Hi guys. Can u help me about my rendering problem?
What setting should i use? Max samples, rendering qualty etc.
Thank you
What setting should i use? Max samples, rendering qualty etc.
Thank you
GTX 1050Ti Render Settings
- Thread starter lalalark
- Start date
- Jan 5, 2018
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- 651
Jesus this patreon rush is making people even lazier.
Or you can google (spoiler: they give you a few tips and tell you to find what works for you)
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Or you can google (spoiler: they give you a few tips and tell you to find what works for you)
- Jun 29, 2018
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I also endorse the link W22N posted for MrKnobb's settings. I was getting renders that I was happy with the quality of but his settings shaved about 15-20% of the time off as well.
It's still a good idea to play around and test different things, it's a great way to learn, but that should give you a good starting point.
It's still a good idea to play around and test different things, it's a great way to learn, but that should give you a good starting point.
I'm using a GTX 1050Ti myself and have only just recently started messing around with Daz. So far other than just trying to remember where to find things being so new to it, the biggest issue I'm running into is memory. My renders generally look pretty good considering how little experience I have so far, but my video card only has 4GB of memory and my renders are using 8-12GB or more so all of my renders are being done by my CPU instead of my GPU.
Definitely less than ideal, so I think I'm going to really need to figure out what tweaks I need to do to reduce memory utilization if I want to get my render times down to something reasonable. The render I'm doing right now only has 2 female characters in it plus a background and it takes about 11GB. I do have scene optimizer but haven't messed with it yet.
I suspect anyone who's renders are going to be a source of income for them really just needs to break down and get a top of the line video card or two, but even then you'll have to watch your memory utilization. I'm already exceeding the memory on a 1080Ti with some of my renders and that's with relatively simple scenes. Personally, I'd rather have good renders and slow render times than low quality renders and fast render times given the choice but if you can get right up to the line you could probably have the best of both worlds.
Definitely less than ideal, so I think I'm going to really need to figure out what tweaks I need to do to reduce memory utilization if I want to get my render times down to something reasonable. The render I'm doing right now only has 2 female characters in it plus a background and it takes about 11GB. I do have scene optimizer but haven't messed with it yet.
I suspect anyone who's renders are going to be a source of income for them really just needs to break down and get a top of the line video card or two, but even then you'll have to watch your memory utilization. I'm already exceeding the memory on a 1080Ti with some of my renders and that's with relatively simple scenes. Personally, I'd rather have good renders and slow render times than low quality renders and fast render times given the choice but if you can get right up to the line you could probably have the best of both worlds.
Rendering on a 1050Ti is less than optimal. During the render process assets that are needed for the rendering are loaded to the video memory you can render with a 1050ti but in the render settings under optimization, you will want to set the render mode to memory so it will load assets as it needs them. Daz will default to CPU rendering when the video memory is full. Rendering at a lower resolution can really help with video memory usage. for 1920x1080 you should use at least a 1070. anything over that for higher resolution. Avoid the new RTX cards for now as they do not work with Iray yet. Most of how well a render turns out is in the scene setup. at the end of the day, Iray or any other renderer can't work miracles
- Jun 25, 2017
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Look for the Scene Optimizer item for Daz. One of the "problems" is that the PA's that produce content love to put 4Kx4K textures on everything. That's 50 megabytes of data once the JPG is decompressed. (And many of the characters have 15-20 individual maps. Or more.) I've seen one asset that had one of those on a doorknob, for cryin' out loud. I understand that some people might have a render where any random item might be very close to the camera, and so you want the detail, but when you start to build large scenes, they choke your card.
There is a Daz setting that will say "if it gets bigger than this, then compress it" but that compression only goes so far - you're far better off reducing the size of the textures yourself, which is what Scene Optimizer will do for you. Take a 4K texture down to 1K, and you've reduced the memory cost of that map by a factor of 16.
Scene Optimizer will also let you remove maps. For example, many assets use bump maps to produce fine detail. Great if it's right up close to the camera, but if it's across the room, you'll never see that detail, so you might as well ditch the map entirely. So for things that aren't close, you can typically remove both bump and displacement maps.
Makes a huge difference in renderability...
I'm guessing you're referring to the Instancing Optimization? Mine was set to speed. I changed it to memory and that made an absolutely massive difference. With instancing optimization set to speed rendering the image I did last night with 2 actors and a background took almost 2 hours for a 1280x720 resolution image. Changing instancing optimization to memory and leaving everything else the same I just redid the same render and it only took 37 minutes.
