Using Iray for Animation?
Deke
Posts: 1,631
Anyone doing this? I'm using Daz 4.8 on a mac and while Iray is very interesting, it is a whole other workflow and renders take a long time. Is this even practical for animation?
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you can limit the samples but yes even then slow
Now I'm converting my project to iray from Octane. I'm able to keep the frame render time within 2-3 minutes without the loss in quality and sometimes (especially with large amount of lights) iray converges faster than Octane.
Not to be unfounded, these are rendered in 24 seconds each, no postwork, just iray internal tonemapping.
Alex L getting good times and results using the Iray interactive renderer. No motion blur enabled yet, though 3DS Max has it in a recent version they are using. He posted a video in one of the Iray threads in the commons.
Here is the post that has the YouTube link and a response to me asking about motion blur.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/54734/P1410/#814235
Here are the two test animation studies I've posted so far
"Denim" - PBR SSS Skin & materials in an HDRI environment, Photoreal mode
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj611aVWstc
24fps, rendered at 2K anamorphic resolution & then sized down to 1080P HD. Average time per frame was under 3 min in the wide shots & 6-8min for the closeups (more detail in the eyes & surface normals register then when far away.
"Kick It" - Variant on PBR SSS Skin for the kicker, & my current "standard" for the kickee, in Interactive mode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQMoPxNW9ac
24fps Interactive mode rendered at 2K anamorphic resolution & then sized down to 1080P HD. Average time per frame 20-50 sec, only needing 50-60 sample iterations per frame! I also made white point adjustments & additional vignetting to complement the surface differences between the two modes. (you can see the effect transition going from "real-world" to the "virtual-world" ;-) )
The biggest component in reducing render times I'm finding is properly setting the materials. A surface that is set according to PBR values renders much faster than just letting 3Delight mats "auto convert", or relying on just the iray uber default.
Using HDRI backgrounds with figures instead of full scenes is also the fastest way to render any animation.
Bryce for example will create such backgrounds from DAZ props and Bryce scenery if you wish to make your own but that will take much longer :lol:
In Octane I usually render in HD (1920x1080) at 500 maxsamples. What would be the equivalent of that in iRAY?
I find those settings offer the best mix of size/pixels vs render speed for a good quality animation that looks good on a 60" screen and can be projected in quite a large space. Most of my animations are composites combining still, animation and film footage so the animation parts take less time to render. There are many ways to speed things up but I was interested in a (close enough) 1 to 1 comparison between iRAY and OcDS.
HI. I did some tests tonight comparing Octane (Daz plugin 1.2) with Iray, installed yesterday, and found them to be very similar. I think there are advantages to both, but the biggest difference I see is that with Octane, you can move the image around and see the shadows etc render as it moves (if its set up right) VS Iray via Daz Viewport (or the optional Auxillary viewport) that switches to Smooth Shaded viewing. This means its more difficult to fine tune lights etc, since each time you move a camera or light or just adjust the scene it flashes back and forth to the two views - Smooth shaded then back to Iray viewing.
The renderings look really good, however. I tested both render modes- Photoreal seems best for stills, certainly much longer renders, while Interactive has features where you can turn down the length of the render time. Since Octane does a great job at 15 seconds per animated frame (I often run a full 45 second video out within a few hours, large sets with 2-3 characters, or in parts for After Effects) I tested that time in Iray (set it to 15 sec per frame) and swapped out a few textures to the Iray shaders (not sure why other people can't load them) The results look just as good, maybe better than Octane. 6 frames = 1.4 minutes. I'll do a long render tomorrow and post it. Emitters always slow down unbiased renders, so unless you need them, use the Sun-Sky only Environment mode (you'll find the sun/sky light in Presets at the top of the Iray tab) This will cast shadows for a sunlight effect and renders very quickly. I am only running a 2gig Nvidia card, which I set to run without the CPU drain.
One of the big advantages is selective focus, which used to take forever in 3Delight.
