Improving my rendering

hapciupalithapciupalit Posts: 121
edited December 2017 in Art Studio

I've been working for a few hours now, trying to get a photorealistic render. I almost achieve a nice render, but the time to render is huge. After 1h it was still 0% and it's quite grainy. Do you guys have any ideas what I should change to render faster.

To outdoor light comes from a hdr file with a sun,
Enviorment intensity = 5
Enviroment Map = 2

To light the room I used an emisive plane with
Temperature 5500K
Luminance 200k

I kinda like the way it look like it's daytime and no light is turned on, but it takes too much to render, if you have any ideas of how to improve the quality/render time please let me know.

The graphic card I use for rendering is a
GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce GTX 1080 Ti XTREME 11GB

Post edited by hapciupalit on

Comments

  • ItsCeoItsCeo Posts: 471
    A 1080 vid card should scream! I have a 1070 and something with this much light and not complicated would literally take me less than 10 minutes for sure (and I also prefer photorealistic renders) What other settings do you have for image size/pixels, etc? Is it dome + scene? I am a total noob and am no help but I know the more info you give the better.
  • ItsCeo said:
    A 1080 vid card should scream! I have a 1070 and something with this much light and not complicated would literally take me less than 10 minutes for sure (and I also prefer photorealistic renders) What other settings do you have for image size/pixels, etc? Is it dome + scene? I am a total noob and am no help but I know the more info you give the better.

    Here are all my settings, I'm quite a noob and don't know what things have more or less impact into the scene

    Thank you!

  • As a general rule transparent surfaces and reflective surfaces add to render times.  Those glass baubles on the lamps and the various reflective metals on the bed and other furnishings are likely requiring considerable calculations.   Since you don't see either the dome or the ground,  no need to have them draw=on.   I noticed you have render quality set to 2, iray does just fime at default,  if the scene has enough light which yours has. . 

    what to change?  pick a different table lamp

  • As a general rule transparent surfaces and reflective surfaces add to render times.  Those glass baubles on the lamps and the various reflective metals on the bed and other furnishings are likely requiring considerable calculations.   Since you don't see either the dome or the ground,  no need to have them draw=on.   I noticed you have render quality set to 2, iray does just fime at default,  if the scene has enough light which yours has. . 

    what to change?  pick a different table lamp

    I understand... One more question.

    If I change the material of those mirror like object to something less lustreless it will make a difference or should i completly change it to something which will reflect nothing?

  • You might try setting the Max Path Length, under Optimisation, to a small positive value - that should stop the light paths from bouncing around so many times before they report their colour to the renderer.

  • You might try setting the Max Path Length, under Optimisation, to a small positive value - that should stop the light paths from bouncing around so many times before they report their colour to the renderer.

    So I changed the Max Path Length to 10 and also removed all the objects from the room to make a quick test and the result I came with after 1hour was 1% of rendering and 

  • Looks like a cpu only render,  check that your video card is available to the renderer under the advanced tab in render setting.

  • Looks like a cpu only render,  check that your video card is available to the renderer under the advanced tab in render setting.

    Nope, it's not that. Do you think that my ghost light could be the problem? 

  • ItsCeoItsCeo Posts: 471
    I am new so I am asking in all earnest. I notice the pixel size is 1920 x 1080 and aspect ratio is 16 x 9. Would it speed the render if pixel size was reduced by 1000 and size reduced to 8 x 4.5? Would those changes make any difference?
  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,104

    The bright spot is causing the problem. Lower the Environment intensity to 1 and change Nominal Luminance to 100.

  • Fishtales said:

    The bright spot is causing the problem. Lower the Environment intensity to 1 and change Nominal Luminance to 100.

    Hello good sir.

    You helped me a lot with this problem a few months ago. I already see an improvement in the rendering speed, after those changes, I have a few more questions.

    Right now the result I'm getting it's a bit to lighty and I don't see the light on the floor comming from the outside too much. My ghost light which is below the roof is on 200k, do you think I shall decrease that number and leave the nominal luminance to do the trick?

