Iray Rendering Tips

[MaxCarna]

I'm just an amateur but will try to help.

Sometimes even if you have a Iray character, most props and envionments aren't Iray by default. So my first tip is always apply Iray Uber on the surfaces tab for all new objects added at the scene. To process Iray's textures only is supposed to be more fast.

Change the optimization to Speed. As you have lower hardware, maybe it was set to Memory. But the attempt if the whole scene fits in your GPU memory size, in very begining of the log you will see if the engine is using the GPU or automatically changed to CPU due lack of resource. I used to have a geforce 970 with 4gb, after update to a geforce 1070 with 8gb almost all my scenes fit.

More lights usually speed up the process. Compare external scenes and internal scenes rendering time. For internal you can change the tone mapping, reducing exposure value from 13 to 12, 11... Ghost lights product is a good way to improve the lighting processing.
Check other parameters here:

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Some users reported a good improvement selecting OptiX Prime Acceleration on Advanced tab.

 

[Dr PinkCake]

As someone who also is new and did the mistake of creating 720p renders instead of 1080p (and now totally regrets it ) I figured I could chime in. My best tip has already been mentioned and it is downsampling. Seriously, this method is superior to any other method I've tried when it comes to saving time and getting good looking renders.

I used to do 10000 samples or 95% convergence in 720p and it took me 1-2 hours per render (on a 1080ti); it was immensely stupid of me. Then I changed my method to render in 4k, between 300-1000 iterations (fewer iterations for well-lit scenes and higher iterations for night scenes), reduce noise in photoshop, downsample to fullHD and finally apply smart sharpen (levels and curves are also great for retouching).

Now my standard render times are between 20-60 minutes long and the result is far better. I have attached one example of my work before and after the discovery of this method.
Before:
Settings: 10000 max samples, 720p, 95% convergence, render time ~1-2 hours.
While the render looks decent, it is very unsharp.


After:
Settings: 700 max samples, 4k->1080p downsample, render time ~40 minutes

 

[Enyos]

Sorry to necro an old thread, but these are exactly the tips I was looking for. Thank you! I see now that my biggest fault is exactly what I suspected, in a sub-par graphics card (so embarrassingly ill-suited that it's not worth mentioning the series). Seeing that it tries to work in everything outside of the shot as well, was another suspicion I had, and one I'll work on for scenes. I'll definitely have to play with making it higher quality and shrinking it down later, that was news to me.

I know some in another thread mentioned using billboards and someone in this thread mentioned just photoshopping in the scene after. I was really considering just photoshopping in the scenes after myself, but of course getting the lights right for the model renders. Is that a viable option, or would it most likely be more time/work intensive?

 

[Chatterbox]

Sorry to necro an old thread, but these are exactly the tips I was looking for. Thank you! I see now that my biggest fault is exactly what I suspected, in a sub-par graphics card (so embarrassingly ill-suited that it's not worth mentioning the series). Seeing that it tries to work in everything outside of the shot as well, was another suspicion I had, and one I'll work on for scenes. I'll definitely have to play with making it higher quality and shrinking it down later, that was news to me.

I know some in another thread mentioned using billboards and someone in this thread mentioned just photoshopping in the scene after. I was really considering just photoshopping in the scenes after myself, but of course getting the lights right for the model renders. Is that a viable option, or would it most likely be more time/work intensive?

Photoshopping in the scene is a good option. It's one that I use sparingly just because I don't care for it. I personally like to render the character in the scene.

 

[Enyos]

Photoshopping in the scene is a good option. It's one that I use sparingly just because I don't care for it. I personally like to render the character in the scene.

I just have a really bad graphics card, and the additional scenery causes a huge amount of noise. After some consideration, I'd at least have to have the floor/ground and nearby props in the scene, because of how much work adding in those shadows would be.

 

[MaxCarna]

Hi friends,

This thread appeared as related in a another similar thread, I thought it was opportune to point out Daz new source (old on the beta) the denoiser. If you activate on the default 8º iteraction will can get very bad results, however I'm testing activating on a higher iteraction, so far everything seems much better than before.

You should try!

 

[lancelotdulak]

First anyone reading this please ignore most of the first posts.. theyre just.. wrong. Im sure the creators are fantastic but the posts are wrong. As far as increasing size then reducing (there is freeware that will do this by batch and with the best quality possible in the format... non commercial originally linux stuff). Also consider if you start playing with photoshop etc you really need to count your time doing that. If you do a 1 hour render then spend 2 hours in photoshop .. how is that reducing a 3 hour renders time?
My suggestions (test for yourself im not an expert either):
1. Lighting. This doesnt work the same for every scene. In fact nothing does but lighting can Radically reduce your time.. or it can increase it. It will universally reduce noise. Nothing worse than a beautiful 2-4 hour render and.. there are exactly 12 very noticeable black dots on a characters forehead.
2. Downsampling - i dont do this and dont have experience with using it in renders. I have a lot of experience with it in things i used to do for the web. It is the one thing ive seen universally recommended, even across rendering software.
3. Hardware. Ok first.. do you have 2 graphics cards and your monitors are on your ubercard for some sweeet gaming action? Ya reverse that shit. Save your best graphics card ONLY for rendering. Zero monitors connected to it etc. If you have one card and your mb will handle on board graphics + card hook your monitors to your mb. That 500 megs of memory and redrawing each screen 144 times take a lot of horsepower from your renders
4. Id really reccomend trying to get a 1060 or 1070 if at all possible. With 2080s out they should get cheap SOON. I expect 1080tis to drop to 250 or less used by next year. Buy. Used.
5. Cameras. Try it without them. These arent actual cameras after all. Theyre bad attempts at aproximating how cameras work. Sometimes its worth it to use them. Sometimes not.
5. Get scene optimizer. (or do it manually if you have time but not money). The way i use it is to decrease texture resolution on everything But characters 2x or 4x. It will RADICALLY decrease the ram your gpu uses and increase render speeds while not noticeably decreasing quality. Make sure your renders arent dropping to gpu. You can see this best by using Process explorer (id love if someone knew of somethign that would tell me the ACTUAL ram daz r enders are using). Iray is HORRIBLE at cpu rendering. HORRIBLE. Literally every cpu renderere blows it the hell away on cpu rendering. If you cant afford a good graphics card id look into using something not iray. Id use octane but i cant justify 20 a month just to rent a rendering engine. I
6. Architexture sampling works awesome in a FEW scenes. In others it does nothing.
7. Most important possibly.. use skydomes etc instead of models when you can and remove absolutely everything you dont want in your scene. If you cant see it it shouldnt be there.
8. Read the actual iray gurus.. some guys study iray like i study cgi or guitar or or.. And try shit. Things that seem illogical sometimes produce amazing speedup.

