November 2018 - Daz 3D New User Challenge - Materials

Fisherman_B

Novbre said:

 

ON a side note...I have used VUE  since the early 2000's.  Vue has an addon called Render Cow, that basically lets you set up your own render farm using other computers you may have available on a network.  Since some complex landscapes in Vue can take 40+ hours to render, using render cow was really the only way to stay sane.  I know Poser has something similar.  I can't recall ever seeing anything like that for Daz.  Short of sending your files off to a professional render farm, IS there a way to daisy chain computers on a net work to distribute the rendering load?

 

There is a thread about this in the Daz3D forums: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/132951/tutorial-iray-server-render-farm-batch-rendering-for-daz-studio

It's 2 years old but the pane in DS 4.10 still looks the same, so perhaps it still works that way? Keep in mind that minimum license costs (2 PCs / 1 year) are as much as a new GTX 1080...

Novbre

@Fisherman_B

I knew the GTX 1080 Ti is a beast, but I did not expect such a subordinated effect of the i9. Of course this is completely different when comparing to systems without a powerful Nvidia GPU and a i7 or older CPU.

Fisherman_B said:

 

I have always had much bigger gains with upgrading my GPU compared to my CPU gains, so I knew that was the case even if I hadn't really thought of it in that way before. But now your test numbers are making me think.....do I want to sell my soul for 2 GTX 1080 ti's.....or hold out for the RTX 2020 Ti's.  The ray tracing aspect of those cards perked my intrest but atm they cost as much as  GTX 1080 ti's and have lot less memory.  Oh decisions decisions lol!

Seriously though, thank you for the numbers.  You were right, they show rathr clearing the gains to be had with another GPU!

 

 

~ Novbre

barbult

Novbre said:

Fisherman_B said:

btw multiple GPU's don' hurt - once you got used to a "realtime" render while working on a scene, e.g. in the Aux viewport, you don't want to miss it. The same applies to other renderers like Vray and Redshift etc as well, of course.

 

 

I keep hearing mixed signals about multiple GPU's, mainly that it doesn't matter how many you have you can't exceed the memory of the lowest GPU card.  So having two GTX 1080Ti sounds lovely with a combined 7k+  CUDA cores, you are still limited to a max of (in this examples case) of 11GB of memory since that is the max memory of that card.   GTX 1080's are still hideously expensive even though they are now out of production and I can't quite bring myself buy two and HOPE it improves my render times.  Do you actually run a multi GPU system,  have you compared render times between single and multi-card renders?  I would LOVE know from someone who actually works on a system like that.

 

barbult said:

@Novbre I'm happy to hear that you feel you got a lot out of this month's challenge. Your image looks very nice. Good job!

1. LAMH fur can be very resource intensive, I've found.
2. Also, when using anything with instances, be sure you have set your Iray render instance optimization to Memory. The default setting is Speed and that can lead to a lot of crashes and freezes in a scene with lots of instances. More and more vendors are taking advantage of instances in landscape products these days.
3. Unnecessarily high Mesh Resolution (subdivision) settings in the Parameters pane can overload resources, too. When a character is further away, a render subdivision or 3 or 4 is usually overkill. Scene Optimizer can reduce subdivision levels for you, too.
4. Watch out for SubD Displacement Level in the Surfaces pane, too. That is like the Parameters Pane Mesh Resolution as far as drastically increasing resource load goes. For something that is not super close up, I often delete displacement maps entirely. Scene Optimizer can remove displacement maps for you easily. 

Edited to add: Some of these topics may not be familiar to new users, so if you need more info about them, ask. It is not necessarily on topic of "Materials", but it helps us manage resources, so we can use our materials more effectively.

Oh how I wish I had known some of this two weeks ago lol!  I do have Scene Optimizer and I have used it for complex high-resolution multi-character scene I've tried like this one with "extreme" displacement maps and HDR Lighting.  And when I first starting having crashing issues, that was my goto fix.  However, in this particular case with all normals, bumps and displacements turned off and the texture maps divided by 16, I still crashed every render.  Ultimately it was #2 that let me finally render without a crash, but I'll be honest I don't know why it worked.  I thought instances SAVED memory by making the computer only have to keep track of a single item's settings and they just duplicate that where ever an instance was indicated.  I will admit I am more than a little hazy on how instances work.  They have been the "in" thing in a lot of landscape assets I have purchased over the last year or so, but I haven't really delved into them yet.

I am clueless about #4.  This is the first I have heard of it!  You mean SURFACE features can be subdivided as well?  Any good resources/tutorials you could point me to learn about this aspect of DAZ?  Any help would be awesome!

As for LAMH, I agree!  I have learned this first hand.  It's really beautiful and so much more realistic, but it's not something I will be using in the future.  At least not in its current state.  The tradeoff between performance and realism doesn't work for me.  I'll take better performance, and use photoshop to fake the realism I can't get just with rendering alone lol.

Thanks so much for the info though!

 

~ Novbre

 

I really haven't found good documentation on Instances. I think the Memory vs. Speed thing has to do with whether multiple copies of the geometry and textures are loaded into the graphics card (faster?) or just one copy (less memory used?), but this is just a guess. I only know from word of mouth in the forum, that it can be a critical factor in a scene with lots of instances. If you only have a few instances, you can often get by with leaving it on Speed.