    In the last post you told me to use distant light, but what I didn't like about distant light was the fact that I had the shadows to perfect comming from the window... Is there any way to use distant light instead of the light provided by the dome? and still have a smooth shadow like I have here?

  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,239

     

    Fishtales said:

    The bright spot is causing the problem. Lower the Environment intensity to 1 and change Nominal Luminance to 100.

    Hello good sir.

    You helped me a lot with this problem a few months ago. I already see an improvement in the rendering speed, after those changes, I have a few more questions.

    Right now the result I'm getting it's a bit to lighty and I don't see the light on the floor comming from the outside too much. My ghost light which is below the roof is on 200k, do you think I shall decrease that number and leave the nominal luminance to do the trick?

    In the last post you told me to use distant light, but what I didn't like about distant light was the fact that I had the shadows to perfect comming from the window... Is there any way to use distant light instead of the light provided by the dome? and still have a smooth shadow like I have here?

    If you're using a ghost light, remember that the size of the light is quite important. I can see slight shadowing coming from the GL above the bed, which makes me think its perhaps a bit small? The larger area you cover with a ghost light, the faster it will converge. Also, why did you choose to put it below the ceiling? You might be better off putting the light in front of the window at a 45 degree downwards facing angle (unless there is a light up there you want to simulate?). Scale the environment intensity/map back to default values and use the exposure value in the tonemapper instead, that will keep your lights consistent with one another.

  •  

    Fishtales said:

    The bright spot is causing the problem. Lower the Environment intensity to 1 and change Nominal Luminance to 100.

    Hello good sir.

    You helped me a lot with this problem a few months ago. I already see an improvement in the rendering speed, after those changes, I have a few more questions.

    Right now the result I'm getting it's a bit to lighty and I don't see the light on the floor comming from the outside too much. My ghost light which is below the roof is on 200k, do you think I shall decrease that number and leave the nominal luminance to do the trick?

    In the last post you told me to use distant light, but what I didn't like about distant light was the fact that I had the shadows to perfect comming from the window... Is there any way to use distant light instead of the light provided by the dome? and still have a smooth shadow like I have here?

    If you're using a ghost light, remember that the size of the light is quite important. I can see slight shadowing coming from the GL above the bed, which makes me think its perhaps a bit small? The larger area you cover with a ghost light, the faster it will converge. Also, why did you choose to put it below the ceiling? You might be better off putting the light in front of the window at a 45 degree downwards facing angle (unless there is a light up there you want to simulate?). Scale the environment intensity/map back to default values and use the exposure value in the tonemapper instead, that will keep your lights consistent with one another.

    Well I taught that maybe if I put it below the ceiling (as big as the room) it will light the room simetrically.
    If I put it on 45 degree I will have a black shadow behind the Ghost Light, like in the picture below and if I toggle the two face thing on the Ghost Light I will have like a line.

    In the photo below I changed everything back to default. The only changes I've made was :

    - expose value: 11.5
    - arhitectural sample : on
    - nominal luminance : 100
    - the ghost light is in front of the windows 

    And the time for render was 30minutes with 4% 

    But it's too slow for an empty room. What else should I change?

  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,104

    Is the room enclosed or is there an open end behind the camera? If it is open then use a plane primitive to close it and use the shader for the walls on it. For a uniform glow light from the ceiling I would just make it an Emissive and leave it at the default at 5500 temperature. Thefloor looks very shiny so I would drop that a bit too. Once that was set I would then drop the Environment Intensity and adjust the Tone Mapping until it all balanced. There is also a light that can be used in the windows that can be set to adjust the amount of light coming through, although as I am not at my computer I can't remember the name of it ☺ Light Portal comes to mind.

  • Fishtales said:

    Is the room enclosed or is there an open end behind the camera? If it is open then use a plane primitive to close it and use the shader for the walls on it. For a uniform glow light from the ceiling I would just make it an Emissive and leave it at the default at 5500 temperature. Thefloor looks very shiny so I would drop that a bit too. Once that was set I would then drop the Environment Intensity and adjust the Tone Mapping until it all balanced. There is also a light that can be used in the windows that can be set to adjust the amount of light coming through, although as I am not at my computer I can't remember the name of it ☺ Light Portal comes to mind.