I checked my task manager periodically during both and when it was set to speed my CPU was pegged at 100% and my GPU was mostly stuck at about 1%. With it set to memory my CPU was still pegged at 100% the whole time but my GPU utilization ranged from 1% all the way up to around 50% off and on. So even though I was still using about 8GB of memory and only have a 4GB card, it was still using my GPU part of the time with just that 1 change. I suspect if I mess around with scene optimizer some I might be able to squeeze some more efficiency out without losing much image quality.
Thanks for all the tips.
After playing around with different settings as well as Scene Optimizer I'm not sure if I'll be able to get my memory utilization down below the 4GB threshold that I'd need to render with my video card unless I reduce the target resolution of the image I'm rendering, but I have discovered a few more things that did make a big difference for me.
1. Reducing memory utilization seems to speed up render time even if you're still rendering 100% with your CPU. Cutting my memory utilization by about 4GB allows me to render a scene in 10 minutes that looks better than a scene without memory optimization that I let render for more than 4 hours. I have 16 GB of system memory and without optimization I use more than 12 of it.
2. I had assumed that objects that were not visible would automatically be excluded from memory by Daz but that does not seem to be the case. If I hide all objects that are not actually visible in the scene (including walls/celing/etc) that are outside of the view of the scene it massively reduces memory utilization.
3. I noticed that before optimization, my renders were consistently producing images that were good quality for the parts of the scene that were well lit but noticeably grainy for areas that were in the shadows. With memory optimization there were no grainy parts even in the shadows. Iray seems to take longer to render the parts of the image that are not well lit.
Using scene optimizer to reduce the texture size for some of the objects in the scene plus making sure to hide everything that shouldn't be visible allowed me to reduce memory utilization from more than 12GB to about 8GB and cut my render time from more than 4 hours to about 15 minutes even though I'm still rendering 100% with my CPU.
I definitely plan on making sure that my next video card has more than 8GB of memory.
1. Reducing memory utilization seems to speed up render time even if you're still rendering 100% with your CPU. Cutting my memory utilization by about 4GB allows me to render a scene in 10 minutes that looks better than a scene without memory optimization that I let render for more than 4 hours. I have 16 GB of system memory and without optimization I use more than 12 of it.
2. I had assumed that objects that were not visible would automatically be excluded from memory by Daz but that does not seem to be the case. If I hide all objects that are not actually visible in the scene (including walls/celing/etc) that are outside of the view of the scene it massively reduces memory utilization.
3. I noticed that before optimization, my renders were consistently producing images that were good quality for the parts of the scene that were well lit but noticeably grainy for areas that were in the shadows. With memory optimization there were no grainy parts even in the shadows. Iray seems to take longer to render the parts of the image that are not well lit.
Using scene optimizer to reduce the texture size for some of the objects in the scene plus making sure to hide everything that shouldn't be visible allowed me to reduce memory utilization from more than 12GB to about 8GB and cut my render time from more than 4 hours to about 15 minutes even though I'm still rendering 100% with my CPU.
I definitely plan on making sure that my next video card has more than 8GB of memory.
Something I've been noticing that seems a bit odd is the resource utilization I see when I use Daz. I haven't found a way to get my VRAM utilization down below 4GB so I expect to see my CPU pegged whenever I'm rendering. Sometimes I see spikes like this though with nothing running other than Daz and the task manager. Does this mean Daz actually does periodically get some use out of my GPU. I can't imagine why else my GPU would spike since I'm just sitting there doing nothing watching the task manager with everything else minimized.
- Jun 17, 2017
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Reading through this thread, it looks like you have a 4 GB Nvidia card. Sooo....
Is there any particular reason why you need to render the characters and scenes together? I say this, because a number of games will simply superimpose the characters over the background (particularly Renpy and and RPG Maker games, but others do this too). Sometimes this is done for convenience, but it also helps cut down your render times, as you are essentially rendering the characters as standalones. So it's a bit easier to squeeze them into 4 GB.
With a bit of practice, you can set up your lighting without the room, and get 'close enough' lighting for your characters, and then render the background by itself with similar lighting. Or say maybe the characters with just a couch, and the rest of the room done as a separate render. It won't be perfect, but it'll be good enough for most people.
A number of games either start out by doing this, or just do this as part of their designs. I've seen a few start out with the 'overlay' characters thing, and then, once their game started getting traction on Patreon, and cash started flowing in, then they'd look to upgrade their video card, and maybe system.
Also, for outdoor stuff, looking into HDRIs might be worthwhile. There's a bunch of free ones at HDRIHaven.com (they do like it when people donate to the cause of course). They provide decent lighting in a lot of cases, and tend to be less resource intensive than setpieces (trees, rocks, etc.).
