Daz Render time for animation in Daz.

[androm3dart]

Ok, so I am trying to render an animation scene in daz, I thought since the environment is the same and consecutive frames are only slightly different, render speed will be good. Now the problem is that daz is rendering frame by frame. I stopped immediately when it was displaying rendering frame 0. So I want to know that does it actually renders each frame as an individual or uses data together as a whole. If it goes individual wat, I am not doing any animations.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Porcus Dev]

DAZ will render the entire image in each frame

Take a look at this thread, there are several tricks and recommendations to optimize the animations:
https://f95zone.to/threads/daz3d-tips-for-optimizing-animations.37826/

 

[lancelotdulak]

If youre doing animations and you want to ever do anything besides a simple few frame gif and dont have your own server farm is seriously suggest you sign up for octane at 20 a month. If i told you the difference in rendering speed you'd literally think i was lying or mistyping. (or redshift )

 

[Rich]

Now the problem is that daz is rendering frame by frame. I stopped immediately when it was displaying rendering frame 0. So I want to know that does it actually renders each frame as an individual or uses data together as a whole. If it goes individual wat, I am not doing any animations.

As mgomez0077 says, Daz treats each individual frame as a separate image, and starts over from scratch for it. There's really no other way they can do it, because they have no idea (when they designed the program, I mean) what's going to change in the animation and what isn't. Figures can cast different shadows in the background as they move, cameras can shift position, etc. They really don't even know what's "background" and what's "foreground", since something might be still for the first half of an animation and then start moving.

That being said, if your cameras aren't moving, one option is to render the background (without any of the foreground figures that will move) once, then hide all the background and render just the moving parts separately as PNG's (so any area that would be background will be transparent) and then composite them together after the renders are complete. To do this, you'll have to turn off the "dome" rendering (i.e. change the render settings to "scene only") when doing the foreground so that you don't get blue sky or something like that showing behind your figures.

Basically, this way the bulk of your rendering is only the parts that are animated - Daz doesn't waste time re-rendering the background over and over again.

Of course, if your foreground figures cast shadows onto your background, then things get a big dicier. There are ways to handle this, bit it involves some iRay trickery.

 

[androm3dart]

Thank you all for the replies. And as @mgomex0077 posted a reference, I think low iterations for animations are going to work well as long as images are clear enough.
@lancelotdulak, not thinking of octane right now since, first I dont know how it works, second, dont wanna invest money on something that is my secondary job, 3rd, 3d is still my hobby, I like it very much but I dont know how much time I will be able to give it. But as if you really can tell the difference in speeds, I can be convinced.
@Rich, I will take a look at it and see if it works out.

 

[Rich]

@Rich, I will take a look at it and see if it works out.

Sure. Out of curiosity, what does your hardware look like? (GPU, mainly) And at what resolution are you rendering?

There are also a few things you can possibly tweak that may make individual frames render more quickly. Things that are transparent and things that are reflective slow things down, for example, because it adds extra calculations for iRay. So, if you can avoid shiny surfaces, mirrors and windows, that helps.

Obviously, having a scene be well lit helps iRay converge more quickly. If you're using 4.11 or 4.12, you can (as was suggested earlier) limit the number of iterations and then use the denoiser to help.

There's also a setting called "Max Path Length" in "Render Settings > Optimization". (It's not really path length, but really the number of bounces.) By default, it's set to -1, which means "as many as iRay thinks it needs," but you can set it to something like 5-6, and that sometimes helps. Doing that can sometimes cause problems with how eyes come out, however, because of the way that they're constructed.

Essentially, anything you can do to speed up the rendering of one frame of your animation gets multiplied by the total number of frames.

 

[androm3dart]

Sure. Out of curiosity, what does your hardware look like? (GPU, mainly) And at what resolution are you rendering?

There are also a few things you can possibly tweak that may make individual frames render more quickly. Things that are transparent and things that are reflective slow things down, for example, because it adds extra calculations for iRay. So, if you can avoid shiny surfaces, mirrors and windows, that helps.

Obviously, having a scene be well lit helps iRay converge more quickly. If you're using 4.11 or 4.12, you can (as was suggested earlier) limit the number of iterations and then use the denoiser to help.

There's also a setting called "Max Path Length" in "Render Settings > Optimization". (It's not really path length, but really the number of bounces.) By default, it's set to -1, which means "as many as iRay thinks it needs," but you can set it to something like 5-6, and that sometimes helps. Doing that can sometimes cause problems with how eyes come out, however, because of the way that they're constructed.

Essentially, anything you can do to speed up the rendering of one frame of your animation gets multiplied by the total number of frames.

Thanks for the relply.

I don't have any particularly powerful hardware, particularly because I hae to be mobile because of my work. So I am working on a laptop. It is HP omen 15t 2017 model with i5 7300hq quad core cpu, nvidia 1050ti gpu with 4gb vram, 16 gigs of ram. So hardware-wise, I am restricted, and also I can't buy/ don't want to buy a desktop because of my work.

I tried a 40 frame animation with Iray dome and one character with daz basic dance animation. Put max path length to 6 and max iterations to 300 and denoiser post 50th iteration. It worked out pretty well. It took around 28 minutes to complete. Also my gpu is overclocked to 1850 mhz core clock (default is 1620) and memory to 1900 mhz (default is 1800).

