Feature Request: Batch rendering application optimized for DS with an interface to queue, pause and
linvanchene
Posts: 1,382
edited and removed by user
Post edited by linvanchene on
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Linvanchene
Sorry I don't know the answer to that one.
I used to wonder about that myself.
Just a little plug for my favourite software, Carrara.
Carrara has had batch rendering for quite sometime.
If you find yourself doing large scale projects, it might be worth looking into.
Best of Luck!
If you are rendering out an animation, one can render the animation to a series of images or a movie (the latter not usually reccomended btw.) If you are looking to render a separate group of images as a batch process, you are correct there is no way I know of to que them up in DS. Perhaps someone has a creative solution using the animation timeline I haven't thought of though.
I'd love a batch rendering ability. I believe, however, that that's part of 3Delight's premium features. That might not be the case, but I think it is.
the following scripts dont exactly address this but i think they will be of interest
render specific frames
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/mcjlistrender-for-ds-1-2-3-4
render a series of shots from many cameras in one scene as one render
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/camseq-for-ds-2-3
video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HRXVgGm-tw
render daz scenes (including animations) using Blender's GPU-accelerated path renderer ( Cycles )
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/mcjteleblender-for-ds1-2-3-4
video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTIIwjTV7s4&feature=player_embedded
edited and removed by user
Keep in mind that DAZ Studio uses 3Delight which is a professional render engine. It is in fact used by the professionaly industry that you claim it needs to keep up with. However, in order to be allowed to embed it in DS as the native render engine and give it away for free it is clearly obvious that some things had to be left out or left only to those who can program for it and know how to bring the inner workings to the surface (no un intended). In most Hollywood productions, render engines such as Pixar's PrMan and 3Delight are not used with "out of the box" settings but instead they hire on programmers to create new shaders from scratch. These people have learned to script in the Renderman Shader Language and know how to make use of the inner working of the render engines to create the effects that the movies require.
DAZ3D is a digital content provider and they are not a large organization. You are dealing with a company who is providing a program and content mostly for the little guys. You cannot expect a lightweight app such as DS to have all the heavyweight features that the bigger apps have. There is a reason why a program such as 3D Studio Max is as expensive as it is but at the same time there is a reason why it is used professionally across the globe too. At the same time though, 3DSM is not the only program in the pipeline used to create the movie. Different apps do different things and some are better at certain things then others.
DAZ3D is doing what they do best, providing content and that content human figures and add ons for them. DAZ Studio has a SDK available and any programmer who wishes to create plugins to achive certain things with DS can do so. DAZ3D cannot be expected to prvide every last possible solution for all our different rendering needs.
===
More on topic of answering your question, aside from what Casual listed above, the only other way I know of doing batch rendering is not in DAZ Studio itself but with LuxRender via the Reality plugin. Using DS and Reality you can create your scenes and have Reality export the Lux files. Then when you are ready, launch LuxRender and use its batch settings to load up all your scenes. Just remember to specify in the Reality Plugin how many samples you want to image to render upto before its stopped. Thats what I did for my promo images in this set here - http://www.daz3d.com/my-best-friend - took 30 hours to render all together, thats 2 hours per image but I was able to do other things while it worked.
You'd be surprised at how well the free standalone 3Delight actually performs. Yes, it is locked to two cores, but it is faster than you'd expect.
The trade off for the free version is the core lock. The trade off for the version included in DS is no network/external access...and that's what you'd need to do true batch rendering in DS. Robwiz explained it once, maybe about a year ago, in the old forums...I think maybe in the dev section. Yeah, I suppose that could be enabled...but there will have to be a significant price increase in DS...like about a $1500 one.
Cycles is ( i think) called a path tracer, the light paths are allowed to bounce many times, so you get light colors from nearby objects
we can also apply an image HDRI or not ( so far i only use equirectangular ) as a sky sphere, so it's Global Illumination
objects can also emit light for areaLights etc
on the topic of 3Delight, a while ago i wrote something to help render RIB files and inject them with the needed Renderman code to use "point cloud" based ambient occlusion , it would also enable "point cloud" based indirect lighting
https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/mcjribcook-for-the-pc
it's not a turn-key solution, but i was able to render animations ( series of RIBs ) with it
there still were issues with the compositing to iron out
I just found this freeware open source Renderman Compliant render engine - http://www.aqsis.org/
Not sure what all it can do but if it can accept RIB files then it might help.
Okay, Mattymanx... maybe it's time for a campaign to get a pluggin for THAT render engine :)
And yes, Aqsis does support RIB
http://wiki.aqsis.org/doc/rib
edited and removed by user
http://www.opengl.org/ Lots of information on OpenGL here.
Aqsis DOESN'T support on the fly recompile of shaders...so all the shaders need to be manually recompiled (if they aren't compiled with the 'recompile flag' enabled, you need the source code...which leaves a lot of DS Shaders out of being usable)...and it is slower than 3Delight, in most cases.
Thanks MJC.