You can use 'indoor' HDRI's as well, but these can be a bit more tricky with camera positioning and such. Plus you won't be able to adjust the background, as it's static.
Is there any particular reason why you need to render the characters and scenes together? I say this, because a number of games will simply superimpose the characters over the background (particularly Renpy and and RPG Maker games, but others do this too). Sometimes this is done for convenience, but it also helps cut down your render times, as you are essentially rendering the characters as standalones. So it's a bit easier to squeeze them into 4 GB.
With a bit of practice, you can set up your lighting without the room, and get 'close enough' lighting for your characters, and then render the background by itself with similar lighting. Or say maybe the characters with just a couch, and the rest of the room done as a separate render. It won't be perfect, but it'll be good enough for most people.
A number of games either start out by doing this, or just do this as part of their designs. I've seen a few start out with the 'overlay' characters thing, and then, once their game started getting traction on Patreon, and cash started flowing in, then they'd look to upgrade their video card, and maybe system.
Also, for outdoor stuff, looking into HDRIs might be worthwhile. There's a bunch of free ones at HDRIHaven.com (they do like it when people donate to the cause of course). They provide decent lighting in a lot of cases, and tend to be less resource intensive than setpieces (trees, rocks, etc.).
You can use 'indoor' HDRI's as well, but these can be a bit more tricky with camera positioning and such. Plus you won't be able to adjust the background, as it's static.
genesis 8 takes an average of 48GB of physical RAM, which gets used even on the most basic of scene's, if you want to speed up render times then you need more then 48GB of physical RAM installed so the graphic's card is'nt bottle necked by virtual memory speed of your SATA read/write speed
if you have more then 48GB of physical RAM installed with sli, you will probably have a 60% speed increase
if you have more then 48GB of physical RAM installed with sli, you will probably have a 60% speed increase
- Jun 17, 2017
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This simply is not true. I'm able to fit Genesis 8 characters (multiple ones at at that ) into my 6.4 GB of available graphics memory when rendering. I've never had a problem rendering a Genesis 8 character using the GPU. Multiples, maybe...
Also, LOTS of people work with Genesis 8 with only 16 GB of system ram, without issue. Sure, the virtual ram (hdd/ssd) may come into play, but again, when it comes time to render, yes Genesis 8 can be a bit more intensive but not not always. Some Genesis 3 characters with HD can exceed typical Genesis 8 characters. Also, Altern8, which remaps the G8 textures (at least with the ones included in the package) can help with this.
If viewport lagging is an issue for you, you can always flip the viewport over to texture shaded... it's much more responsive, and you can use the Iray viewport once you've set everything up to 'pre-check' your work before rendering. Or use the spot render tool...
But, if VRAM is an issue, you can always fall back on previous generations. Genesis 8 just looks a bit more detailed on average, although there are some Genesis 3 characters (and previous generations) that still look absolutely stunning...
Keep in mind that new Victoria 4.2 gen characters are STILL being released today in Poser land...
(stupid Windows 10 VRAM tax, stealing 1.6 GB of my graphics memory).
it is true, i have already told you the basic's of light rendering and vectors on meshes, for the in's and out's watch the john carmack video on youtube on the principles of lighting and rendering
or just download HWINFO64 and watch virtual memory go upto 48GB [ including physical memory ] when rendering if virtual memory is set to system managed
- Jun 17, 2017
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I don't know what characters you are using, but I just loaded a scene featuring a G8M with G8 clothing and a motorcycle into Daz just now, and my system is only using 13.9 GB of ram to run everything (Daz, Win 10 environment, AND Firefox). That's with the texture shaded viewport. Flipping over to Iray viewport, yeah then it jumps a bit to 17.82 GB. So I'm guessing that number you pulled out is for a full scene with an involved background and perhaps multiple characters, and using the Iray viewport.
Rendering the scene I just mentioned/loaded takes somewhere around half of my available VRAM (the bike is rather detailed with lots of shiny reflective chrome). It only took a few minutes to render this particular scene.
Windows (in general) loves to use the virtual disk, whether you like it to or not. So yeah, as far as hard drive/ssd space, you should probably look at setting your virtual disk to a suitably large size. A number of people recommend setting minimum and maximum to the same value, so that your system isn't having to 'think' about how big the virtual disk should be. You may want to consider going with some 'crazy high' number like 64 GB or more on your virtual disk, to 'cover' for the extra large Daz scenes and such...