When I purchased this laptop (june 2017), laptops were costly here in India. For example, I got this laptop for 1lakhs INR, but right now for 1 lakhs I can get a 1660ti/2060 laptop with i7/i5 9th gen and 16/32 gigs ram, which according to me if compared 1050ti in 2017 <<< 1660ti in 2019. I follow a 3 year laptop life cycle. Lets see how laptop rated will fare in june 2020. But right now I'll have to work with what I've got.

 

[Rich]

I tried a 40 frame animation with Iray dome and one character with daz basic dance animation. Put max path length to 6 and max iterations to 300 and denoiser post 50th iteration. It worked out pretty well. It took around 28 minutes to complete.

Was talking with someone else about this, and he also does exactly that, which is to (artificially) limit the number of iterations and then use the denoiser - this also gives him very good results. I'm still primarily using 4.10, which doesn't have the denoiser, so I haven't played with attacking animations this way. (In the throes of finishing up the next phase of a project and didn't want to change versions mid-stream. After I put this to bed, I'm going to spend some time getting to know 4.12.)

 

[androm3dart]

Was talking with someone else about this, and he also does exactly that, which is to (artificially) limit the number of iterations and then use the denoiser - this also gives him very good results. I'm still primarily using 4.10, which doesn't have the denoiser, so I haven't played with attacking animations this way. (In the throes of finishing up the next phase of a project and didn't want to change versions mid-stream. After I put this to bed, I'm going to spend some time getting to know 4.12.)

Ok, I don't know much about pre 4.11, because I started using daz recently in June this year. I remembered daz because I used it back in 2015 with 3delight. But I left it because I got full time job that time and now I started it because I came to realise that this is the thing I like. Apparently, one thing I noticed that and you probably know is that some of the hdr backgrounds are faster than others. I once tried a simple scene with G8F with hdr as dome and it got rendered in 2 minutes, very clean and clear and without any noise at all. So, for animation a fast hdr background can definitely be used properly.

 

[lancelotdulak]

@lancelotdulak, .. But as if you really can tell the difference in speeds, I can be convinced.
@Rich, I will take a look at it and see if it works out.

I completely understand the money situation.. especially as i dont know how it compares where you are (India?). Octane speedwise almost always blows iray out of the water. There are some scenes where daz is just as fast, but on average id guess 5 to 10x as fast. Not joking. Plus a huge deal is it can use out of core memory so.. bigger scenes without dropping to cpu rendering. It does have a big downside noone talks about. If you look at 90% of renders, by very good artists, they look.. powdery.. washed out. It's a different specific look they need to fix. Right now you need to use redspecc's skin shader to get remotely realistic. The images just arent Vibrant normally. If youre sticking to a laptop i would eventually try it out (you can download a verson that will watermark images , same w redshift). Or honestly you can build a good desktop render machine pretty damn cheap. Last gen cpu (you dont need ryzen or top of the line).. $50 chip $25 mb, $30 case and ps, ddr3 $50 for 16gb.. best gpu you can afford.. id say the 1070 is the sweet spot, 1060s ae good).

One thing i think most of us overlook.. knowingly. Is manually optimising the scene. I dont like to do it because i like to keep reference scenes. But removing Everything that isnt rendered, cutting texture quality where it doesnt matter, rendering background separate from parts of scene that move etc are somehting i definitely dont do enough

 

[androm3dart]

I completely understand the money situation.. especially as i dont know how it compares where you are (India?). Octane speedwise almost always blows iray out of the water. There are some scenes where daz is just as fast, but on average id guess 5 to 10x as fast. Not joking. Plus a huge deal is it can use out of core memory so.. bigger scenes without dropping to cpu rendering. It does have a big downside noone talks about. If you look at 90% of renders, by very good artists, they look.. powdery.. washed out. It's a different specific look they need to fix. Right now you need to use redspecc's skin shader to get remotely realistic. The images just arent Vibrant normally. If youre sticking to a laptop i would eventually try it out (you can download a verson that will watermark images , same w redshift). Or honestly you can build a good desktop render machine pretty damn cheap. Last gen cpu (you dont need ryzen or top of the line).. $50 chip $25 mb, $30 case and ps, ddr3 $50 for 16gb.. best gpu you can afford.. id say the 1070 is the sweet spot, 1060s ae good).

One thing i think most of us overlook.. knowingly. Is manually optimising the scene. I dont like to do it because i like to keep reference scenes. But removing Everything that isnt rendered, cutting texture quality where it doesnt matter, rendering background separate from parts of scene that move etc are somehting i definitely dont do enough

Yeah, I am from India and I've used octane demo, and can tell you are right here, its around 5-10 times faster than Iray. I am definitely thinking of using octane on rental basis, but not right now. And yeah you are right again that optimising the scene is also very important. I've learned that if scene is optimised properly, a good render is completed within 10 minutes. I tried a 40 frame animation and it was completed in 30 mins. Why? Because I optimized the scene.

And yeah desktop are always better than laptops, but my work involves a lot of travel. I spend a lot weekends at some friend's place in other cities (dont prefer hotels). 3d is my hobby, I never get bored of it. But the desktop is a no-no for me. I am definitely giving serious thoughts to the octane on a rental basis. But the reason I am not getting it is right now I've enough time to do this 3d thing, but I am never sure if I'll be able to give it time in the future.