Hey developer, please tell me about your productivity

[xxx3me]

Sadly I have only a few hours each day to work in my game (and I'm working HARD, no pun) to put an alpha before December out. But the point is: I can't produce many renders with decent quality each day. Sometimes I'm busy taking care of dialogues, other time is interface, and you guys know that building a scene and then render it takes a lot of time.

At least for me... Could you tell how is your productivity in a common day? How many good scenes you can make? Just to be clear, I'm working with different approaches, so some scenes are more complex, with two or more characters, like:

This one was HELL to render and I'm still not fully satisfied, probably will redo in future

...while others are a background where busts of the characters can chat, the "classic" style, I guess you got it.

And those complex scenes are really hell to make in my shitty machine (I'm rendering with APU Ryzen ), taking hours to finish plus time to develop, etc. I just want to have an idea if I'm over struggling or in a "normal" pattern.

Thanks!

 

[Noli Timere]

Well, im probly not the best person to reply to this post, as I have only released partial text games under this dev name.

But I usually spend 1 hour a day, sometimes up to 6, and productivity can be good or bad, depending on what im doing.

Most of the time im coding, since my bigger game atm, needs to have the engine built (almost from the ground up, minus the actual languages used), so depending on what im working on the time spent could be productive or not, like AI can take me a few days to finish a section of code, or a few minutes, depending if i bugger up or not.

If im writing, then thats a much more time consuming process, as im more a programmer then a writer.

Towards your specific situation, if I were to use a 3D app to render scenes I would probly be using IClone with a Heavy Filter render plugin, as ive used it before, and rendering with any heavy filter can generally take hours, so im guessing making the scene would likely take me a hour or more, then id have to wait a few hours for the render to process into a image, but I can only go off memory on that and its been a while, so it could be better now.

so for the ammount of work done, its fine, just if you want to go faster, you need a better computer (processor and GPU, memory too), and need to work on techniques to speed up use, maybe even grab a few plugins if your app allows it that cut corners.

 

[MissFortune]

(I'm rendering with APU Ryzen )

This is your bottleneck. The time:quality ratio of a CPU/APU is pretty awful. It just isn't realistic to push a polished VN with anything but an Nvidia GPU. The most 'low-end' GPU you'll see around here for devs are 1080ti's. No judgement, but man, I can't imagine rendering on an APU. That's what's killing your productivity. I'll counter what was said by the previous user, though. Daz really only cares about your GPU, and to a lesser extent, RAM/Memory (16GB is enough, 32GB is preferred). Your CPU, provided you don't let Daz fall back on it when you run out of VRAM, won't likely ever be super relevant in Daz. I'm aware the GPU market is absolutely fucked short of ordering a prebuilt, but that's your answer to being more productive purely in the sense of renders. It may not fit your characters or storyline from a design standpoint, but have you thought about Honey Select or something of the sort? Much less heavy on the computer.

My renders with a standard 3080 take anywhere from 20-40 minutes at 1440, depending on the complexity, lighting, and iteration count. I work a full time job, and typically more depending on the time of year (such is the medical industry.). On a standard work day with no late emergency calls/patients/etc, I can usually stick out 7-10 renders, sometimes more depending on the aforementioned complexity and lighting. Weekends can usually squeak out a bit more. Keyword being renders. Not scenes, but renders. Any scenes that are of decent length aren't usually being done in one day. 10 renders per day is the realistic goal, 15 renders is a very productive day, especially seeing as I refuse to render overnight in batches. My computer would keep me up (and quite toasty) and I'd rather give it a break than run it into the ground.

In the sense of VNs/games, productivity or the definition thereof, is better illustrated by what you do while rendering. Regardless of the speed. While you're rendering a scene, open up Atom or your editor of choice and write or proofread. Go online and learn what you can about the engine you're working in. Ren'py? Try your hand at learning some Python, and so forth. Try to get better at something. Writing, for example. Learning subtly and studying dialogue will only help, provided you aren't an author. Do some postwork, working under the assumption your PC can run Daz and Photoshop/GIMP at the same time.

