Speeding up renders - would this help?
Patroklos
Posts: 533
I have learned that although lowering the the sutter speed, or increasing the aperture, makes the picture appear brighter, it does not increase the speed of the render, because as in real life, changing camera settings does no actually add light to the scene.
So, will this work - set the camera to "Sunny 16" as in aperture 16 shutter speed 100, and boost the light. Problem, how to boost the light when using HDRI? Adding lights may well slow the render, so will increasing the environment intensity increase the speed of the render?
Anyone know the answer to this?
Thanks
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I almost always have the 'Noise Filter Enable' turned off personally but when I have used it, it speeds up renders quite a bit because it gets rid of noise in dark areas (likely reduces details in dark areas too).
I can't vouch for the camera thing speeding up your renders.. But under the render setting if you adjust your iteration setting as low as possible around 80 then raise the iteration number up until you get a good clear picture your find you'll be around 1000 iterations with most images.. which will speed your render times 4 times faster than if you had them set at the default level of 5000 iterations. ( see screen shot 1) If your going to render animation with Iray this would be how you would cut your renders times down. I usually can get away with a 300 iteration in a scene if its well lighted and depending on how much I have loaded in the scene can takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 70 seconds a frame, if I have a darker scene I will apply the firefly filter set to around 300 to rid those pesky fireflys you get with darker scenes specially if your using HDRi that are dark in natural light. . But I generally start with iteration setting to speed up render times first. the only thing i use the camera setting for is DOF or something like that
also under the render settings tab . you can boast the environment brightness but rasing the the HDRi map value see screen shot 2
I included a couple of screen shots for you
nonesuch00 Yes, I had not thought of that, I guess it would depend as to whether the dark areas were in critical parts of the render.
Ivy, thanks for the screenshots, in number 2 there are 2 sliders of interest there, Environment Map and Environment Intensity. I wonder if using these to increase light levels actually increases the render speed. As to reducing iterations, I do that to some degree, and it certainly saves time, however in portraits this is rarely an option as quality is often the critical factor.
Yes that is what you want to you use to brighten your HDRi scenes .though I very seldom use the environment intensity slider unless its real dark, I would start with the map setting s first. A little goes along way . So I recommend you do it in point decimal increments . like.1.1 1.2 1.3 etc. if you do it in whole numbers , it will give you undesirable results of being to bright. but if you play with them a little bit you'll see what I am talking about
yes portraits you want to use 5000 or more interations & reside to the fact its going to be a long render..lol I have some portraits take as long as 21 hours
Thanks Ivy, I will give it a try.
I always set my iterations to 2000 max, Max time to 0, render quality to 1, and converge percentage to 99% and usually by about 1250 iteration there wont be much visible improvement to me renders (to my non-picky eyes) to go from 1250 to 2000. I CPU render and at 3840x3840 quite often and so 2000 iterations takes about 16 hours on an 8 thread Gen 3 Intel i7 so not too bad.
It'd be much faster with noise filter turned on though if you purposely are trying to create noise in areas of the picture (eg rim lighting behind a person's head).
Hello nonesuch00, Hello Ivy, I have a Mac 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, and sadly a Radion GPU.
I am doing a render 3200 x 2200 lit by HDRI 98% 2500 ish iterations using f16 1/90th and a cranked up environment map ( and I mean way up around 20 ) the quality of the render is very high, the odd setting has not changed the colour or light balance at all. I am at 15hrs 40mins. No noise filter.
I am seriously thinking of getting a PC with a good Nvidea GPU. I wonder how much faster a 11GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 Ti would speed it up?
Cranking up the light on an HDRI doesn't always help.
Have a look at the image in this post and then the next two below it.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3153126/#Comment_3153126
You would be looking at a speed up of between 10-20 times with that card compared to CPU only.
