"But I'm not sure you'd want to salute him if you knew him in real life.." rofl
i get it.. Wow this sounds interesting. That's a lot of renders too, how you get a quality renders like this with that amount of renders lol. What is your render times and your system? i literally have to use denoiser and lower the max samples shit, otherwise one render take my 20-25 min..
Well, I researched a bunch in the beginning, but overall its trial and error basically. The best thing I've learned to use is the bat denoiser. Again, trial and error. In my experience it gets the best results when the grain is minimal to average. Any above that and it becomes smudgy basically. I was terrible at lighting in the beginning so a lot of my renders had grain in them I couldn't smooth out with denoiser without it looking smudgy. Add more lights and raise the exposure value (to balance out the lights), and lower crush blacks(lower the darkness in shadows etc) - both in tone mapping.
In the beginning I rendered the scene fully, and at the time it took everything between 2-8 hours. Now, I remove certain parts of the scene that isn't in the viewport (make sure reflections doesn't show that nor shadows) and do it in layers, one character at the time and finish it with denoiser and then layer them together in photoshop. It takes some getting used to, but when you have it down its really easy and every render takes 20-30 minutes basically. You can always render parts of the body of 1 character and do the other fully if they're touching to make sure that it looks natural when you layer them together.
I render the scene fully at 10-15k samples without characters as a backround. That can take a while, maybe 1-3 hours and I usually leave the computer on while I got sleep for that. Then I render the characters at 3k samples one at the time, or 1k if I need to render in something small (like a phone I forgot to turn back on in vision).
My setup right now is;
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHz 4.20 GHz
24 gb ram
GTX 1080 8gb
and not using a SSD for Daz Studio due to large database.
In the future I hope to upgrade to 16gb vram and 32gb ram and an SSD for better loading times. It works quite well right now with what I have, but it'd be cool to render a scene fully at 6.5k samples or even 10k without worrying about it switching to CPU and making it an 10 hour render.
