Daz Are these renders good? How could I improve them?

[JohnSheridan]

I'm learning to render so I can make a game and I'm wondering if these renders are good enough or what can I do to improve them?

The Model's mesh resolution subdivision was set to 3.
The rendering settings are as follows:
Max Samples: 10000
Max Time: 7200
Converged Ratio: 99%
Those are the only settings I changed from default after installing DAZ.
It seems like the renders went the full 2 hours. Was that not long enough or something?
Any advice for a newbie would be super appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[MissFortune]

Your render settings are going to/can vary quite heavily based on your hardware. Your samples are much too high, irregardless, as you're not working on a 4K+ render.

For example, I render in 4K with fairly high samples, but I'm also on two 4090s:



Renders take no longer than 25 minutes, and that's usually with multiple characters in the shot itself. I'd start by turning off your rendering quality and Max Time (secs) to 0. If you're running on a lower end GPU (it's important to state that you need to be using an Nvidia GPU as AMD GPUs just don't work at all with Iray.), go to filtering and turn on the Post Denoiser settings. Leave post denoiser alpha off. Also, make sure you go to render settings > Advanced > and then uncheck anything CPU related. As falling back to CPU rendering will slow you down significantly, which I suspect might be the case here.

As for images:



Where to start improving? I'd say start with manual posing. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying go fix everything in the image to make sure there's no clipping or anything of the sort. What I'm saying is, fix what shows up in that render. If it's within the camera's frame? Fix it. Anything outside of it doesn't matter until it's in the camera's frame. Even if the perfectionist in you says otherwise, this is going to save you a lot of time.

After you've gotten posing and such down, pick up lighting. This is what takes a good render to great. It's often what seperates a decent VN to a top-tier one. The trade off for that? Lighting is probably the hardest thing to pick up. As each scene is heavily contextual, there's no do-all form of lighting. Thus, a strong understanding of lighting (and sometimes color theory) is absolutely necessary to pull it off consistently. Angles, falloff, temps, bounces, etc. Start with some Daz lighting tutorials first, such as Dreamlight's 8 Point Lighting series. Then start looking at cinematography techniques. They take a bit of fidgeting with to get working in Daz at times, but they'll definitely lift your renders.

Probably the best I can give you right now without any specific questions, to be honest, hopefully it helps some.

 

[JohnSheridan]

Probably the best I can give you right now without any specific questions, to be honest, hopefully it helps some.

Thank you very much. Great general advice!

 

[Jumbi]

Renders take no longer than 25 minutes, and that's usually with multiple characters in the shot itself. I'd start by turning off your rendering quality and Max Time (secs) to 0. If you're running on a lower end GPU (it's important to state that you need to be using an Nvidia GPU as AMD GPUs just don't work at all with Iray.), go to filtering and turn on the Post Denoiser settings. Leave post denoiser alpha off. Also, make sure you go to render settings > Advanced > and then uncheck anything CPU related. As falling back to CPU rendering will slow you down significantly, which I suspect might be the case here.

I'm reading this part with tears in my eyes because of the envy I'm feeling. But seriously though, I have one 4090 card, not two. But for some reason, my renders started taking a whole lot of time to be made as of recent, and I have not a single clue what the cause for it is. I'm on v.4.22 Pro of Daz, with v537.58 Studio drivers installed. My Daz's log does not show any errors. In fact, I'm happy with how the program works (it's very stable). But the fact that simple 4K renders with few props, only one figure, the lighting and some kind of background, be it an HDRI or a plain 2D backdrop, are taking at least one and a half hours to get done for no apparent reason is annoying me. Do you have any idea what I should check to see if I can get faster render times? Thank you.

BTW, I took your word for it when you pointed out the usefulness of the Content Package Assist software to make DIM packages in another thread. Awesome and superuseful little program. Thanks again.

 

[Saint_RNG]

To add to what MissFortune has pointed out, here's my list of what I'd change if I were you ( in addition to what's shown in MissFortune's image ).


Top left image :

• I'd put the lady's right arm over the man's shoulder.
• I would use dForce to make the lady's dress more realistic in this position (stuck against her because of gravity).
• her left tibia could be a little closer to the right and turned inwards.
• her left foot could be bent downwards and turned inwards (she's a bit sideways, so it would look as if her feet were naturally drawn downwards).

Top right image :

• bend her toes up a little (she still has her heels on) and hide her right big toe (in the Scene tab)
• there's nothing rendered outside the room so it looks transparent, I don't know what project you plan to use your renders for but it could cause you problems.
• For the man, raise his feet and slightly turn all of his legs, shins and feet outwards.

Bottom left image :

• the woman's left arm should be lower ( reduce the bend value of the shoulder or arm )
• with the arm lowered down, the forearm and hand will need to be readjusted so that the palm of the hand comes naturally behind the man's head.
• the man's right arm should also be closer to his body ( again, bend values for shoulder or arm ), this time with the hand resting a little below the lady's belt.
• Finally, and this is the part that's likely to take the longest, use dForce to simulate the lady's dress so that it "rises" as a result of her pose and the collision with the man's legs.

 

[CGSerpent]

Add some light contrast and don't stack multiple light sources in the same spot, there is no need for a lamp right next to a window. Try and create some form with the light and show some depth.