The truth is, after I posted that note, I reminded myself that 3Delight is actually one heck of a render engine. And I still believe a lot of stuff we just don't have (yet) can be accessed vial plugin or 3rd Party shaders (Like PW or Omnifreaker)...
Now, I simply do not know how to use the freeware version of 3Delight. I downloaded it, but I don't understand it at all. I'm curious to know if one can render a DS Scene file to RIB and have that render in the freeware version of 3Delight render out as if you simply hit "Render" in DS.
It occures to me that that might be a way to do batch renders, or the means to do them.
Okay...
According to the 3Delight manual, it is possible to render more than one image.
Uhm... here's my problem... I'm in Windows 7, and I'm assuming that renderdl from 3Delight works exactly like BMRT, which requires we use the command prompt to enter commands, am I correct? Where is the command prompt in Windows7? Duh... (I hate reverting to noob mode...)
I don't have a solution now, but are you interested in
a) something that would launch Studio for several scenes and render image sequences from Studio?
b) Or are you more interested in some sort of render to RIB's (one for each frame) in Studio and then at another time you run some batch process that runs the free version of 3delight on all the RIB's?
Of course what you really want is a full network renderer, but that requires a network 3dlight license.
Uhm... here's my problem... I'm in Windows 7, and I'm assuming that renderdl from 3Delight works exactly like BMRT, which requires we use the command prompt to enter commands, am I correct? Where is the command prompt in Windows7? Duh... (I hate reverting to noob mode...)
Well I was going to answer the previous post...but you've already found that...
For a command prompt in Win7, I believe you type cmd in the 'Search' on the Start Menu (yeah, you would really think THAT'S where you need to manually run a program from, right?).
yes, I finally figured it out. Found the command prompt in accessories.
And I'm right now playing with it.... apparently, if you render to rib you need to do something special so 3Delight can find everything... I'll start a new thread on this in the DAZ Studio Forum. It would be good if we develop some knowledge base for using 3Delight, I think.
Nope...nothing special. You just need to render the RIB INSIDE the collected folder...not the one outside of it.
I tried that once, and I get a whole lot of error messages... but I believe "collected folder" you mean I need to have DS compile all the associated files, correct?
NM, edited because IS WORKING... as I write this, 3Delight is rendering... I AM SO EXCITED!
Most of those messages were probably of the 'for better performance, recompile suchandsuch shader' nature. There is a version mismatch between the DS and stand alone versions...
not to mention the fact that DS tries to convert poser textures over, but they're not 100% correct...
not to mention the fact that DS tries to convert poser textures over, but they're not 100% correct...
That isn't anything with the 3Delight renderer, though. The texture conversion is more of an internal DS thing. By the time it's rendered to a RIB, that's already been done. When you export a RIB you're exporting everything just like DS sends to the renderer, instead of passing it to the render engine, you are dumping it to a folder.
Things like bump/displacement maps...well, that's how the maps are made...DS/3Delight uses a map from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255 (RGB) with 128,128,128 being the zero point ('darker' goes down, 'lighter' goes up), while Poser/FireFly uses a 'one way' map...up. So maps made for Poser are only 'half' a map for DS/3DL...and no 'conversion' is going to 'fix' that. Then there's all the various settings that are just ignored, because there isn't a directly corresponding one in DS.
Technically, it is possible to handle the half maps, if you could identify them. In theory, there's virtually no reason why someone couldn't completely convert poser material networks to DS Shader Mixer Networks. I personally have done it for some very complex products. It's automating it that would take someone far smarter than I... ;)
The keys are seeing the Poser Networks, Understanding them, and then Knowing which Shader Mixer Nodes/functions correlate.
Exactly...it's the automation that fails. Yes, I suppose it could be scripted...since almost all the features of the Poser Networks are available through the ShaderMixer, is should be possible to create a script to 'build' a network from the 'equivalent' Poser node...(it would require a translation table, at the very least).
Does Poser export to RIB efficiently? Because it it does, I'd be interested in seeing how a scene from Poser renders in 3Delight.
Not as far as I am aware. This is because Poser is a Firefly renderer. RIB is the RenderMan Interface Bytestream thus specific to Renderman rendering engines.
I know it used to hive RIB export, but it didn't compile shaders very well... that was a long, long time ago I tried it with BMRT.
I made a feature request in mantis bug tracker to add external or internal batch rendering support with an user interface for DS:
0049718: External or Internal Batch rendering with User Interface for DS
https://bugs.daz3d.com/view.php?id=49718
Please add your voice as a note to the "feature request".
Without batch rendering DAZ studio can just not reasonably be used in a semi professional or professional environment.
Especially for small CG studios it is important to be able to let the computers run over night and do automated rendering work that does not need to be supervised.
The official stand alone render versions offered by 3delight on their website are NOT a solution for DS users.
What is needed is an internal or external application with an user friendly interface specifically designed for DS users.
why is the 3Delight stand alone not a solution? It works great. Hollywood studios have used it for motion picture production. So I don't see what the complaint is.
What DS does not have, and I'm mighty upset about this, is sequenced RIB export for animation.