Is less photorealistic rendering faster in Daz3D?
- Thread starter Affogado
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- Aug 17, 2019
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For the most part, yeah. Goes for almost anything in a digital sense. The higher the quality of anything, the bigger the file size. I'd think the same rule applies to rendering (at least in Daz.); the more realistic it is, the more details need to be rendered, and therefore the longer the render.
I suppose one thing you could do is render at a lower resolution, such as 1080p with the Daz Denoiser. You could also try something more cartoon-y like what MrSilverLust is doing with his game Nothing is Forever, though I'm not sure exactly what type of shader he's using to get that effect. But he mentions that it's speeding up his renders on a laptop, so it might be useful for you. Perhaps shoot him a message if that look is appealing for you.
I'd think your only other option would to be go the HoneySelect/Koikatsu route. Not as realistic, and borders on horrible if done wrong, but it's workable and likely a lost less of resource hog than Daz or something of the like is. I suppose you could also load your render in an Iray preview and screenshot what's in the viewport. It's sorta cheating, I guess, and the quality'll probably suck comparatively along with having no room for animations (though with your system, that's probably not a priority.), but it's quicker than rendering at the same time. Though, I suppose an external denoiser could help with that, or not. Could still look pretty bad. For example:
Then crop out any UI elements and tryrunning it through a denoiser. It'll probably still be noisy as fuck, but it's another option. In short: Anything other than just straight up rendering is always going to look like a step down, and even then it's not always going to be perfect. Ride out the scalping and save up for a decent GPU (A 10 series should be better than what you have, a 1660 served me decently when I was learning, too). It'll save you a lot of time and the life of your PC.
I suppose one thing you could do is render at a lower resolution, such as 1080p with the Daz Denoiser. You could also try something more cartoon-y like what MrSilverLust is doing with his game Nothing is Forever, though I'm not sure exactly what type of shader he's using to get that effect. But he mentions that it's speeding up his renders on a laptop, so it might be useful for you. Perhaps shoot him a message if that look is appealing for you.
I'd think your only other option would to be go the HoneySelect/Koikatsu route. Not as realistic, and borders on horrible if done wrong, but it's workable and likely a lost less of resource hog than Daz or something of the like is. I suppose you could also load your render in an Iray preview and screenshot what's in the viewport. It's sorta cheating, I guess, and the quality'll probably suck comparatively along with having no room for animations (though with your system, that's probably not a priority.), but it's quicker than rendering at the same time. Though, I suppose an external denoiser could help with that, or not. Could still look pretty bad. For example:
Then crop out any UI elements and tryrunning it through a denoiser. It'll probably still be noisy as fuck, but it's another option. In short: Anything other than just straight up rendering is always going to look like a step down, and even then it's not always going to be perfect. Ride out the scalping and save up for a decent GPU (A 10 series should be better than what you have, a 1660 served me decently when I was learning, too). It'll save you a lot of time and the life of your PC.
Last edited:
- Sep 26, 2018
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- Jun 12, 2021
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I've got a 1080 - but it's a laptop, and it runs damn hot mid-render. My (older) desktop has a decent CPU but no video card. When I can afford it I'll upgrade to something better, but that's at least a year off.
I don't mind rendering at a lower resolution if I can figure out a style where that doesn't look too terrible.
I don't mind rendering at a lower resolution if I can figure out a style where that doesn't look too terrible.
I feel your pain. I have a few different games I'm working on right now but I'm stuck with a GTX 1050Ti (4GB). So I've resigned myself to just brainstorming, writing story, dialog, code, basically doing the back end stuff for my games and no rendering at all. I did a bunch of rendering for a mod as practice on my current rig and even rendering at 720p resolution it was taking me from 20 mins to 2 hours for most of my renders. Based on the memory utilization I saw when optimizing stuff to try and fit below 4GB, I can't see buying anything with less than 16GB and I refuse to pay $3000+ for a 3090 at the moment. I'm almost certainly going to wait for the 40xx series before I upgrade.
I found that when it comes to reducing render times, the things that seemed to have the largest effect was reducing the number of light sources, eliminating reflective surfaces, and avoiding dark scenes. Iray seems to take forever to render low light scenes so it's better to use a photo editing program to darken a brightly lit image after the fact if you want a dark scene.
I got really burned out on having to waste so much time optimizing, but there's not really any choice if your card doesn't have enough memory. Those same renders that would take me 20 mins to 2 hours on my GPU were taking longer than 12 hours on my CPU.
