A few questions

[Chatterbox]

I know I've been asking you guys a lot of questions. Thank you for all the answers so far, it has been a big help. I do have a few thoughts and questions that I'd like to get your input on.

I've read a lot of advice saying render in stages. For example, render the background then use photoshop or another program to insert the characters or furnishings. This doesn't seem to work for me. It speeds up renders by not rendering the background multiple times, but I hate the way that the light changes on the character, or lack of shadows. How do other devs get this to look right?

Another thing is render times. I've seen examples of people saying this or that render of an entire scene only took 9 or 10 minutes. I have a fairly good rig, and have tweaked the hell out of my settings, but I never get close to that kind of speed. It seems that even when I render in stages, I use 3000 to 8000 iterations. I will admit that if it's in view, I tend to render it. But how else could they be getting that fast of a render?

 

[Catwashere]

The Discord chat may also be able to help!

 

[Rich]

I've read a lot of advice saying render in stages. For example, render the background then use photoshop or another program to insert the characters or furnishings. This doesn't seem to work for me. It speeds up renders by not rendering the background multiple times, but I hate the way that the light changes on the character, or lack of shadows. How do other devs get this to look right?

This is the downfall of the "render in stages" approach - when you do it in parts, the parts don't interact they way they do if you render the whole scene at once. It's theoretically possible to make up for some of this with post-work, but, personally, I'm not that good with Photoshop or GIMP.

Another thing is render times. I've seen examples of people saying this or that render of an entire scene only took 9 or 10 minutes. I have a fairly good rig, and have tweaked the hell out of my settings, but I never get close to that kind of speed. It seems that even when I render in stages, I use 3000 to 8000 iterations. I will admit that if it's in view, I tend to render it. But how else could they be getting that fast of a render?

Well, some of these folks have rigs that aren't just good, they're awesome. LOL Multiple high-end GPU's.

A lot of how fast scenes will render comes down to your choices of settings, plus how you light the scene. 3,000 to 8,000 iterations is in the same range that a lot of my renders take, so it doesn't sound like you're massively off there.

But, just to review, settings:

1. The size of your image will have a lot to do with render time, since it controls how many pixels have to be computed. A 1920x1080 image has more than twice the number of pixels that a 1280x720 one does.
2. The "Rendering Quality" and "Rendering Converged Ratio" settings on the Render Settings > Progressive Rendering affect how long Daz will work on an image before deciding it's done. "Rendering Quality" is a metric that affects when Daz will decide a pixel has converged. Higher values = more work to make sure Daz has the pixel "correct." "Rendering Converged Ratio" is the percentage of pixels that have to have converged for Daz to declare victory. I usually leave the Rendering Quality at 1.0, and use Converged Ratio in the 95%-98%, dependin on the image.
3. You can speed things up a bit by setting Optimization > Max Path Length to a positive number. The default (-1) tells iRay to let rays go as long as they're contributing anything to the scene, which can mean a lot of bounces if you have many objects in the scene. The downside of tuning this is that it can make it harder for shadowed areas to converge.

Lighting:

Given what you're seeing in terms of iterations, you're probably doing this OK, but...

1. Portions of your image that are directly lit (i.e. exposed to your background HDRI or being illuminated with a spotlight or ghost light) will converge MUCH more quickly than portions that are not (i.e. areas in shadows).
2. Reflective surfaces slow things down, because they require extra bounces.
3. Lights that are in your scene but which are not illuminating anything visible will slow your render down. Daz tries to compute the effect of all light sources, so if you have a spotlight pointing away from what's visible (and which doesn't indirectly illuminate it due to bounces), Daz will keep trying to see if it can find a way to have that light affect things. ("You put it there, there must be a reason." LOL)
4. One of the ways that people speed renders is heavy use of ghost lights, so that virtually everything is directly illuminated. The problem with this (IMHO) is that it makes scenes look artificial, because you don't get the kind of shadows that "normal" lighting will generate.

As I said, with the iteration counts you're getting, it doesn't sound like you're doing too bad a job at designing your scenes - you may just be getting discouraged by trying to race your Mustang against a Ferrari...