    Still no improvement in the speed. Do you think it maybe the graphic card is not installed properly? I checked now the dxdiag and in the display I don't see the GTX 1080TI, but in Daz I see it, so do you think this could happen?

  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,104
    edited December 2017

    I have CPU only so can't comment on that. Have a look at this series of renders on my Art Studio thread and see the difference in render times just by moving the bright light.

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2904886/#Comment_2904886

    Post edited by Fishtales on
  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,239
    Fishtales said:

    Is the room enclosed or is there an open end behind the camera? If it is open then use a plane primitive to close it and use the shader for the walls on it. For a uniform glow light from the ceiling I would just make it an Emissive and leave it at the default at 5500 temperature. Thefloor looks very shiny so I would drop that a bit too. Once that was set I would then drop the Environment Intensity and adjust the Tone Mapping until it all balanced. There is also a light that can be used in the windows that can be set to adjust the amount of light coming through, although as I am not at my computer I can't remember the name of it ☺ Light Portal comes to mind.

    Still no improvement in the speed. Do you think it maybe the graphic card is not installed properly? I checked now the dxdiag and in the display I don't see the GTX 1080TI, but in Daz I see it, so do you think this could happen?

    What do the renders actually look like at full size? How much noise are you getting? The % that studio throws up can be a bit misleading. I lot of my promo work rarely passes 5-10%, but its clean. I run 2x Titan x's and enclosed rooms can still be an issue for me, even if utilize every trick i've managed to soak up. However, provided the grain is down to a minimum, you should be ok, it's just the curse of path tracers. If the full size renders are still noisy after half an hour though, something is not quite right there, and we'll have to delve further. Can you post a full size render? 1920X1080 If possible. Also, what room is that? If i have it, i might be able to set it up and compare render times.

  • hapciupalithapciupalit Posts: 121
    edited December 2017
    Fishtales said:

    Is the room enclosed or is there an open end behind the camera? If it is open then use a plane primitive to close it and use the shader for the walls on it. For a uniform glow light from the ceiling I would just make it an Emissive and leave it at the default at 5500 temperature. Thefloor looks very shiny so I would drop that a bit too. Once that was set I would then drop the Environment Intensity and adjust the Tone Mapping until it all balanced. There is also a light that can be used in the windows that can be set to adjust the amount of light coming through, although as I am not at my computer I can't remember the name of it ☺ Light Portal comes to mind.

    Still no improvement in the speed. Do you think it maybe the graphic card is not installed properly? I checked now the dxdiag and in the display I don't see the GTX 1080TI, but in Daz I see it, so do you think this could happen?

    What do the renders actually look like at full size? How much noise are you getting? The % that studio throws up can be a bit misleading. I lot of my promo work rarely passes 5-10%, but its clean. I run 2x Titan x's and enclosed rooms can still be an issue for me, even if utilize every trick i've managed to soak up. However, provided the grain is down to a minimum, you should be ok, it's just the curse of path tracers. If the full size renders are still noisy after half an hour though, something is not quite right there, and we'll have to delve further. Can you post a full size render? 1920X1080 If possible. Also, what room is that? If i have it, i might be able to set it up and compare render times.

    Yeah sure... I will add two photos one with the render (full size) after 30 minutes and the other with the settings I used.

    The room was made using this asset https://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-create-a-room-xpack-3

    After I created the room I placed two ghost lights in front of the windows 
    Temperature: 5500
    Luminance: 200k

    If you have any ideas of how to improve the rendering time and quality please let me know, also I would like to know more about your iRay Light Probe Kit, how it works and if it could help me.

    Thank you!

    *My post was edited because the images were too big... but you can click them... it should take you to the full size image*

    Post edited by hapciupalit on
  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,239
    Fishtales said:

    Is the room enclosed or is there an open end behind the camera? If it is open then use a plane primitive to close it and use the shader for the walls on it. For a uniform glow light from the ceiling I would just make it an Emissive and leave it at the default at 5500 temperature. Thefloor looks very shiny so I would drop that a bit too. Once that was set I would then drop the Environment Intensity and adjust the Tone Mapping until it all balanced. There is also a light that can be used in the windows that can be set to adjust the amount of light coming through, although as I am not at my computer I can't remember the name of it ☺ Light Portal comes to mind.

