IRay, time limit or convergence limit.....
tring01
Posts: 305
Had some good success today in developing my animation workflow in IRay and just wanted to share it and entertain possible comments.
I tried limiting the render time to 5 minutes per frame (which equates to 2 hours of render time per second of animation at 24FPS). I noticed that camera pan shots were producing uneven results. As more complex assets came into view of the shot the quality of the frame renders dropped off. So I tried limiting convergence instead. I tried a few settings and found that 50% convergence produces acceptable frames at 1080p HD. The quality of all of the frames is consistent as well. The non-complex shots (just some scenery in view) render in a couple minutes. But as Genesis figures come into view the render times go way, way up.
Also, I thought when zooming in on a Genesis figure from a distance I would have to convert the Genesis to Sub D at distance to shorten my render time - which is problematic because then I have to convert the figure back to full resolution as the camera pans in - but I found that the render times are still only a couple minutes with even several full resolution Genesis figures in the distance.
I found that even static renders look very good with the convergence set around 70%.
I've done all this testing in a well lit scene using only Sun Sky environment lighting. Since IRay doesn't like dim scenes I'm not sure if these values will hold up well for dimly lit indoor scenes.
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Comments
Wow. Oh wow. Running a long zoom shot now. 48 frames that zoom from a distance into a close up on the face of a figure built on Eva 7. Frame 1 written at 4:42 AM, frame 2 at 4:49. Meh. 7 minutes. I can live with that. Frame 24 written at 10:01, frame 25 written at 11:09. Wow. I guess I will let it run the rest of the day just to see what happens. Wow.
I like to turn my computer off for the night. So I got used to rendering animations as a series of images. That way I can just let it work for even 10 or 15 minutes per frame if it wants to, and can cancel any time, and continue from where I left off the next day. Another advantage of this is that if I hate a part of the animation, I only need to rerender that small part, based on frame numbers.
This way I can go for better quality (as high as 95% convergence usually, 98% if I really want it to look nice), and not have to worry too much about the time it takes to render the full animation.
Yup. I render to a .png series as well. Only way to go.
What image size do you use? I'm using 1080p 16:9 for compatability with YouTube. Do you run in higher or lower resolution?
How long do you usually expect your machine to run rendering one second of animation?
Time is NOT a good limit. As you have found out...simple is faster to converge, so more will get done in that time limit.
And yes, animation does not NEED to have the same 'clarity'/convergence that a still would...simply because the inherent 'blur' will take care of softening the 'noise'.
As to your distant/close disparity...some amout of LOD/texture compression is done automatically within Studio/renderer, so no you won't really need to worry about manually switching things, it's already being done. Yeah, you'd get more control doing it manually, but would you pick up any time savings or render quality...probably not.
And yes, lighting will play a role...dim will take longer.
I usually render at 1280x720 (same 16:9 for YouTube, only one resolution lower than yours).
I usually use 3Delight (I like the way it looks), which is way faster than Iray. Just recently I did a part of an animation in Iray, I think that part ended up to be something like 4 seconds total, rendering for two (half) days at 30 FPS. Some frames render faster than others. As you mentioned, when there is a closeup of a character (I use Genesis2), rendering time starts to skyrocket, going up as high as 10 minutes per frame.
Compared to the two (half) days it took for the Iray renders to be complete, I finished the other half of my animation in 3Delight is about 2 hours. :)
I have to add that I don't have the fastest videocard on the market. It's an i7 machine with a GTX760.
Ha! All too true.
I tried and tried to make 3Delight work for me. I couldn't get consistent results. I could learn 3Delight I suppose, but IRay is so amazing at doing photo real that I really, really want to make it work. I had no idea the time differences were that much though. I'm probably going to have to learn to use 3Delight in order to get on with learning to animate - which is my primary goal. Thanks for the input.
For some animations I use a backdrop image as a background. Iray fits better to those backgrounds with its photorealistic style. But when I have the entire scene in DazStudio, I like 3Delight. It's not as photorealistic, but I love the way it looks.
(I did a couple-second shot with 30 or so figures loaded (army, standing in front of a castle, waiting to invade), I have to say that animating the camera only was a nightmare. The actors did not even move, I would not have been able to do that without going totally insane from the slowness. :) I got a few tools to help with this situation in the future, did not have the chance to try them yet.)
Ati2, one problem with your comparrison...3DL was NOT even approaching the complexity of the Iray render. The lighting was in no way similar enough to compare. By the very nature of it, Iray is doing, all the time, full, global illumination with bounce. There is no 3DL shader, on the planet that can do the same thing fast. Using the light shaders in 3DL to get the same effects as 'native' in Iray will give very similar render times.
Plus there is the fact to consider that the Iray renders were dropped to CPU only...without GPU acceleration Iray is just another renderer.
I'm sure there are other factors too, that I don't even know of yet. :) I'm learning as I go along.
Also which mode is being used in 3Delight will make a difference...especially with a full GI light shader. The normal 'REYES' mode will be incredibly slow.
And if the Iray scene was using meshlights, that will be slower...especially if the meshlights have 'double sided:ON'.
Well, now I remember I found this before. I created the same scene in 3Delight and ran the render. Two hours later it still handn't painted the first interation on progressive. I've found 3Delight renders of complex scenes take about twice as long as IRay, or longer. Perhaps it's something I'm doing wrong. I dunno. I didn't use SSS or reflective eyes or anything special since it's a crowd scene with 6 Genesis figures.
My 3Delight render is incredibly slow. What is the REYES mode you speak of and how do I change it?
REYES is the 'normal' everyday mode that Studio renders in. To switch to the faster raytracer hider (that's 3Delight talk for renderer) just turn on Progressive, under the Render Settings.
Thanks. I was on progressive already.
Ha! Got my IRay render rolling again. I limited it to 45% convergence and a maximum time of 1800 seconds. Is working fine and moving along at a good pace. Results being cut off at 1800 seconds are still quite acceptable.
Then there is something, shader, probably something with an AoA SSS shader that has a long precompute time (it's not the only one with a long 'pre' time, but one of the longest).
Could be, yes. I could spend a good while searching for it too.
I also got that bug where my Genesis figures turned out complete whited out on the first render. Looked that up and found the solution of running Daz in Administrator mode to solve it. Once I did that things ground to a complete halt. Meh, had enough with 3Delight. Thanks for the help. I might go back and try it again some day.
I drop the samples as well as convergence myself when I use iray the more light from IBL it has the faster it is too getting a less spotty result in less iterations rather than emitters or lights converted to emitters, losing the headlight and using IBL worked best for me, it can be a 360 render of the scene you wish to include if you can do one, sadly not in studio, Carrara will do spherical renders and Bryce so if you have either can use those, not unbiased of course with their inbuilt renderers but you can untick draw dome and composite in a similar shot after if no camera movement.
i use octane in Carrara myself of course and can do 360 renders there too for IBL in Iray, I mainly intend to do so if I need HD characters for close ups in DAZ studio as HD not supported in Carrara. Used to use DS octane but now we have Iray and since I have not updated from OrDS1,2 I have been playing with that.