Quick guide: Daz optimizations for lower-to-mid range hardware

[alexander3rd]

Helllo there. After weeks of frustration and good help from this community, I thought, why not share a few tips. Maybe it will help some of you guys out, so you don't have to read countless threads and spend days searching for stuff, that's obvious, once you have a clue about it.
I won't cover any render specific things, these are just suggestions for asset optimization.

Daz defaults to high poly models & fairly large textures, and Iray defaults to 'realism' quality - which is awesome, unless you would rather prefer a much better performance in the viewport + faster render times, than a detailed wall somewhere in the background of the scene.

Tip #1
Clean up the place. Delete everything in the scene, that's not necessary. Straightforward, and the fastest way to increase performance.

Tip #2
Decrease the size of your textures. As of now, I know two good & easy ways to do that:
1. Install Daz Scene Optimizer and decrease the size of every texture that's not important. Most environment textures can be decreased in size, unless the goal is to get a really high quality realistic render - and tbh, personally, I'm not doing pro interior designs, so there's no point to render that level of detail on a 4gb 1050ti.
Scene optimizer is good for a fast resolution reduction on a scene-basis. Meaning, it does not replace the original textures, but creates new ones in a temp folder. Which I don't really like for 2 reasons: firstly, if those files get accidentally deleted (I clean my sys drive regularly), Daz will cry, that textures are missing, when loading the scene. Secondly, unless my goal is to reduce the texture size only temporarily, then I want those smaller textures to default for the asset. For that, there's the second way:
2. Find and modify the original textures. They're located in Daz library folder /Runtime/Textures/***.
Reducing resolution for the original textures will save an unnecessary step every time the asset is reloaded. Of course, do this only if you're sure, that you won't need a larger texture later. What I personally like with this approach, is that if I reduce the size of my textures in Photoshop, I might as well customize them

Tip #3
REDUCE POLYGONS.
Many Daz assets are so detailed, that the poly count can easily go beyond 1M for even a simple scene. I know only one way to properly do this in Daz, and that's by using the Decimator plugin. I've no idea why this functionality isn't already implemented in Daz studio, as it's quite important, but I guess it's their business model.

Compare the difference here, reduction of polygons from over 1M to just 160K for the entire scene.
Rounded objects will be affected by this, as seen above - so it's a really bad idea to reduce polygons for models. For hair, however, it can be done - reduce it as much as possible, until you reach a satisfactory level of detail.
This step easily made it possible for me to work on even some large and detailed scenes, that wasn't possible otherwise, without deleting a ton of objects.

So, there we have it. Be free to correct me, or add anything I missed here, as I am nowhere near experienced in 3D, nor in Daz. I just learn as I go.
Hope this helps someone, and good luck.

 

[skvllbro]

Thanks for this. My rig is definitely not what one would normally use for rendering, but with a few of your tips I did manage to speed things up a bit.

The quality isn’t as good, obviously. But with my specs I’d never be able to compete with the high quality images we see from certain devs anyway. At least now I get to save time and pump out more stuff.

 

[Rich]

Regarding Tip #2 (texture compression) there's an additional option or two that can be considered.

On the Render Settings, on the Advanced tab, there are texture compression settings. "Medium Threshold" and "High Threshold". Let's suppose that Medium is set to 512 and High is set to 1024.

What this means is that any texture which is less than 512x512 pixels will be sent to the GPU as-is, any that is at least 512x512 but not larger than 1024x1024 will undergo "Medium Compression" as part of being sent to the GPU, and any that is over 1024x1024 will undergo "High Compression" as part of being sent to the GPU.

The GPU compression isn't lossless, but it can reduce the actual in-GPU size of your textures to maybe ~30% of what they would be uncompressed. Some people suggest that the GPU compression gives better results than reducing the texture size yourself - I'm honestly not sure. But, again, unless you're doing close-ups on something, you probably won't notice the difference.

So dialing down those numbers - particularly the Medium Threshold - can sometimes make the difference between your scene fitting in the GPU and not.

There's more detail about iRay texture compression here:

You must be registered to see the links

Also, one thing that wasn't mentioned that Scene Optimizer can do for you is remove textures. (You can do this manually, of course.) If you have something in your scene that isn't close, there's a reasonable chance that things like normal maps or bump maps or displacement maps aren't going to produce visible results, since normal maps are frequently used to simulate fine detail. So, for distant items, or items that will be out of focus due to depth-of-field, you can just set these to "None." Not sending any texture always beats sending even a compressed or reduced size texture.

But, past that, if your character's mouth is closed, you don't need any of the textures associated with the teeth, tongue, etc. So think a bit about what is really needed.

 

[Evic]

Tip 1 should really be: Create scenes intelligently

If you start right, everything else becomes a lot easier. For example, loading the full scene of a house/apartment/bar/whatever is probably a bad idea since most of it is likely not going to be visible (even as shadows or reflections). Often you can create a perfectly good scene using a few properly textured primitives and a couple of detailed objects. Imagine your scene as an amateur play in a cheap theater, place only the props you need and learn to use lighting & DoF to hide/obscure or draw attention away from the less important parts of the scene. For example, in most scenes within a room you can create a "lived in" feeling by just placing some cube and plane primitives with simple, solid colored materials off camera to cast shadows or fill in reflections on windows and mirrors.

 

[alexander3rd]

Regarding Tip #2 (texture compression) there's an additional option or two that can be considered.

Thanks, didn't even wonder about the render compression options.

Tip 1 should really be: Create scenes intelligently

That's what I meant with 'delete everything you don't need', but thank you for being more specific. Personally, I don't load up a whole scene anymore. Takes much less time and headache to load up parts as needed, than to load a whole house and then delete everything not required.

 

[Evic]

That's what I meant with 'delete everything you don't need', but thank you for being more specific. Personally, I don't load up a whole scene anymore. Takes much less time and headache to load up parts as needed, than to load a whole house and then delete everything not required.

I figured as much, I just find it so much easier to "not place" rather than "delete"

I think it sounds like more work to build a scene from scratch but the truth is that it can save so much time in the long run that it's worth it. It's easier to light, to move the camera around for the right angle, the viewport responds better, it renders faster, I could go on forever!