Daz [Solved] Question about a strange effect when rendering in Daz

[moose_puck]

Hi there,

I was wondering if one of you vets could answer a question about a strange effect I am seeing in Daz when rendering.

First off, I have to use CPU right now as my vid card does not have enough memory for GPU rendering. Otherwise, my system is middle of the road 7th gen Intel with 24GB ram and I get decent renders, just in a lot longer time.. lol.

So, what i see happening lately, is when i am rendering a semi-complex scene, with a Gen 8 figure in some environment, but minimal lighting (in example below, just two ghost lights) - the render preview will suddenly transform into a smoothed out and rather decent looking format for 10 seconds, before reverting back to the pixellated noisy image we are used to seeing when renders are in the early stages. Time varies a bit, but it's apx. 1 minute of showing the normal noisy image, then smooths out for 10 seconds, then back for another minute as noisy... this just repeats, over and over again.

It almost looks like some sort of auto-smoothing and modelling is happening because the rendered image, while looking kinda nice, is obviously lacking in some details that will be present when the render is complete.

Here's a simple side by side to show what happens. Image on the left is the typical mid-render preview, while the image on the right is the one that smooths out for 10 seconds. If I had to guess, I'm thinking maybe my Vid card is trying to pick it up, then running out of memory?? Right now, I think I still have both vid card and cpu selected with cpu fallback enabled. It's a GT-1030 with only 2GB so there's no way it can render anything more then an apple, maybe.. lol.



Other settings I can recall ...
1080P render
Scene only,
Draw ground Off,
Denoiser is ON and enabled
Tone Mapping is all default
Optimization is still AUTO (I try and keep my scenes near zero point)
.. can't think of anything else right now.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Hmm. Denoiser I think. Could you test without it?

 

[moose_puck]

Hmm. Denoiser I think. Could you test without it?

I just ran the same scene again with the Denoiser disabled and that seems to be it. It's strange I didn't notice that before, but it doesn't seem to have the same behaviour when rendering just characters alone or environments alone. Only when you are doing them together. I started using the Denoiser after watching a youtube tutorial and it does help eliminate those annoying specks of noise that might slip through and save you time, from having to PS them out in post processing.

Thx. Sometimes Daz just hits you with settings overload. I've started to keep a notebook beside my keyboard for joting down the most important ones, because I can't seem to trust Daz will "remember them" when I open up the scene later on.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

I just ran the same scene again with the Denoiser disabled and that seems to be it. It's strange I didn't notice that before, but it doesn't seem to have the same behaviour when rendering just characters alone or environments alone. Only when you are doing them together. I started using the Denoiser after watching a youtube tutorial and it does help eliminate those annoying specks of noise that might slip through and save you time, from having to PS them out in post processing.

Thx. Sometimes Daz just hits you with settings overload. I've started to keep a notebook beside my keyboard for joting down the most important ones, because I can't seem to trust Daz will "remember them" when I open up the scene later on.

Tbh I'm a bit clueless in your particular case and I'm not really familiar with Iray denoiser.
Far I remember it uses Optix, so CUDA cores (GPU), but you render with your CPU.

Maybe wrong but I wonder if your card is not even too low spec to handle the denoiser (and maybe restart the thing indefinitely), I have no way to test this tho (maybe a look at your card with GPUZ when it's happening could give more hints). I'm not sure it should affect large or smaller scene, but instead large or smaller render size.

 

[moose_puck]

Tbh I'm a bit clueless in your particular case and I'm not really familiar with Iray denoiser.
Far I remember it uses Optix, so CUDA cores (GPU), but you render with your CPU.

Maybe wrong but I wonder if your card is not even too low spec to handle the denoiser (and maybe restart the thing indefinitely), I have no way to test this tho (maybe a look at your card with GPUZ when it's happening could give more hints). I'm not sure it should affect large or smaller scene, but instead large or smaller render size.

Bingo!

I think you hit the nail on the head.

• Looking through the log files, the render starts with 3 cores of my CPU and 1 CUDA device (0) which is my GT-1030. All initialization works OK and the renders start...
• Almost immediately, the GPU gets an out-of-memory error and gets disabled.
• Then, for about ~1 minute, the CPU chugs along for several iterations
• Then I got a log message saying "Available GPU memory has increased since out-of-memory failure. Re-enabling CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030)"
• Denoiser starts up again and runs for about ~10 seconds before running out of memory and it gets disabled again.
• This cycle keeps repeating.

Makes me wish I had a big red button that I could hit near the end of a render, which would blank out my monitors, free up some GPU memory and run the denoiser and then save and exit the render.

Well, I know now and I guess I'll leave the Denoiser off until I get my new card, hopefully in a month or so.

 

[MissFortune]

Well, I know now and I guess I'll leave the Denoiser off until I get my new card, hopefully in a month or so.

You really shouldn't be using the Daz denoiser at all to begin with. Not necessarily because the quality is worse (it sort of is, but still decent enough.), but because you only get the denoised copy of the render out of it. To quote Empiric, who put it quite well:

FUCK Daz denoiser, even if it performed at exactly the same quality as any other. Because one simple reason: If you turn on the deonoiser, you only get the denoised version of the image and THAT'S it.

What you want to do is have the original image, the denoised image and slap the denoised image over the original and adjust the opacity, so that you save as much detail as possible, while getting the noise down as much as possible. You can also mask it and only get rid of the noise locally, in parts of the image that has a lot of noise, while saving the detail in parts of the image that rendered out well.

That's what I've been doing for quite a while. It takes a few seconds to denoise the render and drop it over the original un-denoised render. I personally denoise with

You must be registered to see the links

. Links for the Intel and Nvidia Denoisers are

You must be registered to see the links

. You can set it up to use one or both denoisers (so you can choose, though I'd go out on a limb and say that the Intel denoiser is marginally better than the Nvidia one in 90% cases, but not drastic enough to blindly be able to tell them apart. Intel's is just slightly less aggressive on the hair/clothing.

 

[moose_puck]

You really shouldn't be using the Daz denoiser at all to begin with. Not necessarily because the quality is worse (it sort of is, but still decent enough.), but because you only get the denoised copy of the render out of it. To quote Empiric, who put it quite well:



That's what I've been doing for quite a while. It takes a few seconds to denoise the render and drop it over the original un-denoised render. I personally denoise with

You must be registered to see the links

. Links for the Intel and Nvidia Denoisers are

You must be registered to see the links

. You can set it up to use one or both denoisers (so you can choose, though I'd go out on a limb and say that the Intel denoiser is marginally better than the Nvidia one in 90% cases, but not drastic enough to blindly be able to tell them apart. Intel's is just slightly less aggressive on the hair/clothing.

Thank you very much... this is great information to learn.

It makes a lot of sense to keep the original versions of every render and I have been slowly developing a workflow pattern as I learn more in Daz Studio. I'm a bit of a layman amateur in many skills that are helping me with learning Daz now, but it's ironic... the most recent skill I learned (Microsoft Office Specialist) is coming in super handy right now, as I made a spreadsheet to track my renders, scripts, DUF's, etc. It's helping me to keep track of the files so I don't lose any.