3D-Daz Daz3d Art - Show Us Your DazSkill

LBW · Aug 17, 2021

Freediving

LBW · Aug 17, 2021

atheran said:
So..To all you people doing renders for a long time. I recently cleaned my laptop and it now can handle rendering without overheating. I also just managed to light up my scene, finalize the character design and pose it exactly the way I want to.

So far I let it render for a couple of hours for each render (afraid it'd overheat and I'd lose it all) at 960p with an hdri and a couple of lights max. In this new scene, I have full atmospherics and it's at 4k but the way it goes, it'd need about 2 days to finish. Should I bite the bullet and let it go until it finishes or I'm satisfied with the progress? Or the difference between my usual 20-30% and 90-98% isn't really worth it?

And by the way, it'll be a double render, as in..2 renders with same exact settings/lighting/atmosperics/etc.

Personally I never render more than 1500 iterations(samples). Basically at 1500 I've set the denoiser to kick in. In my experience 1500 iterations are enough for any render, no matter how complex your scene/lighting is. Anything beyond 1500 it's a waste of time and electrical current in my opinion. Now depending on the computer configuration, 1500 iterations can take days, hours or 10-15 minutes. In my case, I render at 2560x1440 (basically 2K resolution) and depending on the number of objects in the scene the render takes around 10-15 minutes.

AlexStone · Aug 17, 2021

Yustu said:
Just want to correct Your point about cache and CPU rendering.
The point about Blender is incorrect. For CPU tile size should be small, for GPU large. This is due to amount of memory available to the device (CPU or GPU - talking about device memory, not RAM here).

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CPU has L1 / L2 / L3 and GPU have L1 / L2 caches and if "task" can fit in it it will produce performance benefits. The slowest L3 (CPU) cache is magnitude faster then RAM. Speed of that memory is from where performance comes.
Of course layout of cores also matters, for example Zen CCX has it's own memory pools that can be accessed only by that CCX so as You can see if this memory could be accessed by others CCX then we don't need to duplicate memory for given task ("tile" while rendering) and share that data across all cores and having performance boost that way. On GPU side more "cores" (compute units) have access to that data, and of course there is more "cores", so it perform better then CPU. There are exceptions from that rule of course, i.e. Threadripper and depending on GPU that You compare it to it can perform better.
Now with GPU the problem is amount of that VRAM and so called "out of core" mode with has huge performance penalty.

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Note that by "task" I mean set of instructions and data required to perform that task. There are multiple tasks types in rendering pipeline and rendering single "tile" consist of multiple of such tasks. It has nothing to do with i.e. texture size as this is "storage" kind of memory for data that are not needed to perform current task. If current, or next, task require data that is not in cache then that data is fetched from slower and larger memory, usually it's L3 or VRAM and then, if data can't fit there or is simply not accessed earlier, it's fetched from RAM (for GPU assuming out of core mode support). So it's slow.

As for the value in iRay (Daz) - dunno didn't researched that, but most likely it doesn't matter in Your renderings (i.e. doesn't influence rendering time) because, most likely, other limitations kinck in first, i.e. total amount of iterations.

Well, that's more of a supplement than a refutation of what I said.
Indeed, the size of the optimal "tile" depends on many parameters. (My first renders on my ancient laptop with the first i5 series in Blender I've made with 16x16 tiles, oh my god it took me sooooooo long!)

But the fact is that "tiled" mode where you don't have to pull data back and forth from RAM to cache in Blender gives me a nice performance boost (I've measured it too, it's almost a 40% saving in time). In DAZ/Iray, as I said, there's no such mode: the renderer jumps around the whole picture at once, so there's not much to compare it with.

That leaves me only to compare by eye: does the render quality parameter give any savings? For me it does: the renderer can stop at a smaller number of iterations and at approximately the same quality, and the time itself is a single iteration increases, though not by much. That is, the overall gain is evident. But, as I said, this is a subjective view, because in this variant we deliberately discard the conversion ratio parameter.

AlexStone · Aug 17, 2021

LBW said:
Personally I never render more than 1500 iterations(samples). Basically at 1500 I've set the denoiser to kick in. In my experience 1500 iterations are enough for any render, no matter how complex your scene/lighting is. Anything beyond 1500 it's a waste of time and electrical current in my opinion. Now depending on the computer configuration 1500 iterations can take days, hours or 10-15 minutes. In my case I render at 2560x1440 (basically 2K resolution) and depending on the number of objects in the scene the render takes around 10-15 minutes.

https://f95zone.to/threads/daz3d-art-show-us-your-dazskill.4764/page-2589#post-6383156

With the old noise reduction, which worked on every rendering step, you could stop at 600-800 iterations, at 1000 there was no trace of noise anymore.
But, as I understand, in new versions of DAZ this option of noise reduction was removed? Or not?

LBW · Aug 17, 2021

AlexStone said:
https://f95zone.to/threads/daz3d-art-show-us-your-dazskill.4764/page-2589#post-6383156

With the old noise reduction, which worked on every rendering step, you could stop at 600-800 iterations, at 1000 there was no trace of noise anymore.
But, as I understand, in new versions of DAZ this option of noise reduction was removed? Or not?

You can set it to start at frame 0 or any other frame. In theory you can start with the denoiser right away as you hit render, but I've seen very weird artefacts especially on reflective surfaces if it kicks in too early.

AlexStone · Aug 17, 2021

LBW said:
You can set it to start at frame 0 or any other frame. In theory you can start with the denoiser right away as you hit render, but I've seen very weird artefacts especially on reflective surfaces if it kicks in too early.

I know about this problem with the new denoiser, the same artifacts are constantly being caught by the regular denoiser in Blender. That's why I love the old denoiser, which I use in all my renders, because I haven't seen this kind of fuck-up.

Straz3D · Aug 17, 2021

MothManlet · Aug 17, 2021

atheran said:
Even though it reminds me of sims4 just at a higher resolution, it's beautiful. May I ask how you achieved this look? Possibly the skin/hair materials you used, but I might learn something about render settings as well by it.

I'm using genesis 8.1. The model itself is custom but the head is based off of this character