2 things that I can not get to work - 1, the emitter is not illuminating its surroundings. 2. I can't figure out how to add a dome without the light dropping out. This also happens in Octane and the solution is to use emitters or run a light more diagonally (or hide the top of a roof, etc) But with Iray, I can't seem to get it to even recognize the dome. I've tried Reality SOE domes (removing the lights) and others but the results always just go to black, blocking the light. I also tried creating an emitter from the dome, which works in Octane, but not in Iray. Any ideas?
Hope this info helps. I will do screen shots of my settings, doesn't look like I can save them.
May be you need to have the head lamp blocker in your scene, like the one available in:
http://www.daz3d.com/iradiance-studio-hdris-for-iray
or http://www.daz3d.com/iradiance-hdr-mesh-lights-for-iray
That's funny, I was just looking to buy one of those. Which one, not sure yet. Or the point and shoot one. Just want to try one before I get into pushing emitters and setting up individual lights here and there in my next scenes.
Thanks.
The Iradiance Studio HDRI set is pretty amazing. It has some nice features you don't see in other light sets. I still can't get any dome to work with it or others, but will play with it a bit more. It does very realistic lights with a few simple adjustments. If I can get an emitter or two in the scenes, should be a good starting point.
Thanks for comparing OcDS and iRAY animation rendering. I'll be interested to see your further tests. I don't really have the technical knowledge to do a fair comparison myself. It would be interesting to see how a OcDS render and a iRAY render of the same animation taking the same amount of time compare.
For example, OcDS doesn't switch on HD automatically so when using HD figures in a scene iRAY appears to take longer to render because it automatically uses HD. Technical differences like this can make it appear that OcDS is faster when it actually isn't.
I don't think its possible to do a speed comparison as one would need to set up the lights differently. With Octane, the 1.2 plugin for Daz (which works great for me, by the way, never had any problems with it) you simply click on the normal Daz scene and then go to the textures tab and it will tell you if you have enough space on your video card for the scene. If not, you can reduce it in Daz in a few ways, or, use the texture reducer in Octane to drop the mats to 1/2/ 1/3/ or 1/4th the size. Once it loads, which is within a few seconds, you see the scene being rendered and you simply move their lights or set up the emitter objects. (Or, you pick an object, right click, and make it an emitter.) Like Reality, there are a few times when the textures need to be reset (certain skin tones, floor textures, no domes) I will look into the high res issue, thanks for mentioning that.
In Iray, you will need to set up all the lights for Iray to work. The standard lights are not giving me the lighting needed. Once this is done, which can take a long time to test, then the render can be run. (hence the first sell-able items from suppliers for Daz are lights and textures, which work exceptionally well if you want to make it easier on yourself to load in preset lights). I have Iray set up to use just the video card, which I believe is faster, and the results look really good, rich, controllable! But I can't tell if a scene is too big for the card and if the card is running hot (with Octane there is an indicator showing the heat of the card.) I worried about this so I opened my case and run a fan on the inside of the computer, which is archaic but works. Right now my computer won't restart, it loaded in a Win7 update and doesn't reboot. Back to square one...! I hope Iray didn't fry the video card. Got it! Had to shut down, wait, then restart. Whew!
If I get time I will do a speed test, but 15 seconds per frame with very good results was my goal and I reached that. I use 15 seconds because that is the minimum that Octane allows you to run a manual set time for animation. This can lead to grainy images so you need to time it first. I'll try to post something here when I can.
Its great that Iray is now part of Daz. Its a bit complicated to get the lights set up right but there are very positive results and you don't have to run it in Iray mode. For a first run, they did a great job with it, in my opinion. Lighting is everything, so if you take time to get it down, you can get photo-realistic results within a few seconds. How they do this in the preview is beyond me, the preview often looks better than the final, which it should look the same. I have not done a long render, so my guess is that a long render would result in the same smooth final look. Great to play with!
