Iray Rendering Tips

[Oppai Auteur]

I've been working on my own game for a little while now(two version releases with a third coming very soon ) and I've always had issues with the renders, mostly pixelation and very long cook times with little pay off. My only real understanding of Daz3D comes from its own built in tutorials so I'm hoping someone here might have a few tips they didn't bother to include

I recently upgraded the hardware and this helped a little, I used to have to render with the CPU, with this I can at least do some GPU work. The machine now has a GTX 1050ti, AMD Ryzen3 1300X and 16GB RAM (Close to a $1000 that cost, and that was on sale, fuck!)



The render I've attached here is a 16:9 720p Iray render, the render quality setting is already set to off, its set to a 3000 max sample and I also have the rendering quality set to 2.0. The architectural sampler is on and I changed the exposure value to 12.0. with a shutter speed of 64.0

All assests that wont be in view have already been removed from the scene(including other walls and the roof to allow light) and I have a distant light set to the scene. The two characters are both Gen8 and any clothes etc not in the scene have also been removed, the ones in view are iray assests.

The total render time was about 4 hours and it stilll ended up with a good bit of pixelation, so i'm hoping you know where I'm going wrong. I know there are plenty off online tutorials but I want to make sure I'm looking at the right ones instead of stumpling in the dark

...I really suck at this, I feel sorry for the people who play my game lol

 

[Chatterbox]

Your max samples is very high. I set mine between 800 and 1200. DAZ will render a good quality image around 1200 even in a busy environment. If my image is good enough I'll stop the render and click save last render. My render times are around 30 minutes to 1 hour even in the more complicated renders. Simpler renders should only take 10 minutes. That said, I have a little more horse power than you, but 4 hours is still a damn long time.

I'm no expert, but just a couple weeks ago my render times were over 16 hours on a darker scene, and 3-4 hours on well lit but complicated scenes. It's all in the settings. Also look for my previous posts. I had one with a title that might have been "My first render" or something like that. Someone posted some great tutorials, and that's what helped me.

I'm still learning myself, so don't get discouraged. There are people who can render what I render in half the time it takes me with the same equipment.

 

[Chatterbox]

P.S. I also noticed that if you set the update intervals at like 10-15 it speeds up rendering. I think the reason is that the updates causes the render to pause for a couple seconds. Less pauses equals less render time.

 

[thecardinal]

4 minute render time. Upgrading your render engine (and plenty of trial and error) is more efficient than upgrading your rig.

 

[Chatterbox]

@carnalcardinal How did you get a 4 min render time? Good render btw.

 

[thecardinal]

@carnalcardinal How did you get a 4 min render time? Good render btw.

Only render character and props they interact with. Background can be added later. I use Octane for almost all my renders, after exporting them from Daz. It has a real-time viewport and only uses your GPU. And then just mess with the render settings until you find what works best for your rig.

Glossy and Specular materials eat up the render times so much it's crazy. I avoid them when I can.

 

[Deleted member 510989]

Lighting has a massive influence on rendering times. Try some different lighting sources or HDRi's and you might find a huge difference. Another good trick is to render at double the image size for a set amount of time, then half it in PS/Gimp which will sharpen it up. There's a thread over on the iray forums that tested this out. I'll see if I can find it.

 

[Chatterbox]

@carnalcardinal Doesn't that mess up your lighting?

 

[Oppai Auteur]

4 minute render time. Upgrading your render engine (and plenty of trial and error) is more efficient than upgrading your rig.

View attachment 110559

Not exactly sure what I can do to upgrade the engine, could you explain?

 

[thecardinal]

Not exactly sure what I can do to upgrade the engine, could you explain?

Well you mentioned you spent $1,000 upgrading your rig, so I either expect you have money to throw around or take this seriously. Look into Octane. They are thinking of changing it from a $400 up front fee to a $20-$30 per month service. Download the demo and try it out. You just export an '.obj' from Daz using 3delight shaders (this is key) and then import a Geometry mesh into Octane. The demo has a set render size and you can't save the pics (has a watermark too) but you should find the speed is incredible.

