Long Render Times

[GodofSex69]

Hello peoples,

I have a question about the render times for some recent renders i've been doing. Usually my render times are no more than 40 minutes, but the past few renders i've done have been 5+ hours. Some of my render settings are:
4k - 1.0 render quality - Mitchell Pixel filter at 0.8
PC specs are:
Intel I7 9700k - 16gb ram - RTX 2070

I have a feeling that it is because of the lighting in my renders but i'm not sure. Curious what people think could be causing it/Also curious what others use for their render settings

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

what people think could be causing it

Like lightening, 80% of the case.
Not sure why rendering in 4k tho.

 

[79flavors]

Not that I render anything... so maybe wait for the more experienced crowd to wade in...

... but going from 40mins to 5hrs sounds like you've exceeded the texture memory of your 2070.

Generally speaking Daz will try to render using only the onboard graphics card memory. When it can... that's relatively quick.
When it exceeds the graphics card memory, it switches to CPU ONLY. That's slow.
It doesn't do anything clever like only use the CPU for the excess... it's either one or the other.

I know there are ways to find out the size of the scene will require - but since I don't use Daz, someone else will have to tell you.

Or it could be some obscure Daz setting that you've exceeded... but my money is on the graphics card memory.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Generally you really feel it when it switch to cpu, even alt tabbed elsewhere it's like it's wrote in plain letter.

 

[GodofSex69]

Like lightening, 80% of the case.
Not sure why rendering in 4k tho.

i have a 2k monitor so ive been rendering in 4k and then downsizing to 2k. not sure if its even doing anything but further increasing my render times lol

 

[polywog]

 

[Papa Ernie]

i have a 2k monitor so ive been rendering in 4k and then downsizing to 2k. not sure if its even doing anything but further increasing my render times lol

Something to consider using:
NVidia AI Denoiser 2.4
Intel Open Image Denoiser 1.2

 

[recreation]

Rendering time is influenced by many factors:

• Number of objects in the scene: more objects -> longer rendering time
• Light: not enough light -> longer rendering time; too many light sources -> longer rendering time
• poly count: complex objects (like figures) have a lot of polygons, the more of these object you use -> longer rendering time
• Texture size: bigger textures -> longer rendering time
• Surfaces: the more reflective surfaces -> longer rendering time; complex surfaces with bump, normal, displacement and/or subsurface scattering, ambient occlusion, etc -> longer rendering time

Every object in a scene has to be computed, and every object reflects light (some more, some less), every light beam, every ray that get's reflective has to be computed. The more complex an object is, the more has to be computed.

In general: keep the polycount low, light the scene well without using too many light sources, don't use too many objects, avoid too many reflective surfaces, use less complex surfaces/shader and avoid extreme resolution textures.

 

[osanaiko]

I agree that something is wrong - 5H is unreasonably long.

Typically i render in 3.2K and then 50% downsize to 1.6K. For this resolution, even the most complex scene i can fit into the 8GB memory (5 x G3F/G8F figures + clothes and scenery) takes only 40mins on a 1070.

Maybe post some examples of the scene which takes 5 hours to render?

Also post screenshot of your daz render settings....

 

[79flavors]

Rich I swear you've posted before that it's possible to see the render memory requirement within Daz. To see the size of the scene before (or maybe during) it's render to figure out whether it will fit within the graphics card's onboard memory - so it doesn't revert to using a single GPU or fall back to CPU only.

I tend to bookmark that sort of stuff these days, but this was before the site introduced bookmarks.

 

[recreation]

Rich I swear you've posted before that it's possible to see the render memory requirement within Daz. To see the size of the scene before (or maybe during) it's render to figure out whether it will fit within the graphics card's onboard memory - so it doesn't revert to using a single GPU or fall back to CPU only.

I tend to bookmark that sort of stuff these days, but this was before the site introduced bookmarks.

https://f95zone.to/threads/iray-memory-assistant.10706/

 

[Rich]

Rich I swear you've posted before that it's possible to see the render memory requirement within Daz.

Actually, Daz doesn't provide you with terribly good information on this. This has been a constant complaint on the Daz forums, with lots of debates about what Daz Studio reports versus what is seen by GPU measurement tools. The link that recreation posted certainly helps. The other thing you can do is look at the Daz log. If you kick off an iRay render, even just by setting the viewport to "NVidia iRay" mode, the rendering process will log a bunch of info. If you look there, you'll see entries like:

2020-01-15 10:34:24.609 Iray VERBOSE - module:category(IRAY:RENDER):   1.4   IRAY   rend stat : Geometry memory consumption: 3.70432 MiB (device 0), 0 B (host)
2020-01-15 10:34:37.495 Iray VERBOSE - module:category(IRAY:RENDER):   1.4   IRAY   rend stat : Texture memory consumption: 549.001 MiB (device 0)
2020-01-15 10:34:37.496 Iray VERBOSE - module:category(IRAY:RENDER):   1.4   IRAY   rend stat : Lights memory consumption: 196 B (device 0)
2020-01-15 10:34:37.579 Iray VERBOSE - module:category(IRAY:RENDER):   1.4   IRAY   rend stat : Material measurement memory consumption: 0 B (GPU)
2020-01-15 10:34:37.581 Iray VERBOSE - module:category(IRAY:RENDER):   1.3   IRAY   rend stat : Materials memory consumption: 72.2031 KiB (GPU)

So this scene (which just had a G8F in it) uses 3.7 megabytes of geometry memory (mesh) and 549 megabytes of texture memory. Texture memory, of course, dominates the memory requirements in most scenes.