 

[thecardinal]

I would also familiarize yourself with the surfaces tab. Turning down 'glossy' and 'specular' on certain materials will greatly reduced render times. If you have glass in a scene, turn the opacity very low. Glass surfaces take a lot of render time

 

[Chatterbox]

That makes sense. Yes I am frustrated with my one Titan Ti taking 2 hours to render a scene. If I can get this project off the ground, the first thing I'm going to do is build a better rendering rig, and just use this one as a work station.

I do tend to render the whole scene at once. It just looks better. Didn't know that about spot lights that I'm not currently using. Sometimes I leave them on when not really in use.

Will try that Max Path Length trick. Guess I should read up on that one.

I turn off rendering quality and just set my max iterations based on how quickly the scene previews after it loads the textures. I've gotten a good feel for how many iterations I'll need.

I'm good on lighting. What I figured out is that Ghost lights work great, but I can do the same thing with spot lights as long as I don't have them in the camera's view, along with turning up the lumens of any ceiling lights in a room to around 20-80 million. I then drop the exposure to compensate, and use spot lights to create soft shadows on characters.

@carnalcardinal Thanks for that tip. I have been using that tab to tweak skin under different lighting conditions, but will try your tip and see what happens.

Thanks guys
Chatterbox

PS All scenes for this release are set up. Rendering them as we speak. Hopefully release will happen within the next two weeks.

 

[thecardinal]

With a Titan you should be tearing through scenes. You should consider a gpu-based render engine. I have a GTX 1050, and with Octane I can render a full scene in 30 minutes with 5000 frames. They have a free Octane demo you can download from the otoy website. I have a thread in general for Octane, I can put a guide up later for people who want to try out the demo.

Save your money and don't get a better rig, get a better render engine

 

[Chatterbox]

@carnalcardinal I'll take a look at that. I assume it will use the same textures and settings that I have in DAZ?

 

[thecardinal]

@carnalcardinal I'll take a look at that. I assume it will use the same textures and settings that I have in DAZ?

Yes. The plug-in auto-converts your daz materials so they are more compatible with Octane. One of the best parts is the live action viewport. You can adjust the render settings while it renders and see the changes while the render keeps going.

 

[Chatterbox]

Nice! I just looked at the price though. Ouch! I'm gonna give it a try, but I have to wait until I have more support. Unfortunately I'm off work for a couple weeks, so money is little tight. Plus my wife is starting to balk at what I've spent on this project.

Thanks again,
Chatterbox

 

[Benn Swagger]

I'm not video editor in my old days work as 3D animator, so don't ask me the details. But the purpose of separate renders between model & environment + picture editing are to increase visual + control quality. In making 3D video, 1 second of video = 24 pictures ... 1 minutes = 60sec X 24 pics = 1440 ... 1 hour = 86400 pics, so you really do need these pipeline into your work progress.

Since 3DCG games per update (30 ~ 600 pics/month ... depend on Dev ambition & game genre) doesn't need that much and the latest Graphic Cards can handle it, I don't think you need it very much using picture editor software. Also if we're talking about DAZ's asset games, it's about how much you can be creative with the asset customization and

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skill, plus your familiarity with render setting customization. No need to learn Photoshop or After Effect in this 3DCG games area.

Of course ability to use software like Adobe After Effect to increase your visual quality is superb than normal rendering, but learning how use it are near impossible due to human limited brain capacity & production time deadline. You can expand to this things if you had a team, minimal is 3 person. 1st person as script writer + coding, 2nd person as 3D animator and 3rd person as video/picture editor. Unless you are genius beyond measure and fast as The Flash, I don't think you can handle/master 3 software at once or at least be efficient of using all 3 programs to make your game. [Game Engine (Renpy,RPGM), 3D Software (DAZ, 3DS MAX, MAYA), Picture/Video Editor (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effect)].

 

[Chatterbox]

@Benn Swagger I wish I could put together a team. Maybe it'll happen in the future.

 

[Deleted member 167032]

Honestly read my thread Daz Beginners.. trust me it will speed up your renders. PC is busy now.. GTX1060 6GB card ...

 

[Chatterbox]

@MrKnobb Thank you! I'll give those settings a try. Thanks for the lighting tip as well. I've mostly been using IGLK and spotlights. I like the idea of that probe kit, I'm gonna have to try that. I'm probably less than 24 hours away from releasing Lexi v0.01, so I'll try this for my next release.