DAZ - Render Times

OhWee

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Depends on how much is going on in the scene. And on your system specs.

What are your system specs? I have a laptop with dual GTX 1080s, and my render times vary from a couple of minutes (for very basic renders involving just one character, with some basic lighting and no background) to over an hour (for fairly complex sets with one or two characters). These are Iray renders of course.

Render settings also come into play here. When I remember to change the setting, Mitchell usually results in crisper renders than Gaussian (look for Gaussian in the render settings list, it's the pixel filter, change it to Mitchell). There are other settings which can change the amount of time for renders, it's worthwhile to read up on these (via google searches and such).

If you are doing an Iray render without an Nvidia card, this slows things down quite a lot. My old laptop didn't have one, so renders would typically take hours.
 
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dogk22

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i7 4790k
16 GB RAM
G1 GTX 1080

I'm using Iray engine.

I know it's possible to only render the characters and then adapt them in the scene to save time, but I'm trying something with much richer scenes, I don't know if this time is normal for hardware like this..

I started using Iray Ghost Light couple of weeks ago for testing, and actually the render times reduces significantly as well.

Btw I didn't know about this Mitchell filter. I'll test it to see the results.
 

OhWee

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Your times sound about right to me then. It might not hurt to add another 16GB of ram. 32 GB is considered a 'comfortable amount' for Daz. I have 64GB, but to be honest the extra 32 GB doesn't come into play that often.

A second 1080 can reduce your render times by almost half, IF the scene can fit in the 8 GB of video memory. Note that the video memory doesn't 'stack', as the entire scene needs to fit in each card.

But yeah, you are sitting in a pretty good place right now system specs wise.
 
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uhohitsuhoh

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May 21, 2017
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i'm going to have to look into this mitchell/gaussian setting

specs-

i7 4790 4 ghz
32gb ram
gtx 980 ti gaming

i feel like my renders take forever but i have no frame of reference since im new to this.

some basic things that have speeded it along a little, is making sure that its actually using my card to render and not the cpu, also i click the optix prime accelleration thing? but i have no idea if it does anything or if my card even supports it.

i tend to want to let my renders actually finish, although i've seen they are "never really done" you can just stop them whenever, but i don't understand that. however i've accepted it sort of.

but the two biggest tips i've found so far

1. render the image twice as big. im wanting my renders at 1920/1080, so i'm rendering them at 3840/2160, and stopping them around a half an hour in, instead of rendering an image at 1080 and stopping 1 hour in. then a simple image reduction, to the size you want, will end up getting rid of alot of noise and cleaning it up, so it basically looks the same as the hour long render.

2. "neat-image", its a stand-alone program, but you can also get it as a plugin for photoshop. but using it i feel alot more confident ending renders early. simply find a spot in the image of a decent size where nothing is really going on, and you can create a "noise profile" and then with a click of the mouse and a simple slider you can adjust the noise reduction pretty well.

my only gripe with neat-image is while it tends to clean everything up, it can also dull things slightly, like characters skin textures and such. but if you need to just render a room or area and you don't need perfect pristine quality, doing those two steps can give good results.
 
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OhWee

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One thing you can do to reduce render times (if you have the appropriate script) is that you can reduce the texture map size for 'less important' stuff. There's a product or two that deals with this, and there's also at least one free script available through the Daz forum. 4096 x 4096 might not be needed for some things...

This doesn't always work (say if you have a complex texture map with different stuff included for different areas), but for basic textures it can help a bit.

You can use your integrated GPU to run the screen, freeing up your vid card to focus entirely on rendering. Yeah, it's just a HD 4600, but unless you are using iray in the viewport you don't need much to do the 2d stuff in the workspace. This will allow you to do other stuff a bit more smoothly while waiting on the next render to complete.

I don't know much about optix prime accelleration, so I have no opinon on that. Others might, or maybe google it...
 
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dogk22

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Like I said I've been using the Iray Ghost Light Kit and no more problems with noise for me, even in darker scenes. This lighting kit is really impressive.

I've never use neat-image since I've always used Photoshop native tools for noise reduction. One of them is Camera Raw Filter, very good and effective.

My render settings are 8000 max samples, default 7200 for max time, and all the options checked in Advanced (seems like Optix prime acceleration has efficiency only by using GPU or both). And with 10-20% (10-15 minutes) of rendering the image is already very good.
 

polyrama

New Member
Sep 14, 2017
2
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I don't know much about optix prime accelleration, so I have no opinon on that. Others might, or maybe google it...
Optix is a 'fast low-level API for ray tracing' and if you have an nVidia card with CUDA cores (and you should if you're playing with iRay) turn it on. Things render faster, especially when manipulating the active viewport in iRay mode.
 
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Phoenixfarts

Newbie
Jun 2, 2017
62
30
i'm going to have to look into this mitchell/gaussian setting

specs-

i7 4790 4 ghz
32gb ram
gtx 980 ti gaming

i feel like my renders take forever but i have no frame of reference since im new to this.

some basic things that have speeded it along a little, is making sure that its actually using my card to render and not the cpu, also i click the optix prime accelleration thing? but i have no idea if it does anything or if my card even supports it.

i tend to want to let my renders actually finish, although i've seen they are "never really done" you can just stop them whenever, but i don't understand that. however i've accepted it sort of.

but the two biggest tips i've found so far

1. render the image twice as big. im wanting my renders at 1920/1080, so i'm rendering them at 3840/2160, and stopping them around a half an hour in, instead of rendering an image at 1080 and stopping 1 hour in. then a simple image reduction, to the size you want, will end up getting rid of alot of noise and cleaning it up, so it basically looks the same as the hour long render.

2. "neat-image", its a stand-alone program, but you can also get it as a plugin for photoshop. but using it i feel alot more confident ending renders early. simply find a spot in the image of a decent size where nothing is really going on, and you can create a "noise profile" and then with a click of the mouse and a simple slider you can adjust the noise reduction pretty well.

my only gripe with neat-image is while it tends to clean everything up, it can also dull things slightly, like characters skin textures and such. but if you need to just render a room or area and you don't need perfect pristine quality, doing those two steps can give good results.
3840x2160 is 4x as big as 1920x1080 not 2x lol