You can render much faster than 15fps in Octane
in fact I do not use the frame time limit at all as frames do not match sampling wise
what I do is limit my pixel samples usually to 50 or 100 it is set to a huge number by default
some things I even do 10 samples!!!
it is the same as limiting iterations in iray
Yes, I've tried that but the resolution for my scenes becomes so low that it looks very grainy, especially with any emitters. With the timer, it sicks to that time frame, 15 secs being the lowest, so after I test a few frames, I can go up from there if needed.
I'm doing an interesting test right now that is nearly finished, a comparison to Iray at 30 secs per frame, 4.5 second animation, VS the same amount of time per frame for Octane. I used several odd props for a variety of textures and will try to include a few notes as to what happened. Its just finishing, with Octane rendering the 147 frames in a little under 90 minutes (and the set up was considerably easier, which saved an hour or so) and Iray rendering in at a little over 90 minutes. I did screen shots of the Viewports for those who are interested and haven't seen either renderer yet. I will attach them here and attach the animations after I run them through Premier to reduce them to a size I can send. (I think, one is now 11 mb, hopefully I can just attach it. I don't want to mess with Youtube.)
Before I forget, with Octane, you can see each frame render and adjust to the next frame. I only saw the same first frame with Iray. You can also stop the animation (I do PNG stills) but I think you can continue the render with Iray. It would be nice if Octane had a psd opr tif option. Some of the objects (textures) did not even show up in Octane, like Jepe's shiny cloth, the mirror, and a mirrored ball I put in, which I just used Octanes online textures for. In Iray, most textures worked but some lost their sheen, etc. Its all in how much time you take to set up the files. At least with Iray, you get what you see. With Octane, since its basically another program (plugin), the textures won't always show up right, same as with Reality. But this is rarely a problem and using their mats works very well. Its done, I will put it together now. Meantime, here are a few screen shots, one shows the viewports, one shows the same image, sort of a crazy piece I threw together, as rendered in 3Delight vs Iray, with notes. I had to reduce these down.
Here are the viewports for the above renders, with notes.
I have both animations ready if anyone is interested. I can just email them. Both are 12 k and the limit here is 10k, just saw it, sorry.
I don't mind emailing them but don't want to reduce them further as they will break up too much to be worth looking at.
My notes- The first thing I noticed, besides the crazy flying pancakes, is that the dynamic cloth did not hold up well in Iray. I assume this is because it needs a lead time to set up, can't just render before it moves into the next state of forming around the figure. Why it works in Octane, as it nearly always does, I'm not sure, but I assume there is a short delay before it loads the next frame. Again, you can see it render, frame by frame, in Octane only. These animations show this clearly, so I am hoping they will work on this. Dynamic cloth is the closest thing to a physics engine Daz Studio is likely to have, and the results can be worth it, but if it won't render in an animation, that could be a real problem for those few of us doing video work.
As far as realism, both look very good. If I played with the lights and set up emitters, the realism would increase, but these are just simple light setups for each with no additional lighting. Both were rendered at 30 seconds per frame, both rendered in 90 minutes. These seems to be more depth with Iray, but more luminance with Octane. Once Iray gets better lights and I try more shaders, I'll test it more thoroughly.
I probably should have rendered the Iray setup with just the default sun light, not the purchased softer light. It would have showed shadows and looked closer to Octane's default 'sun' lighting. But I never use those alone, always with added lights or overlapping the full render at percentages while layering in After Effects.
The grain in Iray is very obvious. With Octane, very little grain for a 30 sec per frame render. There is no grain after 3 minutes or so, but that would mean fairly long render times for animations. Might be worth it, though. Again, it would be more fair to compare the sun effect, although in the stills I did, the length of time to do a render in Iray is still much longer than in Octane to get to a non-grainy look. I think that answers someone's question. For stills, Iray is definitely worth delving into. I think you would need to buy some of the new items for materials, shaders for metal and cloth, etc. Most of them hold up well but the shine is gone, fixable in the surface settings, I would think. Still, that is a lot of experimenting to get one scene ready.