 

[lexx228]

Well you mentioned you spent $1,000 upgrading your rig, so I either expect you have money to throw around or take this seriously. Look into Octane. They are thinking of changing it from a $400 up front fee to a $20-$30 per month service. Download the demo and try it out. You just export an '.obj' from Daz using 3delight shaders (this is key) and then import a Geometry mesh into Octane. The demo has a set render size and you can't save the pics (has a watermark too) but you should find the speed is incredible.

the speed is really staggering, but when I used my equipment temperature scares (it is more than in the crash tests)+the time that was saved is spent on setting up the materials - in the end you have to make a Daz scene, move it to the octane(with many inconveniences and with risk to the computer)... then you will get a picture of medium quality with obscure lighting (+half an hour of work in photoshop)...
everyone has different situations and equipment, but it's easier for me to wait iray and do my own things, than messing with octane
sorry my engrish

 

[Deleted member 510989]

I bought octane last year with the Studio plugin, but hardly use it since Iray has been updated and dforce implemented. I play with it occasionally and love the interface and realtime rendering, but actually can get something useable in Daz itself using the renderview. Nothing as slick as the octane one, but I make characters as a living, so flitting between octane and Studio is counterproductive.

 

[lexx228]

a year ago, only a full license for octane cost more than my comp:OhMyGoodness:
why spend money and time on DAZ, then spend time and money to the same extent or more on Octane?
There are many different render options - all of them are good, for individual purposes...
for example, lumion spends 50 seconds-2 minutes, but the settings take hours...

 

[Oppai Auteur]

The opinion on octane seems divided here, it doesn’t really matter I was hoping to do most of the improvements in daz itself anyway. Guess I’ll be trying to improve the lighting the most then

Anyone got some tips, tricks or some good tutorials?

 

[Deleted member 510989]

Simple lighting helps a lot. the more lights you have the more bouncing and scattering goes on. I've a bunch of hdris that I put out as a freebie on dA that render pretty quickly (well some of them) as well as a simple lighting setup with multiple lights that work fast and well on my setup. You could have a play.

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[Oppai Auteur]

Simple lighting helps a lot. the more lights you have the more bouncing and scattering goes on. I've a bunch of hdris that I put out as a freebie on dA that render pretty quickly (well some of them) as well as a simple lighting setup with multiple lights that work fast and well on my setup. You could have a play.

You must be registered to see the links

You must be registered to see the links

Thanks, I'll check these out!

 

[IM6]

One of the best tips out there is to render at 4K and then reduce your image's size in Photoshop or GIMP (or other) after.

My system is quite a bit more powerful than yours (GTX1080, 32 GB RAM), but rendering at 8K (probably overkill) for an hour (I set my render caps by time rather than quality) and downscaling to 1080p usually yields marvelous results. Most times I don't even have to render for an hour and I've had good results with just a target of 25 samples in the past using this method.

 

[Oppai Auteur]

One of the best tips out there is to render at 4K and then reduce your image's size in Photoshop or GIMP (or other) after.

My system is quite a bit more powerful than yours (GTX1080, 32 GB RAM), but rendering at 8K (probably overkill) for an hour (I set my render caps by time rather than quality) and downscaling to 1080p usually yields marvelous results. Most times I don't even have to render for an hour and I've had good results with just a target of 25 samples in the past using this method.

Yeah, a few have mentioned the whole render at a higher resolution then downsize trick, so I’ll have to try that out at some point. Especially since I’m downsizing to 720p rather than 1080p

Although rendering at 8k might be a bit beyond my machine lol

 

[Insanepenguin91]

One of the best tips out there is to render at 4K and then reduce your image's size in Photoshop or GIMP (or other) after.

My system is quite a bit more powerful than yours (GTX1080, 32 GB RAM), but rendering at 8K (probably overkill) for an hour (I set my render caps by time rather than quality) and downscaling to 1080p usually yields marvelous results. Most times I don't even have to render for an hour and I've had good results with just a target of 25 samples in the past using this method.

i tried the trick to render at a higher quality 3840x2160 . im rendering 500 samples at the higher rate and its taking longer than it would at 1920x1080. so do i need to render less samples at the higher quality? and then resize it

 

[IM6]

i tried the trick to render at a higher quality 3840x2160 . im rendering 500 samples at the higher rate and its taking longer than it would at 1920x1080. so do i need to render less samples at the higher quality? and then resize it

Yes, fewer samples (try cutting it in half and compare quality after downsampling). If you maintain the same sample size you're definitely going to take longer.