Sure, virtual ram is slower than system ram, but the system is going to use it anyways at some point. SSDs can help with this, and these days the 'wear rate' on SSDs are rated in the same ballpark as regular HDDs (perhaps higher depending on usage). Nonetheless, being old fashioned, I still put my virtual disk on the HDD mainly because SSDs are more expensive to replace.
So I get that you want to have the fastest Daz experience possible, but that isn't the same as saying Genesis 8 won't work on a system with say only a 4 GB video card and 16 GB of system ram (it may be slower, but it still can be done)
Now as for drive space... yeah get lots of that. If you are acquiring Daz assets, particularly the newer ones, yeah HDD/SSD space can dissapear quick. I have well over a TB of Daz stuff at this point (including various scenes that I've saved over the years), although I managed for quite a wile with 'just' a 512GB HDD when I was just starting out with Daz.
Fortunately, storage is reasonably cheap these days, especially for HDDs. Sure, they are slower, but for storing stuff they do just fine.
Rendering the scene I just mentioned/loaded takes somewhere around half of my available VRAM (the bike is rather detailed with lots of shiny reflective chrome). It only took a few minutes to render this particular scene.
Windows (in general) loves to use the virtual disk, whether you like it to or not. So yeah, as far as hard drive/ssd space, you should probably look at setting your virtual disk to a suitably large size. A number of people recommend setting minimum and maximum to the same value, so that your system isn't having to 'think' about how big the virtual disk should be. You may want to consider going with some 'crazy high' number like 64 GB or more on your virtual disk, to 'cover' for the extra large Daz scenes and such...
Sure, virtual ram is slower than system ram, but the system is going to use it anyways at some point. SSDs can help with this, and these days the 'wear rate' on SSDs are rated in the same ballpark as regular HDDs (perhaps higher depending on usage). Nonetheless, being old fashioned, I still put my virtual disk on the HDD mainly because SSDs are more expensive to replace.
So I get that you want to have the fastest Daz experience possible, but that isn't the same as saying Genesis 8 won't work on a system with say only a 4 GB video card and 16 GB of system ram (it may be slower, but it still can be done)
Now as for drive space... yeah get lots of that. If you are acquiring Daz assets, particularly the newer ones, yeah HDD/SSD space can dissapear quick. I have well over a TB of Daz stuff at this point (including various scenes that I've saved over the years), although I managed for quite a wile with 'just' a 512GB HDD when I was just starting out with Daz.
Fortunately, storage is reasonably cheap these days, especially for HDDs. Sure, they are slower, but for storing stuff they do just fine.
- Jun 17, 2017
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BTW, I'm sure a couple of you have seen me mention Altern8 a couple of times now.
I just did two renders back to back (actually 3, the first render usually takes a few seconds longer so I did that one beforehand).
A simple 'head and bust' closeup of a default load of Aiko 8 took me 5 minutes and 24 seconds to render, using default maps. Using the 'Aiko 8 - mapless' setting in Altern8, the same render setup only took 1 minute and 25 seconds.
There's also an 'Altern8 - mapped' setting as well.
This may be a more 'extreme' example, but yeah this seems to be a trend reported by the people that use Altern8.
Altern8 directly supports a handful of the G8F base characters, and has a 'other characters - mapless' setting for the others. It includes a few other 'skin tweak' settings as well.
Here's a thread on the Daz3D forum where Divamakeup and varous forum peeps have been discussing Altern8... which includes some renders for comparison.
I just did two renders back to back (actually 3, the first render usually takes a few seconds longer so I did that one beforehand).
A simple 'head and bust' closeup of a default load of Aiko 8 took me 5 minutes and 24 seconds to render, using default maps. Using the 'Aiko 8 - mapless' setting in Altern8, the same render setup only took 1 minute and 25 seconds.
There's also an 'Altern8 - mapped' setting as well.
This may be a more 'extreme' example, but yeah this seems to be a trend reported by the people that use Altern8.
Altern8 directly supports a handful of the G8F base characters, and has a 'other characters - mapless' setting for the others. It includes a few other 'skin tweak' settings as well.
Here's a thread on the Daz3D forum where Divamakeup and varous forum peeps have been discussing Altern8... which includes some renders for comparison.
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The effect of resource utilization on Daz render times definitely seems nonintuitive to me. Obviously if my VRAM utilization is high enough that I can't use my GPU, the CPU is going to take longer than if it had been rendered by the GPU. That makes sense. What doesn't make sense to me is that I have 16GB of system ram and a render that uses 12GB of memory I can let run for over 5 hours and it still looks grainy. If I render the exact same scene after just using Scene Optimizer to cut all visible textures to half size, that same scene looks better and less grainy after 5 minutes of rendering than the scene with full sized textures did after 5 hours even though it's still too big for my GPU to render it.
