Daz Help with complex scene optimization

[moose_puck]

Hi ,

I was hoping one of your guru's could provide some tips to speed up renders of complex environment scenes.

What i am doing is to try and make a very detailed, realistic apartment scene and get all the base background shots as high res as possible, before I composite characters onto them. My main problem though is I have to render on CPU, until I get my new vid card (hopefully later this month). It's a pain but I have still gotten surprisingly good renders, even on CPU. They just take a lot longer. Normally, I can get an acceptable quality render with about 800-1000 iterations in about an hour, one hour 20mins or so. I don't get full convergance but with post denoising, I still get a nice 1080P render. This is with two Gen 8 characters in a simple scene. If I shoot the whole scene, then do it over with only the characters, I can get full convergence in about an hour.

So, my problem is that I have this complex apartment scene. It's taken me days to set it up and get all the right props, etc. But when I go to render each room, I am finding that it's way slower then even my double Gen 8 shots are. After 1.5 hours (5400 secs) I am only getting 420 iterations and I don't even think the convergence bar has even registered. With post processing, I still get a nice looking render, but i want these shots to be a reference for all future scenes and therefore, i want them as good as reasonably possible.

I'm using Studio 4.20 and rendering in Iray. The scene has three main sources of light built into it (It's a pre-configured asset, not my lights) - It has an UberEnvironment light, Fill light and Sunlight. There's also several emitters on things like table lamps, etc, but they are not part of most of my shots. There's also an HDRI dome included and I need to use that to get the light coming in the windows, but I don't draw the dome, I use a plane primitive to project an image of the building next door. Hmmm... what else? I'm in 1080P (16:9) - Auto optimization - Tone Mapping on and I bumped up exposure one notch to brighten the scene - No denoising processing (I use the Intel script Post)

I want to avoid having to redo all the lighting if possible. I also don't want to have to hide too many objects, as I have 7 camera angles and I like to be able to run a render queue at night and get them all done while I sleep. I could hide/delete all out of frame objects and then make a bunch of temp. scene DUF's for the render queue, but that adds a lot of time as each scene takes several minutes to load and the queue also restarts DAZ in between to clear any memory leaks.

Is there any other tricks i can try to possibly get the render times down to 1.5 hours or so, with more completion? Do those scene optimization scripts work? I was also going to try the Speed Optimization setting and time it.

Any help appreciated... thanks!

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

I'm using Studio 4.20 and rendering in Iray. The scene has three main sources of light built into it (It's a pre-configured asset, not my lights) - It has an UberEnvironment light, Fill light and Sunlight. There's also several emitters on things like table lamps, etc, but they are not part of most of my shots. There's also an HDRI dome included and I need to use that to get the light coming in the windows, but I don't draw the dome, I use a plane primitive to project an image of the building next door. Hmmm... what else? I'm in 1080P (16:9) - Auto optimization - Tone Mapping on and I bumped up exposure one notch to brighten the scene - No denoising processing (I use the Intel script Post)

Your scene is not right. I feel like you loaded 3DL asset(s) on an Iray setup.
UberEnvironement is a 3DL light shader and nothing to do with Iray.
There is also no sunlight node with Iray, it's either a HDRI or Sun-Sky (no environment map).
You generally don't care about that primitive plane (render that area transparent and add that layer later).

Worth nothing, but when you click on a surface, you see something like this (MDL), and not something (RSL)? :



If you rendering on CPU with Iray, I suggest looking at this method.
You'll need asset attached.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Often a simple fix is lighting. To minimize noise and improve how quickly you reach convergence, making sure objects and light rays find an 'easy' source of lighting. by easy, I mean, assuming the room is either dark or being light indirectly by light leaking in from somewhere (such as a window on a moonlit night) then its the indirect lighting that is the issue. Indirect lighting makes a seen feel soft and can look good, but a lot of the rays don't hit a light source before they 'terminate' so you waste a lot of projected light rays as they don't add any light information to your seen. A simple trick is to fake an ambient light by sticking a light in the middle (some where where it can directly add light to the objects you want to see, such as the whole middle of the room), but make the light physically large but dim, and this will still mimic a soft ambient lighting effect while rendering much faster. But that's only if your doing dark ambient scenes, and not a sunlight seen with hard shadows, in that case, the contrast of shadows can still be problematic.

 

[Rell games]

I don't use daz3d but there's might be a way to speed up a bit your renders, at leas it worth testing. Render 3-5 shots of the same scene with a low amount of iteration with denoiser turned off. It will be noisy as hell, but there's a thing called Temporal Denoiser in Davinci Resolve that takes up to 5 nearby shots and removes noise based on them.
Color tab at the bottom of the screen and find this.

 

[moose_puck]

Your scene is not right. I feel like you loaded 3DL asset(s) on an Iray setup.
UberEnvironement is a 3DL light shader and nothing to do with Iray.
There is also no sunlight node with Iray, it's either a HDRI or Sun-Sky (no environment map).
You generally don't care about that primitive plane (render that area transparent and add that layer later).