Kind of fun to compare. I am sure they will incorporate more and more new stuff to try. I hope there is a way to do some nice fog effects and utilize the 'bloom' feature, which is very sensitive but looks pretty cool. The selective focus alone is worth working with. I will try to figure out why I can't get a dome to render. I read some notes that this is possible, perhaps as an emitter, but have not been able to get any object to radiate light as an emitter, yet. With Octane, you simply right click and make the object an emitter, very easy to do.
If you want to see the animations, send me an email link, I will be happy to send them. Phil
Hi--do you have a tutorial on your process. I too would love to use Iray for animation ...:-)
Hi. I've been experimenting a lot with the two renderers, then comparing them to 3Delight with good uber lighting and realize that Octane is, for my needs, better for some sets and Iray is better for others. I'm sure you have done similar tests. Looks like Octane is my choice for outdoor scenes because its so easy to set up and test lights by moving them in real time. I prefer Iray for interior sets and some faces as it seems to render softer skin tones and, when used with Iray shaders, the effect is as good or better than using the Octane shaders in Octane. And 3Delight, with the right lights, looks as good or better in some scenes if the skin texture is high quality or the props have properties better for that type of renderer.
2-3 minutes per frame is a very long time, so I assume you are using emitters, more than one it sounds like. Without any emitters, your scenes should render in a few seconds to a fairly finished degree with either renderer. This is where they really speed things up. However, once an emitter is in place, that noise you see needs to settle down and that takes time to smooth out.
I can post comparisons if you like, but that is basically how the animation timing works.
Basically, I do 3 or 4 stills from the timeline using each renderer and see how long they take and what looks best. I also (often) strip in composite figures via After Effects, if the figure looks better in one renderer but the background looks better in another. My typical workflow is to try to do an animation all in Iray now (was Octane) but most of the time I am rendering the backgrounds in Octane, the figures now in Iray, and skys in 3Delight using a good domed sky. I did figure out how to light the dome in Iray, but that doesn't look as rich or clean as with straight 3Delight. I haven't tried Reality 4, not sure about its animation capabilities.
A couple of features in Octane that I would like to see in Iray are - realtime previews as the animation is being rendered, a timer for the full sequence, realtime lighting moves so there is no cache or delay as it resets. One nice feature is how Octane can clean up some of the harder edges (rayepisilon) which always bug me when the forms should render smoothly,, especially in closer head shots.
Iray's use of both the Gpu and Cpu if maxed, would be a great feature in Octane (which has yet to be updated as a Daz plugin since 1.2) In large scenes, I've had to drop the textures down to 1/4th in many cases with Octane, whereas Iray has never had any size problems. Also, some materials turn black or white in Octane if you use the Iray shaders, or they just disappear, so you have to go back in and use the original mats or Octanes.
With Iray, with renders under 30 seconds, I can't use dynamic cloth effectively as it has a slight lag before redraw, but with Octane it always works, refreshes faster. I haven't tested dynamic cloth animation with longer render times, however, which might work fine.
So- limit your emitters, keeps the time per frame down, much less grainy, and find that middle ground for the best results. Octane for outdoor scenes seems to be best for me. Soft lighting and reflective subjects, interiors, work well with Iray and 3 Delight. I would avoid the Iray bloom filter unless its toned way down as it looks more like softened dots rather than a soft bloom as with Octane. Also seems to add more time to each render.
Hope this info helps.
You didn't post any images, by the way.
I agree with everything you said about using the right render engine for the job, but 2-3 minutes per frame is anything but slow.
I'm happy if I can get a complex scene to render under 5 minutes per frame in either 3DL or Iray.
Again, it depends on how much grain (noise) you can live with. With emitters, they will slow the render way down. Without them, you can do full renders within a few seconds. At least, that's how its working for me. I often do a 30 second animation (900 frames) in around 4 hours with very high quality rendering, no grain. Or I let it run to 8 hours and its a touch smoother, but when its moving, no one could see the difference anyway. For stills, yeah, several minutes with emitters and Iray, With Octane, usually faster. If you use the full clock time to let it run, which is rarely needed unless you have a lot of emitter lighting, then sure, it can go much longer, but its really not needed for animations even at 1920x1080, which is all I do now.
