are a multitude of options out there to be used. I use Iradiance Light Probes, however wouldn't recommend them as 95% of the options provided aren't of much use.I can't really claim the credit for the animation of the fight scenes as they are predominately the animation assets from
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with some additional tweaking and animation of hair. From what I can tell they were created using image capture and inverse kinematics. When you get down to the detail of movements of individual joints in these animations, its a bit of a mess with a large amount of joint noise. You can see this particularly in the neck joint animation (lower / upper / head), which have excessive noise which counteracts each other to give a relatively stable head position. Problem with this is that it becomes difficult to tweak the animation at all.The lighting utilises the iRay Interior Camera and HDRI. From memory for the Kara scenes in the hold, each frame rendered in about 90 seconds on a GTX1060. So this would equate to about 30 seconds / frame on a RTX2070.
For the next release I am doing animations from scratch and will be doing pole dance animations for the dancers in the club I posted above. My first couple of attempts at these pole dance animations were a little average, due to the source material I used. If the hip of the figure has high movement (translate / rotation) and you have to anchor a foot / hand it is a nightmare to animate all of the joints to make this happen.
As a final point related to animation, don't forget to animate all of the subtle little things like the hair / chest swaying. It takes quite a bit of extra effort, however makes a significant difference in the final result. It's also why the dancers for the club generally aren't overly voluptuous and tend to have short hair.
Unfortunately dForce hair will always have very complex geometry when the hairs are done as single strands. It just comes down to the number of points you need to manage to create the shape for each hair strand. Normal hair assets utilise ribbons for different portions of the hair and then places a texture / opacity map against it to give a strand type feel. This reduces say 20,000 individual hair strands to perhaps 1000 surfaces. You can see the ribbons clearly on a normal hair asset if you change the hair shader to plain surface (no opacity map).
- May 30, 2020
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Hey there, I just downloaded https://f95zone.to/threads/dforce-spring-slingshot-bikini-for-genesis-8-females.53958/ and installed it. I'm very new to this, but from what I understand since the RAR file includes three zips I'm supposed to unpack them to "My DAZ library"? Tutorial here https://f95zone.to/threads/how-to-install-content-to-daz-w-w-o-install-manager.6045/ mentions so.
However, I cannot for the life of me find it in DAZ3D even though I unpacked the zip files correctly to the correct folders.
However, I cannot for the life of me find it in DAZ3D even though I unpacked the zip files correctly to the correct folders.
Have you "refreshed" the content? To optimize, Daz do not look at the actual file structure but stores it in a DB created when the program launches. When some files change, you must "refresh" the content to see it in daz. RMouse->refresh
Besides that the "templates" zips are only useful if you intend to create custom textures for a product. And they are not intended to be unzipped in daz library
Besides that the "templates" zips are only useful if you intend to create custom textures for a product. And they are not intended to be unzipped in daz library
- May 30, 2020
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Nope, that didn't help. Just to be sure I unpacked the files to the correct folders and restarted DAZ, after refresh there's still nothing. Is it possible I am missing dependency? I have G8F working fine with no problems and I can't really see any other dependencies. My install has been really weird though, I cannot for example load G3F models...
Daz do not care about dependencies in the content library. If the directory exists, it will appear in the content library. Verify that you have a directory named people>genesis 8 female>clothing>spring slingshot in your daz 3D lib and you should have something similar in your content library.
Note that this product is from rendero and will *not* appear in the "smart content" tab.
Note that this product is from rendero and will *not* appear in the "smart content" tab.
- Nov 7, 2019
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Did you install in the directory that DAZ uses for its recognized content? It's a common misconception, but... unless you throw it to the same folders DAZ already uses to load content from, you'll have to manually add the new content library to DAZ, via the "add new library directory" option in the content tab.
Or, you can trace down the exact location of your main DAZ library, and just copy-paste every new items you grab to it, after you decompress the archives to whatever other location. Fun fact: This option spares you the frustration of trying to manually pluck out remnants of a corrupt zip archive, in the rare case that happens. If the archive is corrupt, it will only show on decompressing, and if you use a secondary decompress location, before adding to the main library, you'll know before you toss it in there.
- May 30, 2020
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There it is. Thank you for the help, I'll know where to look next time. So far everything has appeared in the smart content and that's why I didn't find it.