The "catch" is that Daz reports texture memory in "uncompressed" mode. iRay supports on-the-fly texture compression. Whether or not compression will be applied is determined by settings in Daz Studio (Advanced Tab within Render Settings). So the actual amount of VRAM that the textures will take may be smaller than what is reported in the log. Or, alternately, DS may report more memory being consumed than you have VRAM, and still work in GPU mode. But this information at least gives you an idea whether you've got a comfortable amount of margin or whether you're getting close.

 

[badsantagirl]

Well Iray is a terribly slow render engine, but most likely not that slow. Still Cycles or Prorender cloud be much-much faster on your hardware. And these engines are actively developed, unlike Iray.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Well Iray is a terribly slow render engine, but most likely not that slow. Still Cycles or Prorender cloud be much-much faster on your hardware. And these engines are actively developed, unlike Iray.

Sadly none of them comes with terrabytes of useable assets.

 

[badsantagirl]

Sadly none of them comes with terrabytes of useable assets.

Doesn't matter. Daz is just a simplified solution for a problem. And Blender is a tool to solve your problem in a better way. So Blender don't need specific assets. You can just use what comes with Daz. It's not so hard to export-import them in a manual way, but with

You must be registered to see the links

the whole process is super easy.

You must be registered to see the links

is also very good.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Doesn't matter. Daz is just a simplified solution for a problem. And Blender is a tool to solve your problem in a better way. So Blender don't need specific assets. You can just use what comes with Daz. It's not so hard to export-import them in a manual way, but with

You must be registered to see the links

the whole process is super easy.

You must be registered to see the links

is also very good.

So, you gonna convert every single bit of asset and redo every shaders, lights, textures for a result that is generally subpar from the almost polished look of iray. I ain't sure about this.

 

[recreation]

Doesn't matter. Daz is just a simplified solution for a problem. And Blender is a tool to solve your problem in a better way. So Blender don't need specific assets. You can just use what comes with Daz. It's not so hard to export-import them in a manual way, but with

You must be registered to see the links

the whole process is super easy.

You must be registered to see the links

is also very good.

Both of them are "okay", but not really good when it comes to characters. And for everything else, you don't need any extra script. Just export as fbx and that's it. Almost every 3D program can handle fbx files.
That aside, I find it surprisingly impressive how many people demonize Daz without even knowing what it's capable of, and prefer to jump over to a highly complex full 3D Suite and spend months and even years learning that instead of using the simple solution right in front of them that does exactly what they actually want...

 

[badsantagirl]

So, you gonna convert every single bit of asset and redo every shaders, lights, textures for a result that is generally subpar from the almost polished look of iray. I ain't sure about this.

No, but you can write a program for it. The problems are always the same, so a program can automatically correct them. And with this you can get top class animation tool, and top class rendering, while the rendering speed can better by a long shot. Cycles is easily 2-3x faster. Prorender is somewhat better, mostly because I don't need to care about the VRAM. There won't be any "out of memory" messages, or crashes. Cycles is not so stable at this, but it still handling the memory better.

 

[badsantagirl]

Both of them are "okay", but not really good when it comes to characters. And for everything else, you don't need any extra script. Just export as fbx and that's it. Almost every 3D program can handle fbx files.
That aside, I find it surprisingly impressive how many people demonize Daz without even knowing what it's capable of, and prefer to jump over to a highly complex full 3D Suite and spend months and even years learning that instead of using the simple solution right in front of them that does exactly what they actually want...

Daz is a good simple solution, but nothing else. Compared to Blender, it's more like a toy. And if you do a lot of animations, then Daz is a real pain. It's impossible to create life-like results without a Rigify-like tool.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

No, but you can write a program for it. The problems are always the same, so a program can automatically correct them. And with this you can get top class animation tool, and top class rendering, while the rendering speed can better by a long shot. Cycles is easily 2-3x faster. Prorender is somewhat better, mostly because I don't need to care about the VRAM. There won't be any "out of memory" messages, or crashes. Cycles is not so stable at this, but it still handling the memory better.

So in addtion to these scripts (that perfectly works all of the time, indeed), I have just to code my own program. What was I thinking?

I feel like rendering time gonna be the last of my future problems.