    Still no improvement in the speed. Do you think it maybe the graphic card is not installed properly? I checked now the dxdiag and in the display I don't see the GTX 1080TI, but in Daz I see it, so do you think this could happen?

    What do the renders actually look like at full size? How much noise are you getting? The % that studio throws up can be a bit misleading. I lot of my promo work rarely passes 5-10%, but its clean. I run 2x Titan x's and enclosed rooms can still be an issue for me, even if utilize every trick i've managed to soak up. However, provided the grain is down to a minimum, you should be ok, it's just the curse of path tracers. If the full size renders are still noisy after half an hour though, something is not quite right there, and we'll have to delve further. Can you post a full size render? 1920X1080 If possible. Also, what room is that? If i have it, i might be able to set it up and compare render times.

    Yeah sure... I will add two photos one with the render (full size) after 30 minutes and the other with the settings I used.

    The room was made using this asset https://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-create-a-room-xpack-3

    After I created the room I placed two ghost lights in front of the windows 
    Temperature: 5500
    Luminance: 200k

    If you have any ideas of how to improve the rendering time and quality please let me know, also I would like to know more about your iRay Light Probe Kit, how it works and if it could help me.

    Thank you!

    *My post was edited because the images were too big... but you can click them... it should take you to the full size image*

    Aha! Yes, i do have this pack. Right, i'll have a look and see what i can do. It does look like noise is a problem with this set for some reason, it might even be the shading. If you look at the promo's C3D did for the set, even they seemed to be having noise issues, so its not just you. I'll have a play around with it and see what i can do over the next couple of hours. My Light Probe set *might* be able to help, but i'll try and get results with the tools you've already got, it shouldn't be too difficult.

  • Try unchecking "Rendering Quality Enable". Set your "Max Samples" to something between 250 and 500. Switch "Instancing Optimization" to "Memory" and see if that gets you a faster render.

     

  • JigSaw73 said:

    Try unchecking "Rendering Quality Enable". Set your "Max Samples" to something between 250 and 500. Switch "Instancing Optimization" to "Memory" and see if that gets you a faster render.

     

    Well it is faster, but because I changed the samples to 500, but 500 iterations are not enough for this image... But I'm gonna try again with this settings on 5000 samples to see what it will look like

  • Fishtales said:

    Is the room enclosed or is there an open end behind the camera? If it is open then use a plane primitive to close it and use the shader for the walls on it. For a uniform glow light from the ceiling I would just make it an Emissive and leave it at the default at 5500 temperature. Thefloor looks very shiny so I would drop that a bit too. Once that was set I would then drop the Environment Intensity and adjust the Tone Mapping until it all balanced. There is also a light that can be used in the windows that can be set to adjust the amount of light coming through, although as I am not at my computer I can't remember the name of it ☺ Light Portal comes to mind.

    Still no improvement in the speed. Do you think it maybe the graphic card is not installed properly? I checked now the dxdiag and in the display I don't see the GTX 1080TI, but in Daz I see it, so do you think this could happen?

    What do the renders actually look like at full size? How much noise are you getting? The % that studio throws up can be a bit misleading. I lot of my promo work rarely passes 5-10%, but its clean. I run 2x Titan x's and enclosed rooms can still be an issue for me, even if utilize every trick i've managed to soak up. However, provided the grain is down to a minimum, you should be ok, it's just the curse of path tracers. If the full size renders are still noisy after half an hour though, something is not quite right there, and we'll have to delve further. Can you post a full size render? 1920X1080 If possible. Also, what room is that? If i have it, i might be able to set it up and compare render times.

    Yeah sure... I will add two photos one with the render (full size) after 30 minutes and the other with the settings I used.

    The room was made using this asset https://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-create-a-room-xpack-3

    After I created the room I placed two ghost lights in front of the windows 
    Temperature: 5500
    Luminance: 200k

    If you have any ideas of how to improve the rendering time and quality please let me know, also I would like to know more about your iRay Light Probe Kit, how it works and if it could help me.

