Trouble with 'The Forest'

Skyshorr

Hi folks, I have been having a heck of a time with some crash issues lately.
'The Forest' is the one that really drives me.
It is beautiful, really beautiful, yet it crashes whenever I set render to 4.
And becomes slow as molassess when Genesis gets into the scene.
I have tried new versions of it since May 2011, yet it stll won't play along.
I am running XP, 4 gb ram and Daz 4.5.
Anyone else had trouble with it.
PS, I regularly use big background sets with no trouble.
And would like to get more stuff for 'The Forest.'

Jaderail

The Forest is HUGE and has lots of transparency maps, at 4Gb of Ram your just at the edge of not being able to use it. I have 8Gb ram and it still slows my system way down.

Tips to help you a little. When you have your render camera set up use the Perspective Camera to Hide any objects not in you camera view or that will cast shadows in your render. That will reduce the Ram needed to render the scene you have set up.
Another Tip. Change your View from Texture Shaded to bounding Box or another low View setting as you set up your scene and the turn it back to texture shaded for the detail work. It will look odd but allow you to work a bit faster for setting up.

I hope this helps you.

Pendraia

Jaderail said:

The Forest is HUGE and has lots of transparency maps, at 4Gb of Ram your just at the edge of not being able to use it. I have 8Gb ram and it still slows my system way down.

Tips to help you a little. When you have your render camera set up use the Perspective Camera to Hide any objects not in you camera view or that will cast shadows in your render. That will reduce the Ram needed to render the scene you have set up.
Another Tip. Change your View from Texture Shaded to bounding Box or another low View setting as you set up your scene and the turn it back to texture shaded for the detail work. It will look odd but allow you to work a bit faster for setting up.

I hope this helps you.

It still slows my i7 with 16gb of ram down...it is really hard to work with. I wouldn't just hide the items not in use I would delete them unless you want shadows from them. I tried turning the eye off in the scene tab first and it still took forever to render, but when I deleted items it ran quite quickly.

I love this set so I've perservered with it but I tend to use the cameras to get viewpoints where possible rather than manually positioning it.

Herald of Fire

I've had a few issues with using the Forest, not least of all that hiding individual items means mass-hiding all instances of that object. There's no easy way to only keep the items in view visible, and that's a real shame because it really is a lovely set on the whole. My system is no slouch, but it really does slow down when loading it, even with a good graphics card and 16Gb of RAM.

Not much else to say except try to deal with it as best you can. Good luck.

mark128

I bought this set some time ago when it was on sale, but haven't really tried to use it much. I also got the recently released Forest Elements (http://www.daz3d.com/forest-elements). This set allows you to build your own forest. The setup scene below shows the ground middle summer set. It is much smaller than the whole forest set, which is also included. I posed my subject on the hill side and positioned the camera. Then I build the forest behind her. I had not problems with DAZ slowing down on this much smaller scene.

I experimented a lot with lighting, and finally settled on a very simple lighting setup. There is one distant light at 100% intensity with ray traces shadows that pointed at subjects side and slightly rear. There is a second spot light at the camera location at 100% intensity, 90 deg spread angle, diffuse only and no shadows.

This lighting arrangement is party based on my outdoor photography experience. Position the subject so the sun is not on their face, then use a fill flash to light up the subject to match the background. I used the diffuse only because I did not want specular highlights on her face and arms from the fill light. I think the specular highlights in the picture look more natural this way. The fill light is also creating something like the ambient light in the forest behind her. Without the fill light the forest would look much darker.

With this very simple lighting setup, render time was 50 min at 800x600 and 1 hr 26 min at 1200x900. These are slow render times, but still tolerable. The memory usage by DAZ was just under 1 GB while rendering this, so you would not need a giant computer to handle this. My processor is I7-3770 at 3.4 GHz, so I think it is a fairly fast processor.

I also tried using another distant light as the fill light, and that worked just fine too, but I don't think it would work in the real forest set, because trees behind the camera would block the light. A spot light should work in the real forest set.

I tried to use UE2, but the render time went crazy. I canceled most of the renders after hours because there was no point. I don't think you can use UE2 with even this small forest set.

I'm now going to try some experiments in the real hi-res forest set.

Harry Dresden

If you're using 32bit XP you have even less RAM as only 2GB will be available.

Another tip I could add is to render your scene in passes if you have a lot of lights on. Basically you'd render your scene a few times, each time switching different lights on and off as you go and then combine all those renders in an image editing program like GIMP or Photoshop.