I have run out long renders (Iray, Octane for 5 minutes or so per frame) for some animations with big scenes (big sets with lots of lights, shadows, a few figures) and then compared this to a quick render of say 30 sec to 1 minute per frame. I can't see the difference once its moving.
One cool trick is to run out a quick render, even with a touch of grain (noise) then run another one using another renderer, like 3Delight, then overlap these at 50/50 or so in After Effects. This usually looks a little softer but somehow more realistic and the grain if any, is gone. This cuts the rendering time down to about 1/4th, even though you render it out 2 times, but each time its much faster than long renders per frame. Works well for me, anyway.
I actually created an animation with it -- 90 seconds a frame -- NVIDIA 970 card
there's some noise but not too bad
https://vimeo.com/132371976
Again, Octane and Iray are biased renderers, reality based like the real world, which means that if you use one light (the sun) it will render off the GPU much faster than unbiased renderers like 3Delight. Octane and Iray (and Reality) slow down when you start adding extra lights or make an object in the scene an emitter.
I've done dozens of animations and stills now from both and lots of speed tests, and they always come out way ahead, much faster than CPU based renderers. However, if you don't have the right materials (textures or shaders) this can slow down the renders a bit and if they are too big for your video card (GPU) then Octane simply won't load until you reduce down the total mat size. Iray can run both GPU (Nvidia, fastest setting) or GPU + CPU, slower but can handle larger total material size.
You don't have to wait until a still renders to completion- just cancel it on the small progress window and view it, save if you want to keep it. (Its hidden on my computer beneath Daz's normal viewing screens.) In both Iray and Octane you can set the time you want it to render in various ways and with animation, there's really no reason to render a full frame each time like its a still. I'm finding that 30 seconds or less for scenes with no more than 1 or two emitters + sunlight (or dome if you set it up right) is all I need for most smooth animations. I only go longer if there is more noise due to bloom or a large emitter in a dark environment.
I just made some 'fake' 3d landscapes, brought the models into Mudbox and raised the surfaces, then back to Daz for textures. These are really large landscapes with extra large textures, but they show up instantly in Octane, where I can turn the sunlight in realtime, and within 2 seconds in Iray, both photoreal looking and much, much better than the 3Delight renders, which take several minutes with fast but decent lights. The default sun and sky, by the way, with Iray, is as good as the default for Octane. Tweaking this only takes seconds once you memorize the tools, so there really is no comparison in speed to the unbiased renders off the CPU. And all animation is a multiple of those individual frames, so I can do full 30 sec to 2 minute video renders now within hours instead of days, and they always look much better than in 3Delight, except for some materials, which I am sure will soon be available as Iray textures in the store soon.
Yeah, I found that to be the case with lights with trial and errors--it's why I like preset lights--you click around, take lights out and move them around--speeds the renders way, way up...
Oh and using HDRI's seem to help as well for some reason...
The process of conversion from Octane to Iray is simple - it's all about making iray materials and writing a script to apply them to old Octane-based scene in a batch manner :) As most shots reuse the scene setup (more or less) script will save you some time, but the same actions may as well be done manually.
About animation process iteslf - I wrote something here http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/57649/
I'm too lazy to make tutorials, sorry :)
Octane and Iray are unbiased, 3Delight is biased.
Philiphowe: So when you saw Emmitters you're referring to any surface that has been assigned the Iray Emitter Shader? Is the alternative to just create lights instead of making a surface emit? And I'm curious on your file set up…Do you have one scene optimized for Iray with it's various base shaders assigned…and then an identical scene for Octane or 3D?
Unless you're using PMC kernel in Octane or architectural and/or caustic sampler in iray. Then they're biased again :) as these features use some sort of MLT to aid convergence.