Why do some environments render better than others?
Taylor-S-Rose
Posts: 79
[Why do some environments render better than others?] Case study: Evening Room by Fugazi vs. Basement of Horror by keppel.
For the past few weeks I've been doing renders with Fugazi's Evening Room environment and I find that even stripped to the BARE minimum -- extra walls, props, ceilings, lights deleted, custom lighting used -- the Nvidia Iray preview takes forever to de-grain-ify.
And then when I go to render the image (I use the Boost for Daz service), I have to use one of the higher level GPUs (the $8) to get the image to render in 3-4 hours, which ends up being around $30-$35 for a 10K x 8K pixel image.
But then I switch over to a scene with Basement of Horror and I'm able to do it with the $3 GPU in under an hour, and the preview de-grain-ifies almost instantly.
I'll point out that I'm using the same exposure value (5) and only a couple of lights. Also the characters and apparel are the same. Same 10K x 8K image size. The only difference as far as I can tell is the environment.
What causes this difference in rendering? I like Fugazi's work (his lighting and exposure value choices notwithstanding) but $30 a render is too much, at least for a small timer like myself.
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Comments
Lots of reasons, the modeling efficienty (or lack of), the mesh density, the texture sizes, the materials, reflective surfaces, lights, etc. I agree, $30 is way to much to pay for a render, then again, I wouldn't use a service that I had to pay for the creation of an image.
I know from using them on my own computer Fugazi/Ironman13 sets are very heavy so rarely buy them unless heavily discounted (which they often are)
they have lots of usually big and not very optimised UV wise texture maps in every channel (bump, normal, metallic, roughness etc) lots of polygons
many people with high end machines like this and seek it out so it's not an issue in itself rather one just for those needing to fit it on a lesser card or paying for cloud rendering like you.
DAZ does list map sizes and numbers in the product description so that helps in buying choices
I wish they listed polycounts too
I myself usually render backdrops with matching tifs I convert to HDR in Gimp if using them (or render them in another program that does HDR like Twinmotion)
Some interesting tips there (as always!), not sure I entirely understand the last sentence: you mean "TIF" the graphic format? Am I right in understanding that you would (1) choose the part of the environment that you wish to use for the scene, (2) render it to TIF without the characters/figures you will use (obviously) then (3) convert that TIF in GIMP to HDR and then get rid (4) of the environment in your scene and start using this freshly made HDR?
Q: Why TIF then (other formats cannot be HDRified?)? And ad. 2, doesn't that take nearly as long as doing it the normal way with characters/figures included in the scene?
yes
TIFthe largest image file option so has the most information
while it is still lacks metadata for lighting it's not too bad converted to Radiance HDR in Gimp
and yes empty scene with a spherical lens and camera with zero rotations about eye height (or height you want rendered) 2:1 ratio
it need not be large if you do a background too and just use it for dome with it not visible
Purrfect thx!
You mention that you wouldn't use a paid service to create an image -- do you know of a cheaper/free alternative to Boost? Or do you mean you use your onboard GPU?
Okay, that makes sense. Thank you.
Comparing Fugazi's stuff to some of the other environments I own, I can see that the map #s on the stuff that renders faster tends to be lower.
It's not just about the number of textures/maps or their sizes in pixels and color depth, but also about how efficiently the UV mapping has been done.
It's not unusual to have 4 maps on a surface in addition to the main texture, if they are all 8192 pixels x 8192 pixels x 24bit, each of them take 192MB's of RAM and about 96MB's of VRAM when rendered in Iray = Total 960MB's of RAM and 480MB's of VRAM and that's just one surface that can be something one hardly pays any attention to.
The worst case that I have stumbled on was just like that, and when I started investigating, why was the scene taking so much resources, there was just one of the surfaces that was taking 960MB's of RAM but the same level of detail was achievable with only 20MB's of RAM usage if one had done better UV mapping. 940MB's of RAM was wasted on empty space and that was just one surface amongst 200+ surfaces...
Using my PC. I am highly against any kind of payed or subscription service. If I was to pay for a service, I might as well purchase a good PC since the cost of using a service will add up. Personally, if I had a weak PC and couldn't create on it, I would find another hobby.
Frustratingly I have not yet managed to upgrade my feeble 3Gb GeForce videocard so all those nice environments that I bought from Fugazi1968, Ironman13 and Tesla3Dcorp etc. etc. are pretty much unusable and I am forced to work with HDRI's mostly. However in the DAZ shop, during these weeks' sales I stumbled upon Scene Optimizer by V3Digitimes and already I managed to get a couple of decent renders of formerly "impossible" environments. Scene Optimizer's manual is not an easy read (when will these developers learn to give us a simple and practical scenario first before delving into the nitty gritty?) but even with basic settings it does its magic. Dealing with my suboptimal hardware, I now also render parts of an environment based scene separately and collate them in Photoshop, the typical scenario is to render the environment apart from figures etc.