Worth nothing, but when you click on a surface, you see something like this (MDL), and not something (RSL)? :

View attachment 1767229

If you rendering on CPU with Iray, I suggest looking at this method.
You'll need asset attached.

I just checked and all my surfaces say "Iray Uber" on the Shader, when I check them.

I did not know about the UberEnvironment being an old 3DL lighting system. I'm still just starting to learn about lighting beyond the basics like points and spots... it's confusing enough as it is - add the fact that Daz seemed to go through all these changes - just makes it harder to grasp, lol. It explains a lot though. When I did my first test render, the lighting was very dim, using the default settings. I see now that is because I am rendering in Iray and the 3DL lighting already put in place is useless.

I'm intrigued by that Iray Camera preset you linked and your tips. I went to the dev's page and I'll read up and play with it this weekend. Thanks for the tips!

Often a simple fix is lighting. To minimize noise and improve how quickly you reach convergence, making sure objects and light rays find an 'easy' source of lighting. by easy, I mean, assuming the room is either dark or being light indirectly by light leaking in from somewhere (such as a window on a moonlit night) then its the indirect lighting that is the issue. Indirect lighting makes a seen feel soft and can look good, but a lot of the rays don't hit a light source before they 'terminate' so you waste a lot of projected light rays as they don't add any light information to your seen. A simple trick is to fake an ambient light by sticking a light in the middle (some where where it can directly add light to the objects you want to see, such as the whole middle of the room), but make the light physically large but dim, and this will still mimic a soft ambient lighting effect while rendering much faster. But that's only if your doing dark ambient scenes, and not a sunlight seen with hard shadows, in that case, the contrast of shadows can still be problematic.

Ya. I've been slowly learning how to make lighting better. Watching some youtube vids and playing around. For my own simple scenes, I've been able to get some nice effects that render fast. It's harder though when using preset environments, and of course, much harder on interiors.

 

[moose_puck]

I don't use daz3d but there's might be a way to speed up a bit your renders, at leas it worth testing. Render 3-5 shots of the same scene with a low amount of iteration with denoiser turned off. It will be noisy as hell, but there's a thing called Temporal Denoiser in Davinci Resolve that takes up to 5 nearby shots and removes noise based on them.
Color tab at the bottom of the screen and find this.
View attachment 1767238

I actually don't use the built in Denoiser anymore, after another user showed me how inefficient it is, and - of course - i can't use it while on CPU alone. Instead I use the

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utility. I just take the completed render (with some noise still showing) and drop it onto the GUI of this script and it denoises it in about 2 seconds on my Intel CPU. Does a really sweet job and I usually layer the original render with the denoised copy and blend them to keep as much detail as possible. It really speeds up the work flow.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

I actually don't use the built in Denoiser anymore, after another user showed me how inefficient it is, and - of course - i can't use it while on CPU alone.

In-build denoiser is great for previews, especially working on lights. Just not for rendering \o/

View attachment Dazstudio Qljeixjtyv222.webm

 

[Rell games]

Here is the comparison I just made. The character is far away from the camera (I zoomed in to see details more clearly).
All results are decent in my opinion and the end-user won't see any difference (if we don't take into account color correction).

Original:



Intel denoiser


Nvidia OptiX



Davinci Resolve's Temporal Denoiser + Color correction preset applied that I've made.

 

[moose_puck]

In-build denoiser is great for previews, especially working on lights. Just not for rendering \o/

You are just teasing me .... I can't wait until I get a decent GPU. The prices have finally dropped back into some semblance of normal range again. Just have to budget it for next month.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

You are just teasing me .... I can't wait until I get a decent GPU. The prices have finally dropped back into some semblance of normal range again. Just have to budget it for next month.

lol I swear not o/
Some people use Filament for preview with quite beefy card.
I never get it tho.

 

[moose_puck]

I'm using that Iray Camera preset you linked, and running a couple of tests right now. I am seeing immediate results. I can now use the Dome for lighting the interior and the scene is much brighter and has way less noise. My iterations are about the same rate, but I think thats a limit of my CPU power, so not going to change - all else being equal.

So now i can play with different HDRI's and hopefully, I should be able to knock some backgrounds off tonight!

Thanks for the help.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

I'm using that Iray Camera preset you linked, and running a couple of tests right now. I am seeing immediate results. I can now use the Dome for lighting the interior and the scene is much brighter and has way less noise. My iterations are about the same rate, but I think thats a limit of my CPU power, so not going to change - all else being equal.

So now i can play with different HDRI's and hopefully, I should be able to knock some backgrounds off tonight!

Thanks for the help.

Glad to hear. Remember to hide at least the top Iray section plane when in interior.
If I can recommend you some HDRI, it's the 2 one I run for most of my tests :

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You must be registered to see the links

(I think it is but Im not sure)