The scene I'm rendering right now I let run all night with full texture size and it was still grainy. Used scene optimizer on it this afternoon and am rerendering it. Still using 6.4GB (including Firefox) (Last night it was a bit over 10GB without Firefox). Still over my 4GB VRAM limit so 100% rendered by the CPU, but after 10 minutes of rendering so far it looks almost done.
I don't always run into this problem with full sized textures, it seems to just be when using certain environments that take a lot of memory. Another oddity for the render last night was that when I went to bed after it had been rendering for over 3 hours already, the little tracking window for the render still showed it at 0% complete after several thousand iterations. That seems to be a trend for the scenes that always end up grainy for me. When they look good, the tracking window shows a nonzero completion percentage. I have it intentionally set to take as long as it needs to so I generally just stop it when I think it looks good enough but the grainy ones never look good enough no matter how long I let them run.
- Jun 17, 2017
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@ Khumak,
Yeah, that's the 'rub' in Daz rendering. There's definitely a price to pay when using large texture maps.
And yeah, there's a difference between how much system memory a scene takes up when setting up a scene, versus how big the scene actually is once it's 'compressed' and optimized for rendering by your video card. I.E. the example I shared above was soaking up over 12 GB of system ram, but only needed about 4 GB or so of video card memory to actually render, on the 'speed' setting for the memory. I'm sure it would have been a bit smaller if I had went with the 'size' setting instead (whatever that one's called, I don't have Daz open at the moment).
Lighting in Daz can be a real bitch sometimes... if you can master it you can do some truly kickass stuff, but there's a lot of moving parts in a given scene that can change the playing field, particularly if you are trying to render an indoor scene. I'll be the first to admit that lighting isn't my jam in Daz, and that I fall back on HDRI spheres a LOT, 'cuz they do a pretty good job lighting outdoor (and some indoor) scenes. I still work with light rigs as well, but I can't say that I look forward to that part...
And that's why I say that there are MUCH better Daz artists out there than me. I continue to be amazed by some of the Daz art I see on the web in my daily internet rounds.
Yeah, that's the 'rub' in Daz rendering. There's definitely a price to pay when using large texture maps.
And yeah, there's a difference between how much system memory a scene takes up when setting up a scene, versus how big the scene actually is once it's 'compressed' and optimized for rendering by your video card. I.E. the example I shared above was soaking up over 12 GB of system ram, but only needed about 4 GB or so of video card memory to actually render, on the 'speed' setting for the memory. I'm sure it would have been a bit smaller if I had went with the 'size' setting instead (whatever that one's called, I don't have Daz open at the moment).
Lighting in Daz can be a real bitch sometimes... if you can master it you can do some truly kickass stuff, but there's a lot of moving parts in a given scene that can change the playing field, particularly if you are trying to render an indoor scene. I'll be the first to admit that lighting isn't my jam in Daz, and that I fall back on HDRI spheres a LOT, 'cuz they do a pretty good job lighting outdoor (and some indoor) scenes. I still work with light rigs as well, but I can't say that I look forward to that part...
And that's why I say that there are MUCH better Daz artists out there than me. I continue to be amazed by some of the Daz art I see on the web in my daily internet rounds.
I'm still a total novice with Daz but I'm learning. I'm absolutely horrible with lighting so I mostly rely on whatever lighting is set up in the environments I'm using or I just load a preset lighting environment. I hope to eventually get to where I know what I'm doing when it comes to that but for now lighting is beyond me.
I have noticed that Daz does NOT like rendering dark scenes. I'm hoping there is some way around that but I haven't found it yet. When I try to do an intentionally dark scene a lot of times I'll have to just give up and change it to a bright scene or I end up with a scene that finished rendering in a matter of minutes but has hardly any detail even though I have my render settings set up so that Daz can take longer than 5 hours if it needs to.
I have noticed that Daz does NOT like rendering dark scenes. I'm hoping there is some way around that but I haven't found it yet. When I try to do an intentionally dark scene a lot of times I'll have to just give up and change it to a bright scene or I end up with a scene that finished rendering in a matter of minutes but has hardly any detail even though I have my render settings set up so that Daz can take longer than 5 hours if it needs to.
- Jun 17, 2017
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I understand that ghost lighting can help a lot with darker renders, but I'll leave it to the professionals to explain how to improve 'low light' render times and quality. Not my area of expertise.
like i have said, and this is the third time, add some iray lighting, and some iray materials,
just using a skydome uses hardly any RAM, around 6GB
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while this, half rendered image, uses 40GB in total
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