I found that when it comes to reducing render times, the things that seemed to have the largest effect was reducing the number of light sources, eliminating reflective surfaces, and avoiding dark scenes. Iray seems to take forever to render low light scenes so it's better to use a photo editing program to darken a brightly lit image after the fact if you want a dark scene.
I got really burned out on having to waste so much time optimizing, but there's not really any choice if your card doesn't have enough memory. Those same renders that would take me 20 mins to 2 hours on my GPU were taking longer than 12 hours on my CPU.
It ends up giving you more work, but try rendering as many things solo as you can get away with, and composite it all together in Photoshop or whatever you use later. The less things in the scene at render time, the faster it will go.
Also YouTube has some good info on getting faster results from iRay.
One thing I have read about but haven't played with yet is to render high res and down scale. Render at 4x the resolution you want with denoise off and at the lowest quality you can accept. Then in Photoshop or whatever you use scale it down to the resolution you wanted to begin with.
And as for the shader Miss Fortune wad talking about it looks like a hard clamped ambient occlusion. I don't know how to do it in iRay, but people do it in other software all the time to try and fake the NPR (Non-Photo Realistic) look.
Good luck! I have a 3950x and an RTX2070 and still think iRay is too slow. Lol. I know it's not the same, but seriously I hate iRay no matter what im using. Looks nice sure, but ultimately if it takes too long to render whats the damn point. I wish they would just make a proper bridge to blender forn using Cycles already. OR that someone would port Cycles over ad an addon like Octane.
Also YouTube has some good info on getting faster results from iRay.
One thing I have read about but haven't played with yet is to render high res and down scale. Render at 4x the resolution you want with denoise off and at the lowest quality you can accept. Then in Photoshop or whatever you use scale it down to the resolution you wanted to begin with.
And as for the shader Miss Fortune wad talking about it looks like a hard clamped ambient occlusion. I don't know how to do it in iRay, but people do it in other software all the time to try and fake the NPR (Non-Photo Realistic) look.
Good luck! I have a 3950x and an RTX2070 and still think iRay is too slow. Lol. I know it's not the same, but seriously I hate iRay no matter what im using. Looks nice sure, but ultimately if it takes too long to render whats the damn point. I wish they would just make a proper bridge to blender forn using Cycles already. OR that someone would port Cycles over ad an addon like Octane.
As an owner of a GTX1060 laptop, I feel your pain and had exactly the same thought process as you. Note that I’m still quite inexperience with Daz and might be doing stuff suboptimally, but this were the things I found that helped:
Using the
Using the
Using iray beauty canvasas to render only the stuff that changes from render to render. It requires some setting up and postprocessing that also takes time, to the point that, at least for me, it’s not worth it 90% of the time, but I do it from time to time.
Using the denoiser. I’ve seen it being recommended not to use it in photorealistic renders because it loses too many details, but that’s not the look I’m going for anyway.
Lights. Render times is all about the lights. I don’t understand nearly as much as I would like about lights. It’s always a struggle.
Look around, there are other shaders than the one I use. Losing all the details in a realistic skin, especially light reflection and translucidity, will decrease speed render times, and also decrease the number of iray iterations you can do and get away with without having a noisy render.
It’s a game compromises. With photorealistic renders I’d never have a game. This way I might, but it will put off some players. The worse is that GPU’s prices are not coming down anytime soon. At the moment it's just ridiculous.
Using the
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. I played around with it until I was happy with the results and it didn’t take forever to setup a new scene.Using the
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addon. I use it when a scene exceeds my GPU memory and it starts rendering with CPU. Of course at, some point, the only solution is to break the scene down and render it in pieces.Using iray beauty canvasas to render only the stuff that changes from render to render. It requires some setting up and postprocessing that also takes time, to the point that, at least for me, it’s not worth it 90% of the time, but I do it from time to time.
Using the denoiser. I’ve seen it being recommended not to use it in photorealistic renders because it loses too many details, but that’s not the look I’m going for anyway.
Lights. Render times is all about the lights. I don’t understand nearly as much as I would like about lights. It’s always a struggle.
Look around, there are other shaders than the one I use. Losing all the details in a realistic skin, especially light reflection and translucidity, will decrease speed render times, and also decrease the number of iray iterations you can do and get away with without having a noisy render.
It’s a game compromises. With photorealistic renders I’d never have a game. This way I might, but it will put off some players. The worse is that GPU’s prices are not coming down anytime soon. At the moment it's just ridiculous.