Daz Daz Rendering Issues(Noise, Time)

[Dedricks]

Greetings all,

I recently decided to throw my hat into the ring when it comes to making games since I have a background in python development, so I chose Renpy as my engine and Daz3D as my rendering tool since there are many assets and tutorials for it. I am coming across an issue however in my renders that other solutions I have seen on this forum and across the web cannot solve, and I am unsure if I am missing something simple or misunderstanding something.

Attached is a render I did earlier today, it took about 2 hours and did not reach 95% convergance with 7000 iteration samples set. The image seemed rather noisy/blurry, so I of course went to see other people who had the same issues. I made sure that the problem was not CPU fallback, my GPU is being used in the renders. I have messed with having render quality setting on and off with no apparent success. I have changed the lighting multiple times to no avail. The render you see is with an emissive plane at the ceiling and an hdri lighting with draw dome on.

I am only posing this since from what I read other people do not have render times of around 2 hours where the quality is still this poor and have not found a solution. I will attach my current render settings, as well as some more info below.

Computer Specs:
NVIDIA 2070x
Intel I7-10700k @ 4GHz
32GB Ram
DAZ is intalled on a M.2 drive

Extra notes:
I did use Scene Optimizer and the Camera Cutaway tool in the hopes of lowering render time

 

[MissFortune]

Dunno how efficient it is, especially seeing as I'm on a 3080, but I actually touch very little of the render settings. But otherwise, our systems are just about identical short of the RAM (more RAM is always better. Especially for Daz, which can tend to hog it.)

My render settings are basically the same:
- Leave "Max Samples" as is. Maybe bump it up, if you want.
- Change "Max Time" to 0.
- Turn "Rendering Quality" off.
- I always set "Instance Optimizing" to Memory or Speed to avoid the black eye issue you can get from being too far from the world center.

Everything else, for me, will usually change on a per render or per scene basis.



Speaking to the render above however, I'd lean in on the guess that you've got too much lighting going on. And yes, there's such thing as too much lighting. Generally speaking, taking the roof off of a scene (especially with a daytime HDRI), is going a bit overboard. And in this case, I think it's that that's causing the noise. The other problem that comes along with this style of lighting is that quite literally everything is either washed out or lacking in shadows, which will inherently create a lack of visual interest and/or dynamic. Otherwise known as 'light damage'. That said, again, I'm working under the assumption that the overdosage of light here is creating the noise and render length you're experiencing. As I believe Iray's algorithm has to calculate the light and the way it bounces (probably a lot more complicated, but I wouldn't understand it even if I read it.), and with more light comes more reflections, and thus taking longer to render.

In a scene like that, a couple spotlights and maybe a somewhat dim ghost light/pointlight near a lamp would do wonders for the noise. In the render I posted above, all of it is done with three spotlights (ignoring the corner light that you see. It's visible, yeah, but it's only there to create a bloom. Hardly bright enough to create any issues.). This is traditionally known as 3 Point Lighting. 1 Light will typically be used as the main light source, the Key Light. 1 Light will be dimly lit, enough to get rid of the hard shadows, the Fill Light. 1 more light to create a rim (look at the hair.) of sorts. In this render's case, the left side would be the key, the right would be the fill, the rear (of course) would be the rim/backlight.

 

[Dedricks]

Dunno how efficient it is, especially seeing as I'm on a 3080, but I actually touch very little of the render settings. But otherwise, our systems are just about identical short of the RAM (more RAM is always better. Especially for Daz, which can tend to hog it.)

My render settings are basically the same:
- Leave "Max Samples" as is. Maybe bump it up, if you want.
- Change "Max Time" to 0.
- Turn "Rendering Quality" off.
- I always set "Instance Optimizing" to Memory or Speed to avoid the black eye issue you can get from being too far from the world center.

Everything else, for me, will usually change on a per render or per scene basis.

View attachment 1728324

Speaking to the render above however, I'd lean in on the guess that you've got too much lighting going on. And yes, there's such thing as too much lighting. Generally speaking, taking the roof off of a scene (especially with a daytime HDRI), is going a bit overboard. And in this case, I think it's that that's causing the noise. The other problem that comes along with this style of lighting is that quite literally everything is either washed out or lacking in shadows, which will inherently create a lack of visual interest and/or dynamic. Otherwise known as 'light damage'. That said, again, I'm working under the assumption that the overdosage of light here is creating the noise and render length you're experiencing. As I believe Iray's algorithm has to calculate the light and the way it bounces (probably a lot more complicated, but I wouldn't understand it even if I read it.), and with more light comes more reflections, and thus taking longer to render.

In a scene like that, a couple spotlights and maybe a somewhat dim ghost light/pointlight near a lamp would do wonders for the noise. In the render I posted above, all of it is done with three spotlights (ignoring the corner light that you see. It's visible, yeah, but it's only there to create a bloom. Hardly bright enough to create any issues.). This is traditionally known as 3 Point Lighting. 1 Light will typically be used as the main light source, the Key Light. 1 Light will be dimly lit, enough to get rid of the hard shadows, the Fill Light. 1 more light to create a rim (look at the hair.) of sorts. In this render's case, the left side would be the key, the right would be the fill, the rear (of course) would be the rim/backlight.

Wow that's an impressive render, it's always daunting to see how good other people are lol.

Thanks for the suggestions. I will need to look into three point lighting for sure in that case. I just shot out a quick render replacing my emissive lights with a couple of spotlights setting them up in a "decent" way and will see how that turns out. From the preview I'm seeing it already looks better, so thanks for that.

I see that you have the game dev tag, so if you don't mind me asking, do you spend much time with renders in a post-effects software like photoshop to enhance your final renders? I'm wondering if I'll need to start watching tutorials for things like that since I've never touched it.

 

[MissFortune]

I see that you have the game dev tag, so if you don't mind me asking, do you spend much time with renders in a post-effects software like photoshop to enhance your final renders? I'm wondering if I'll need to start watching tutorials for things like that since I've never touched it.

I personally tend to do a fair bit on

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, yeah, but not everyone does.

It really depends on the end result of your renders out of Daz. I would recommend learning Photoshop (or Affinity, if you're looking for something cheaper. Photopea is free, as well, though lacking some key features Phtoshop has.), if only for the clipping/poke-through that'll inevitably come along at some point. Which is, basically, holes in the clothing that don't usually show up (for whatever reason) in the previews. It's typically easier fixing stuff like that in Photoshop rather than re-rendering or spot rendering. The Spot Healing Brush Tool usually does the trick in most cases, but there's always the Lasso Tool + Content-Aware Fill if the former doesn't work. Like so:


Maybe your render came out a bit flatter than you expected, or maybe you want your render to be a bit warmer or colder, darker shadows, maybe you just want to give them some extra punch. Or maybe you want to add some object/etc. that'd be a bitch to add in Daz (fire, smoke, sparks, etc.). All of it is fairly easily done with a little experience in Photoshop, but how much you do, if any at all, is entirely up to you.

it's always daunting to see how good other people are lol.

I didn't get there overnight, and neither did anyone else. Just takes some practice.