Using Amazon AWS to render?

[lancelotdulak]

Rich im pretty sure youre wrong about one part of your post from personal experience.

"The entire scene must fit into each GPU for the GPU to participate in rendering a scene "
I havent tested it scientifically but im pretty sure Iray may use the second cards cores, though much less efficiently

 

[recreation]

Rich im pretty sure youre wrong about one part of your post from personal experience.

"The entire scene must fit into each GPU for the GPU to participate in rendering a scene "
I havent tested it scientifically but im pretty sure Iray may use the second cards cores, though much less efficiently

That's true, I have experienced this myself, but I'm not sure what exactly happens there. The memory won't be used, but the gpu usage is still at 100%.

 

[OhWee]

OK, so I just had a crazy idea for rendering movies. Specifically, trying to cut down on render times for said movies.

I've had very good luck using HDRIs for my renders. They do seem to cut down on render times, as you aren't bouncing light rays around the room, corners, etc. in the background once the HDRI is created.

There's another thread in this section where someone asked about creating your own HDRIs. Apparently there is a camera function in Daz that can do this, if I understood the responses in that thread correctly.

Sooo, if you are rendering animations with a background, I'm thinking that you could do a 'still render' of your room with the lighting, etc. but minus the couch, bed, etc. that the characters are performing on as a HDRI. Then you could use said HDRI as the background for the characters, along with your bed, couch, etc. Assuming that the lighting information is embedded into the Daz render, this could really reduce your lighting ray tracing overhead for the scene, and hence cut down your render times significantly.

I may be off base here, but this idea intrigues me... it all depends on how well Daz can create a 'fully functioning' HDRI using the suggested camera setting.

Thoughts?

 

[recreation]

DAZ can create spherical images with the right lense settings in the camera setting. But thats not a HDRI. You can use a spherical image as HDRI background. That's what I suggested in the other thread. But this means you still have to add lights.

I know photoshop can create hdri's by adding light information to images, but I have never tried it and I'm not really sure how it works.

 

[OhWee]

DAZ can create spherical images with the right lense settings in the camera setting. But thats not a HDRI. You can use a spherical image as HDRI background. That's what I suggested in the other thread. But this means you still have to add lights.

I know photoshop can create hdri's by adding light information to images, but I have never tried it and I'm not really sure how it works.

Thanks for the clarification!

Apparently you can do this using GIMP as well. For those that can't afford Photoshop, but aren't going the bucaneer route, GIMP is a suitable, and free open source alternative to Photoshop...

You must be registered to see the links

Just found that guide using a Google search. There are Youtube videos as well for the suitably adventurious.

 

[Rich]

Rich im pretty sure youre wrong about one part of your post from personal experience.

"The entire scene must fit into each GPU for the GPU to participate in rendering a scene "
I havent tested it scientifically but im pretty sure Iray may use the second cards cores, though much less efficiently

The folks on the Daz Studio forums who actually work for Daz have been extremely clear about this - if the entire scene won't fit in one of your cards, that card will be dropped from the rendering process. This tracks with what has been said by NVidia on some of the iRay forums. In addition, log outputs posted by people who have dissimilar cards also seem to back this up.

That's true, I have experienced this myself, but I'm not sure what exactly happens there. The memory won't be used, but the gpu usage is still at 100%.

There's been a ton of confusion over things like this on the Daz forums. My own suspicion is that the stats reported by the Windows Task Manager may not be completely accurate at all times, if that's what you're basing this on.

The bottom line is that what I've reported is what the people that actually make the software - NVidia folks talking about iRay, and Daz folks talking about Daz Studio - have stated publicly and repeatedly. I can't state anything from personal experience, since both of my cards are the exact same model. But I have to trust the people that actually build the stuff....

 

[lancelotdulak]

A quibble here: There is zero reason to believe daz developers know anything special about iray. To them it's just a plugin.

On the other hand.. i just did science. Loaded up a 4 character daz file that uses about 7.5gb for textures. If you added it up close to 8 all totalled. (at least that i see reported. does anyone know of a way to Simply see the exact ram a scene uses?)

First run a gtx 1070. About 5 and a half minutes total render time (400xsomething with render quality on)
Second run a 1060 and the 1070. About halfway through the 1060 crashed.. i probably need a different driver. Weird part: per afterburner the 1060's gpu wasnt being used (other than for my monitors which are plugged into it). It's temperature didnt rise. Which makes it pretty weird it crashed...... didnt finish the render as it dropped to gpu. (er im assuming something to do with the pci lanes when it rebooted ?) But looking at the numbers it was on track to produce the exact same rendering time.
So it is apparently a sortof placebo affect causing us to think the renders are faster.

The actual important thing i got out of this (as i like to keep the 1060 out anyway so i can still use the computer while i render) is that it is bizarre that when iray ISNT using the 1060 but is told to.... a: it crashes the 1060 and b: when it does it apparently signals iray (as both cards use the same driver) of the crash and it dumps to cpu. The second part isnt suprising. The first part boggles me a bit

 

[Creiz]

OK, so I just had a crazy idea for rendering movies. Specifically, trying to cut down on render times for said movies.

I've had very good luck using HDRIs for my renders. They do seem to cut down on render times, as you aren't bouncing light rays around the room, corners, etc. in the background once the HDRI is created.

There's another thread in this section where someone asked about creating your own HDRIs. Apparently there is a camera function in Daz that can do this, if I understood the responses in that thread correctly.

Sooo, if you are rendering animations with a background, I'm thinking that you could do a 'still render' of your room with the lighting, etc. but minus the couch, bed, etc. that the characters are performing on as a HDRI. Then you could use said HDRI as the background for the characters, along with your bed, couch, etc. Assuming that the lighting information is embedded into the Daz render, this could really reduce your lighting ray tracing overhead for the scene, and hence cut down your render times significantly.

I may be off base here, but this idea intrigues me... it all depends on how well Daz can create a 'fully functioning' HDRI using the suggested camera setting.

Thoughts?

I tried that for the Architect after I had to sell my PC and acquired a laptop. It doesn't work. Well, more specifically, the lighting fuck up. I set up a scene just like you said, the apartment with the lighting and everything set up, then I removed the unnecessary assets just to render the background.

Apart from taking a literal 13 hours and then some, on default settings, it rendered correctly. I saved that image to use as background.

I then rendered the whole scene, appartment + assets, but cancelled at first pass so I got a grainy image, but the lighting looked correct. It was a test so it's fine.

Then I disabled the apartment, only keeping the assets. Then again with lights enabled + assets.

There was no difference in between those last two renders; lighting didn't work. It seems everything needs to be "inside" the apartment while it's there for the lighting to work correctly, you can't "bake" it on the characters and only render everything separate. Which is a goddamn shame.

 

[recreation]

The actual important thing i got out of this (as i like to keep the 1060 out anyway so i can still use the computer while i render) is that it is bizarre that when iray ISNT using the 1060 but is told to.... a: it crashes the 1060 and b: when it does it apparently signals iray (as both cards use the same driver) of the crash and it dumps to cpu. The second part isnt suprising. The first part boggles me a bit

I have the same setup and I always use both cards for rendering, but this never happend to me. The 1060 runs at 100% even if the scene doesn't fit and it's vram isnt used. It never crashed like it did for you.

you can't "bake" it on the characters and only render everything separate. Which is a goddamn shame.

The sad truth, yes. Interior hdri's don'r really work well, it's better to reduce texture sizes and disable/delete everything that isn't nessecary for the scene, etc to get better render times but keep getting a good lighting.