The way SubD Displacement Level in Surfaces works has changed over time, because I'm told that an error in Iray was later corrected. My current understanding is that if you specify a level of SubD displacement in the Surfaces pane, that level of mesh subdivision will be applied to the entire model, not just the surface you changed. I do not understand why it can be specified on a surface by surface basis, if it applies to the whole model. Maybe Richard can clarify that. But anyway, every time you increase subD by a value of 1, you multiply the amount of geometry in that model by 4 (sub D divides one quad face into 4 faces). By the time you've increased subD from 0 to 3, you have increased the geometry by a factor of 64 (4*4*4=64).

Here is a cautionary tale based on my experience and full of my opinions: For example, if some vendor decides they are going to apply a displacement map to the lips of G8F, and their Materials preset sets SubDivision Level in the Lip surface to 3, they have done the equivalent of changing your whole G8F to High Resolution with Render SubD Level of 3. This happens even if you have set that G8F Mesh Resolution to Base, thinking that G8F in the background doesn't need subD. By simply applying that vendor's skin material to your G8F, you have increased the geometry load of that G8F by a factor of 64 - We are talking about going from 10s of thousands to millions of polygons. So, just changing materials on a model can drastically change the geometry load on the render, too. And the really sad thing in all this is that many of the detailed displacement maps added by vendors are ineffective. Iray cannot reasonably resolve that level of displacement detail. Look at some of the detailed displacement maps added to some Iray hair shader products. Ridiculous in my opinion. And here is another gotcha: if you increase the SubD Displacement Level high enough to try to get reasonable displacement detail, Iray may decide that value would create too much geometry, and silently use a lower value than what you have entered. The only way you will know that that happened (other than seeing that it made no change in the appearance of your render) is by looking in the Daz Studio log file. Displacement in Iray simply is not designed to not work the same way as displacement in 3Delight. Trying to make it do so is a futile waste of resources, in my opinion. This is not to say the Displacement is useless in Iray; it is not. But you must temper your expectations and be aware of the consequences of your setting choices.

tycide

There's also this thread that has an exceptional amount of information on GPUs and the effects on rendering, with a benchmark scene.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/53771/iray-starter-scene-post-your-benchmarks/p1

It's interesting to see the results of the newest cards and they talk a lot about the mechanics of pooling VRAM and optimizing render speeds (from the hardware side)

sueya

As it's the last day of the month I will make this my final entry

LaPartita

In Her Sights

 

Thanks!!!

 

Edited to include attachment.

barbult

It's December now. so this challenge is closed. Thanks for participating. I hope you got a lot out of it.

WinterMoon

Boo hoo, I kept forgetting I was taking part.  Maybe in December, I'll be more focused... Maybe.

 

Obviously not an entry at this point, but here's how it ended up. I went with brighter light in the end.

Novbre

That's awesome Tigeranne!  Now (at least for me) the FIRST thing I notice is that pose.   Then it's pulled to the spots of colour in the flowers, then around to take in all that gorgeous green.  The DoF is pretty awesome too!   The lighting added a lot of white highlights to the figurine too, which helped ease all the green the was reflected back into the scene in your previous versions.  Great job, it's a beautiful scene!

 

~ Novbre

dtrscbrutal

TigerAnne said:

Boo hoo, I kept forgetting I was taking part.  Maybe in December, I'll be more focused... Maybe.

 

Obviously not an entry at this point, but here's how it ended up. I went with brighter light in the end.

Challenges come and go, making something beautiful is forever. That really pops with the new lighting.Well done.

I think that would be an impressive piece reproduced in the real world. Perhaps 3D printed.

barbult

Yes, the new lighting sure helped show off your materials. Thanks for posting your final version.

WinterMoon

Novbre said:

Great job, it's a beautiful scene!

 

Challenges come and go, making something beautiful is forever. That really pops with the new lighting.Well done.

Yes, the new lighting sure helped show off your materials. Thanks for posting your final version.

Aww, thank you, guys!  I learned a lot about shaders from this.

 

DAZ_ann0314

November 2018

Showcased Participants for the November Materials Challenge

Realistically Speaking
For this Showcase we looked at the artist who we felt best changed materials in such a way that it added realism to the image and made it feel very grounded..

For those reasons we have selected Fisherman_B to showcase


Everything Must Go
For this Showcase we took a look at who we felt changed materials in their scene in such a way that it gave things a new look and feel

The New User we felt best showed that this month was dtrscbrutal

Born This Way
For this Showcase we took a look at who we felt changed materials in a way that seemed like it was always that way to begin with and natural in look and feel

The New User we felt best showcased those things this month was Novbre


And we also wanted to spotlight TigerAnne as well. While you didn't get your final in quite on time, you did a wonderful job and we were impressed with all the work you put into it.

dtrscbrutal

Thank you so much! Congratulations to the fellow showcased.

Fisherman_B

Thanks for my part as well and congrats to everyone, we all won by learning and getting inspired.

WinterMoon

Congratulations to all the winners! Fisherman_B is right, the prize is what we learn during these challenges!  Let's really step it up in 2019!