Interesting, thanks
Hello Fishtales, yes, in many cases "cranking up" would simply destroy the balance of the HDRI background. What I am rendering is a (fairly) close up of some human figures in front of a white studio background. I have ensured that the white background is not over exposed by changing the setting of the opposite end to the "crush blacks" (can't remember its name as a series of mini strokes have messed my ability to put names to things, typing, spelling, some days ????)
The snow scene renders you are displaying in the link you provided, certainly the first it is over exposed and the 2nd is in some areas, the third gives a nice late afternoon look. In reality using a camera in snowy conditions in full sun is a bit of a problem as even the latest cameras can't handle extremes of light and dark together in the same picture as well as our eyes do when we observe the scene, so we easilly spot the limitations of the camera. Its the same for our pc monitors, our eyes outperform the monitor in this and colour range areas.
I would be interested to know why you decided to change the HDRI intensity rather than increase the shutter speed or aperture? Would that not have had the same effect insofar as the render is concerned, or am I missing something? Or maybe you were experimenting?
I am not saying this will solve lighting your problems. and it surely will not speed up your renders & I don't have my mac book anymore so I can't test this for you. But just out of curiosity? with the light issue your having have you turned off your head lamp off the camera before you hit the render button? usually not turning off the headlamp will give you brighter scenes and longer renders because the computers is try to compensate for the extra light But i have had HDRi i got from HDR labs that when the headlamp was turn on it had a opposite effect . made the renders almost black. but once i turn the headlamp off it rendered as it was designed. I have no idea to why that was.
like I said I do not know if that will clear up your image issues or not But if you haven't already try turn your head lamp off on your camera and then make your adjustments and see if that give you any improvements , you can find your head lamp setting by clicking the camera in in your scene file and then turning off the headlamp in the parameters' tabs sometimes when i forget to turn th headlamp off I will have out of control lighting. .. (see capture)
As far as speeding up CPU renders, my experience has been the less props and characters you have in the scene the faster your scene will render, so try shutting off or removing everything not seen by the camera, and in some cases removing or changing large 4k texture maps will greatly speed up renders .
other wise my friend i am sorry to tell you cpu rendering is just going to be slow with a lot of content in the scene if you have just one character and clothing items and your still getting slow renders then you may be stuck with what you got until you can upgrade your system.
Good luck:)
Hello Ivy, yes I alway turn the headlamp off, and I agree, there appears to be no magic fix, cpu rendering is slow, I guess that ok with Nvidia!
No. I tried increasing the F/Stop to 16 but the faces and the outfits on the elf billboards still looked muddy, which I have noticed on other images I have tried even with items with geometry and shaders, so lowering the intensity of the light and leaving everything else in Tone Mapping at default allowed the textures to be seen properly. It is especially noticeable on the Elf faces and the wooden truck. It is a balancing act between the intensity of light, the camera settings and the surfaces being lit so they are shown properly. I use a lot of HDRI and each one is different and each render needs some tweaking of light and Tone Mapping to get it right. Shutter Speed, F/Stop and ISO all have a different effect on the image and just increasing or decreasing one, two or even all three can make a render look good or make it look worse depending on the HDRI and/or lights used.
yes havinga graphic cards with a good GPU's will greatly speed up Iray renders. I have 2 GTX 980ti,s running in external GPU box so I could combine my vram. other wise having 2 graphics cards won't really do you any good when rendering daz unless you have a stack gpu set up . because Iray won't reconize GPU's set up with SLi keep that in mind when upgrading.
can you tell me the HDRi your using and I'll see if I have it and I can try a test on my big system for you
Fishtales, thats interesting. If you were using a camera I would put that down to the lens performing better at f5.6 or f8 than f16, which can happen - but clearly that is not the case with Daz Studio. I can see that I am going to have to unlearn some photography here!
I think Alessandro, the guy who took the images, said he took them at F11 and a Focal Length of 22 mm. If I had changed the F/Stop to 11 it would probably have looked nearer the way it had been taken. The render just grew from that post and I hadn't really thought much about settings until now :)