 

[xxx3me]

This is your bottleneck. The time:quality ratio of a CPU/APU is pretty awful. It just isn't realistic to push a polished VN with anything but an Nvidia GPU. The most 'low-end' GPU you'll see around here for devs are 1080ti's. No judgement, but man, I can't imagine rendering on an APU.

The craziest part is that I was working before with a 1060 (before it suddenly dies), and now with the 4650G + 32 GB, I was expecting to be absolutely impossible to keep going but honestly, I can do it. It's just a matter of taking care of the scenes, not shoving tons of light points and objects, etc. It's really moving forward. My real issue is in the way I had the game/story in my mind, using only "complex" scenes. Now it's not practical anymore so I'll have to rely a lot in backgrounds + characters.

It may not fit your characters or storyline from a design standpoint, but have you thought about Honey Select or something of the sort? Much less heavy on the computer.

Nah... I've thought about it, but HS is not really my thing.

My renders with a standard 3080 take anywhere from 20-40 minutes at 1440, depending on the complexity, lighting [...] I can usually stick out 7-10 renders, sometimes more depending on the aforementioned complexity and lighting. Weekends can usually squeak out a bit more.

10 renders a day sounds amazing. I rarely can put 3 large renders out, and this because I'm going easy on lights. And I'm doing some post-processing with Photoshop to get rid of imperfections.

In the sense of VNs/games, productivity or the definition thereof, is better illustrated by what you do while rendering. Regardless of the speed. While you're rendering a scene, open up Atom or your editor of choice and write or proofread. Go online and learn what you can about the engine you're working in. Ren'py? Try your hand at learning some Python, and so forth. Try to get better at something. Writing, for example. Learning subtly and studying dialogue will only help, provided you aren't an author. Do some postwork, working under the assumption your PC can run Daz and Photoshop/GIMP at the same time.

Sure. Somehow (maybe because it does have a lot of memory) the machine is not knocked out while rendering, otherwise I would really consider it impossible to keep moving. I'm always writing dialogues, coding or simply editing images at same time.

 

[ppoooors]

I mean it's really about how you prefer to do it and what you find most efficient and makes more sense to you, someone may like to write first and then focus solely on the 3d part for a bit, design a scene and prepare multiple renders to be done overnight while someone else likes to do it all at the same time as MissFortune suggested.

If you're working on dialogue and writing while rendering then that's probably as productive as it can get. Although 3 renders a day really does seem a bit low, so your PC is definitely the bottleneck there.

 

[Morgan42]

My renders take about 5-20 minutes each, depending on the clothes and shaders. I've spent months trying to figure out lighting and prop combos that don't mess with speed or noise.

I work full time. On a good day I can do between 10-20 renders. Average is 4-10. Postwork takes a few minutes on each since I have some preset things I do and so postwork is really just tweaking settings. The longest part of postwork is really just saving all the renders to their new folders.

I try to keep it to no more than 3 characters on screen at once. I also mess with angles and do alot of "first person view" renders to keep times down.

One thing I notice, vram. I have a lot of vram and notice with prop heavy scenes I need to close out of daz and restart it to clear the cached vram after every render. It's annoying and really eats into time.

 

[xxx3me]

I try to keep it to no more than 3 characters on screen at once. I also mess with angles and do alot of "first person view" renders to keep times down.

Yes, I noticed that Daz works VERY poorly with more than 2 characters in the same scene. I tried the exact same scene with two characters, and after inserting a third one, the performance drops a lot. The scene I published with four characters was rendered in two parts.

 

[Deleted member 1536527]

I need to close out of daz and restart it to clear the cached vram after every render.

Yup, I have noticed this too quite a few times, even after closing the window for the previous render. As far as I'm aware this shouldn't happen, the renderer should clear out vram own its own, maybe there's some sort of memory leak in iray.