 

[pat11]

octane is very powerfull in rendering time, but, the time spend for editing material and add light is crazy, as iray light are not supported in octane, you need to add all the light in your sene, emissive, environement etc...+ editing the materials, i try the demo pluggin for daz, i stopped after 3h.

 

[LenioTG]

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!)

View attachment 110540

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

Sorry if I don't read the whole thread before answering, maybe they've already given you the same tips.

1000$ is UNACCEPTABLE for that rig. They're thieves.
Or is it a laptop?
If you HAVE to buy a prebuilt, LTT made a wonderful video about North America:

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But for 1000$ nowadays, I'd go for something like this (config made by myself right now. I live in Europe, prices are higher here):

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I don't like MSI mobos, but this one has the option to upgrade the BIOS without a CPU installed. B550 is not out yet, and X570 cost too much. And the 3600 is too powerful to choose a 2600 in its stead.
EDIT: you don't seem to have the MSI B450M Armor in the US, look for something similar.

As you can see, at 1040$ it DESTROYS that config.
Some Raw numbers (from cpubenchmark and that benchmark website listed below +30% Iray 2019 bonus, the websites I trust the most)
CPU Multicore: +180%
CPU Single-core: +53%
GPU Iray: +400%, without even considering the doubled amount of VRAM

You can't use your GPU for Iray if you go over your VRAM. Your GPU has 4Gb of VRAM, you probably go over that.
Consider that you can't use it all. Windows 10 won't let you use more than 90% of that. And setting the scene itself occupies a portion of your VRAM.
To render, I use Render Queue, that kills and restarts Daz every single time.
To see if you're using your GPU, don't trust Windows task manager, but download GPU-Z.

You absolutely don't need to use your CPU to render. In my 2nd rig I have a Ryzen 3 1200, and it's barely enough to navigate the viewport.
Using the CPU, most of the time, will just prevent you from using your PC while you render, and it could even slow down your GPU.

I set 1500 iterations or 95% convergence at quality 1, I find it good enough for most situations.
Always use the Intel denoiser, it does wonders:

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Try oversampling: there really isn't any reason to render at 720p. I mostly render at 1440p, and it doesn't take much more time, but if you reduce then the size to 1080p with Photoshop, you'll have more details than rendering at already 1080p (720p is a dead resolution in 2019 IMHO).

If you can, go for an RTX 2070/2060 SUPER, or at least a 2060 (it has 6Gb of VRAM instead of 8).
RTX cards have RT cores, that gives them at least 30% more performance in Daz Studio 4.12 Public Build, that uses Iray 2019. I've personally seen in first hand a 800% speed improvement one time, in a scene with the new strand hair.
These useful benchmarks are before Iray 2019, so you need to multiply those values about the RTX cards per at least 1.3 to get the current performances:

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Then, there are issues with the skin and with the lights, but in 2 pages of threads I guess you've already addressed those issues.

I hope you'll find this useful, have a nice day!

 

[QQ]

could some one tell me how to render with GPU not CPU at the render config i only click GPU but it still work on my CPU

 

[Porcus Dev]

could some one tell me how to render with GPU not CPU at the render config i only click GPU but it still work on my CPU

This is most likely because your scene exceeds the memory capacity of your graphics card (VRAM), and when this happens DAZ cannot use your GPU and instead uses the CPU.

What graphics card do you have?

 

[QQ]

This is most likely because your scene exceeds the memory capacity of your graphics card (VRAM), and when this happens DAZ cannot use your GPU and instead uses the CPU.

What graphics card do you have?

i have gtx 1080 and 6700K win 10 32G of memory

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

i have gtx 1080 and 6700K win 10 32G of memory

It switch on CPU on all render? With a 1080 you should have no problems.
I didn't have that problem for ages but make sure :
- Drivers & Daz up to date
- You don't have Optix Prime activated (in render/advanced panel)
- x1,5 of your total RAM in

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(it stopped casual CPU rendering on my old card I don't use anymore)

 

[MaxCarna]

i have gtx 1080 and 6700K win 10 32G of memory

The only thing that will make difference in this case is the size of the card memory, in this case 1080 have 8gb, if you attach your monitor on the same card, windows will use part of this memory, reducing what is available for Daz. You can confirm the problem on the log file: menu->Help->Troubleshooting->View log file.

Another common issue is incompatibility with Daz version and the Nvidia driver version.