    Thank you!

    *My post was edited because the images were too big... but you can click them... it should take you to the full size image*

    Aha! Yes, i do have this pack. Right, i'll have a look and see what i can do. It does look like noise is a problem with this set for some reason, it might even be the shading. If you look at the promo's C3D did for the set, even they seemed to be having noise issues, so its not just you. I'll have a play around with it and see what i can do over the next couple of hours. My Light Probe set *might* be able to help, but i'll try and get results with the tools you've already got, it shouldn't be too difficult.

    Thank you very much, I'll be waiting for your response.

  • KindredArtsKindredArts Posts: 1,239

    So i did some testing. I tried to get as close to the scene you have as i could, using the exact same set, and even tried to match your wall coloring (although i might have gotten it a bit wrong). Lastly, i disabled one of my cards, which means the remaining card should have very similar processing power to your 1080TI.

    Firstly, as mentioned above by fishtales, the super bright sunlight coming through the window isn't helping your cause, even if it looks good. Besides, daz still works in an SRGB color space and lacks the dynamic range to deal with that sort of intensity, it's always going to blow out. You can still have the warm lighting, just be wary of intense lights that blow out large areas.

    Secondly, i'd avoid using the ghost light on the ceiling, unless you're trying to simulate an actual light up there. If you're going for photorealism, putting lights where they are not supposed to be will only cause you grief in the long run. For me, i prefer to keep them in front of windows - this way you can force more light into the room without reducing the exposure and blowing out your windows (which causes more noise). Don't get me wrong, you do want the windows to look very close to being blown out, otherwise it looks odd, but there's no need for super heavy emission. Just knocking your exposure down to 11-12 should be enough, nothing too drastic.

    Thirdly, for some reason the Bump mapping intensity on the walls is at 50, no idea why this is. Open the walls up in the surfaces tab and put the values back down to one. Leaving them at 50 seems to make them quite dark an noisy.

    So, i did what i said above, with 2x ghost lights, a slightly overcast hdri, fixed wall shaders, and i managed to get the render down to about 10 minutes. I reckon you could use smaller ghost lights near the windows so the wall is a bit less dark, but it might cost a few extra minutes of render time. Here's a screenshot while i was rendering...

    RoomTest.jpg
    3440 x 1376 - 2M
  • So i did some testing. I tried to get as close to the scene you have as i could, using the exact same set, and even tried to match your wall coloring (although i might have gotten it a bit wrong). Lastly, i disabled one of my cards, which means the remaining card should have very similar processing power to your 1080TI.

    Firstly, as mentioned above by fishtales, the super bright sunlight coming through the window isn't helping your cause, even if it looks good. Besides, daz still works in an SRGB color space and lacks the dynamic range to deal with that sort of intensity, it's always going to blow out. You can still have the warm lighting, just be wary of intense lights that blow out large areas.

    Secondly, i'd avoid using the ghost light on the ceiling, unless you're trying to simulate an actual light up there. If you're going for photorealism, putting lights where they are not supposed to be will only cause you grief in the long run. For me, i prefer to keep them in front of windows - this way you can force more light into the room without reducing the exposure and blowing out your windows (which causes more noise). Don't get me wrong, you do want the windows to look very close to being blown out, otherwise it looks odd, but there's no need for super heavy emission. Just knocking your exposure down to 11-12 should be enough, nothing too drastic.

    Thirdly, for some reason the Bump mapping intensity on the walls is at 50, no idea why this is. Open the walls up in the surfaces tab and put the values back down to one. Leaving them at 50 seems to make them quite dark an noisy.

    So, i did what i said above, with 2x ghost lights, a slightly overcast hdri, fixed wall shaders, and i managed to get the render down to about 10 minutes. I reckon you could use smaller ghost lights near the windows so the wall is a bit less dark, but it might cost a few extra minutes of render time. Here's a screenshot while i was rendering...

    Thank you very much for your time, it means a lot. I'm going to try this right away. It means a lot your help. 
    I hope it will be ok

Sign In or Register to comment.