Here is a
no postwork picture except a slight denoising, as it seems that I
"just postworked, painting over a bad render" (I caricature a little) my last artwork which was intended to look like a movie poster btw (inspired by
Kompromat) and to be the main screen of my
maybecomingoneday game.
View attachment 2075239
I feel your pain. I also have a GTX 1060 (3Gb) in my
craptop. For the pic above, 1500 iterations - CPU only -> rendering time 6h30.
But i've been told that hardware doesn't matter....
I was doing renders on my 1050 with the same about of VRAM and they took me around 5mins by the GPU. The trick is you need to reduce the texture size and geometry in your scene so they take up less VRAM. When you use up too much VRAM, it can no longer use the GPU to render and has to switch to the CPU. There is software scripts to reduce the texture sizes, just reducing them by half, from 4096x4096 down to 2048x2048 makes a huge difference, half the size, and 1/4 the memory taken with very little difference. Then you need to HIDE all objects that the camera cannot see as anything not hidden will be loaded into the video card's memory (VRAM) whether it is seen or not. I would also go over the character and hide any body part that wasn't visible, like an arm that was on the far side and not seen, the tongue in the mouth, the teeth etc... if their mouth is closed, I would hide the eyeball if it wasn't in the scene. It all adds up and eventually I was able to do a nice GPU render that was quite a bit faster as well.
Here's some examples I posted a while back when I was still using my 1050... this image took me 5mins to render with denoising and around 100-200 iterations...
This is the same image rendered from a different wide camera angle. I actually rendered this by mistake, but I kept it as it showed you what I did to get the speed. I used a script to reduce the textures on all objects by half as well, I'll post links to it below... but this shows you the geometry to hide in order to get faster renders and fit it into VRAM...
This is from the "Desert Inn" environment. I kept the floor, the wall with lights, all other objects and walls gone. Just the mattress, the rest of the bedframe gone (can't be seen)... and every body part that is not visible, hidden. No need to DELETE anything, when you load objects they are loaded into system RAM, when you hide something that means don't load it into VRAM.
Here is another example. This scene is from the Desert Inn Office environment and was one I redone later on once I bought an RTX 3060 (12G version, VRAM is vital), nothing deleted and full texture size (also with denoising and under 5mins to render)...
When I still had my 1050, I hid all objects in t his scene I didn't feel were important in the story. I also reduced all textures to half their size and while you can't see it, I hid all object and even part of her arm you cannot see as well as their legs, eyes, teeth etc that are not seen and this is what I got (again, with denoising, only 5mins to render on my 1050)...
If you look at their skin, hair and clothes, you really can't tell the texture is half the size. I think it is most noticable on the dirt outside the door.
But it CAN be done on the GPU, in a reasonable amount of time if you cut back on things and use denoising.
For reducing your texture size, grab the following Scene optimizer here:
You must be registered to see the links
While I prefer to hide my own objects manually, you can use the following script which allows you to select a camera, click it and it will hide/delete all objects not in view:
You must be registered to see the links
Of course, even with the camera optimizer, if you want to hide body parts, you need to do that manually, just click a part, then click the EYE icon in the scene view window (upper right corner where it lists everything in the scene).