 

[MissFortune]

I'm reading this part with tears in my eyes because of the envy I'm feeling. But seriously though, I have one 4090 card, not two. But for some reason, my renders started taking a whole lot of time to be made as of recent, and I have not a single clue what the cause for it is. I'm on v.4.22 Pro of Daz, with v537.58 Studio drivers installed. My Daz's log does not show any errors. In fact, I'm happy with how the program works (it's very stable). But the fact that simple 4K renders with few props, only one figure, the lighting and some kind of background, be it an HDRI or a plain 2D backdrop, are taking at least one and a half hours to get done for no apparent reason is annoying me. Do you have any idea what I should check to see if I can get faster render times? Thank you.

I'm assuming you have all the CPU fallback stuff unchecked, along with no absurd parameters in the render settings?

Pretty sure you're running into that dreaded update that basically wrecked render times for basically anyone who updated, there's a whole thread in the dev subforum about it. I think the driver version you're on is fine (I'm on the same one. But you could try grabbing a slightly older/newer driver first with something like NVCleanInstall to see if that helps at all), but I'm using 4.21.05, which you can grab

You must be registered to see the links

, or

You must be registered to see the links

(scroll down a bit for this one as it has the older versions). If going to an older version doesn't fix it, I'd have to see your render settings before I could say anything else.

It definitely shouldn't be taking that long at all. Stuff like this is the reason why I'm so hesitant to update mid-project for any software, which is largely why I haven't yet. I've been tempted as I've heard the loading times are better, but the slower loading times and the OOT crashing stuff had put me off for this version, honestly. Will likely see what Daz 5 has to offer before I update at any point.

BTW, I took your word for it when you pointed out the usefulness of the Content Package Assist software to make DIM packages in another thread. Awesome and superuseful little program. Thanks again.

It's definitely super useful, especially for the keeping the non-Daz Store assets organized and easily removable.

 

[Jumbi]

I'm assuming you have all the CPU fallback stuff unchecked, along with no absurd parameters in the render settings?

Pretty sure you're running into that dreaded update that basically wrecked render times for basically anyone who updated, there's a whole thread in the dev subforum about it. I think the driver version you're on is fine (I'm on the same one. But you could try grabbing a slightly older/newer driver first with something like NVCleanInstall to see if that helps at all), but I'm using 4.21.05, which you can grab

You must be registered to see the links

, or

You must be registered to see the links

(scroll down a bit for this one as it has the older versions). If going to an older version doesn't fix it, I'd have to see your render settings before I could say anything else.

It definitely shouldn't be taking that long at all. Stuff like this is the reason why I'm so hesitant to update mid-project for any software, which is largely why I haven't yet. I've been tempted as I've heard the loading times are better, but the slower loading times and the OOT crashing stuff had put me off for this version, honestly. Will likely see what Daz 5 has to offer before I update at any point.

I hope it is the subversion of Daz 4.22 I was using then. Yesterday, I updated it via DIM. Previously, I had 4.22.0.1. Since yesterday's update now it is 4.22.0.15. Maybe that will do it, let's hope. I'll also have a look at that thread in the dev subforum, just in case.

And here are a couple of screenshots of my default Daz render settings. I might do slight modifications in the editor subtab settings depending on the scene, like increasing the max samples count and things like that. But other than that those are the settings I like to use and have been using for a long time, even before my long render times issue started.

It's definitely super useful, especially for the keeping the non-Daz Store assets organized and easily removable.

Oh, yeah. That's it. It's absolutely fantastic to be able to install all your favorite products via Daz IM, regardless of the store you got them from.

 

[MissFortune]

I hope it is the subversion of Daz 4.22 I was using then. Yesterday, I updated it via DIM. Previously, I had 4.22.0.1. Since yesterday's update now it is 4.22.0.15. Maybe that will do it, let's hope. I'll also have a look at that thread in the dev subforum, just in case.

And here are a couple of screenshots of my default Daz render settings. I might do slight modifications in the editor subtab settings depending on the scene, like increasing the max samples count and things like that. But other than that those are the settings I like to use and have been using for a long time, even before my long render times issue started.

Your settings look fine (or at least nothing sticks out on first glance.), only difference between mine and yours is the Texture Compression thresholds (mine are 512 and 1024 respectively), but I don't think those would have any meaningful effect on render speeds. Not at this level, at least.

If upgrading doesn't work, try going backwards to the 4.21 version(s) I linked. That's about the limit of my ability of troubleshooting this can go, though. Before you start uninstalling things, I'd try playing around with some older Studio drivers just to see if the current one isn't conflicting with something in 4.22.

Alternatively, if you're currently on a Beta build of 4.22, I believe you can install a Pro version of Daz on the same PC without overwriting the beta version of it.

 

[Jumbi]

Your settings look fine (or at least nothing sticks out on first glance.), only difference between mine and yours is the Texture Compression thresholds (mine are 512 and 1024 respectively), but I don't think those would have any meaningful effect on render speeds. Not at this level, at least.

If upgrading doesn't work, try going backwards to the 4.21 version(s) I linked. That's about the limit of my ability of troubleshooting this can go, though. Before you start uninstalling things, I'd try playing around with some older Studio drivers just to see if the current one isn't conflicting with something in 4.22.

Alternatively, if you're currently on a Beta build of 4.22, I believe you can install a Pro version of Daz on the same PC without overwriting the beta version of it.

Yesterday's update to v4.22.0.15 via Daz IM has improved considerably my render times. I just rendered kinda a 4K closeup portrait and it's taken 43 minutes this time. Thanks for your help.