April 2020 - Daz 3D New User Challenge - Open Render Challenge

0996ps

Smoerebroet said:

Congratulation to the winners!

@TristanQEverett Today there is some nice fire and smoke props in sale.
The first fire i see in DAZ that looks good and variable.
https://www.daz3d.com/mmx-fire-and-smoke-for-iray

I spent a lot in the last three months. I am totally out of money. I can't even buy platinum membership for this month. It's all good. I will try to work now with what I have and maybe soon I will have more money but thanks for letting me know.

Damn! they look amazing. Wishlisted!

AZDigitalArtist

COOL, thanks!  I happen to love Rune.  Congrats to everyone featured!

 

Bobvan

L'Adair said:

I think discussing render settings fits quite nicely into a "free" month. Iray has progressed significantly since it was introduced to Daz Studio in 2015. The code has also increased sginificantly. The version of Iray in 4.12 will accomplish more in a single iteration than previous versions of Iray, but each iteration takes longer. I have found I don't need to render as many samples to get the same quality, so the total time to render is actually less.

One of the default Render Settings > Progressive Rendering is Rendering Quality Enable: On. With Quality enabled, the render algorithm uses the Rendering Quality and Rendering Converged Ratio parameters to determine when to stop the render. To do that, the code needs to test the iterations to see if convergence is met. I'm guessing the code is sophisticated enough that it uses the early iterations to project how many samples it needs to get close to Convergence. I do know that as the render gets close, rendering slows, reporting the number of iterations more frequently.

Of course, there are two other conditions that can stop a render besides convergence, Max Time and Max Samples. If you reach either of these limits, it doesn't matter what the convergence is, the render will stop.

It took me way too long to try rendering with Rendering Quality Enable set to Off, but since then, I rarely render with it on. When you turn off the Quality parameter, the code no longer tests the samples for convergence. If you're rendering CPU Only, as I was way back when, cutting out this step may speed up your renders noticably. I doubt if it's noticable if you're system has an Nvidia card. However, once you disable the Quality settings, the only parameters that will stop your render are Max Time and Max Samples.

Max Time can be turned off by setting the value to zero, (0). You cannot turn Max Samples off. But with both the Quality and Time settings off, you can control the length of the render with the Max Samples setting. Doing a test render? Set Max Samples to something low, like 100. Doing a final render? Set Max Samples to something higher. (My default is 15000, though with the latest version of Iray, I seldom go that long. I just haven't revised my default scene or presets.) The render finished, but you think it needs more time? Increase Max Samples without closing the render window and click on the Resume button.

Here's an image of my default Progressive Rendering settings, with my changes highlighted, (something to break up the "wall-o-text" of this post!)

One of the advantages of this set up is with spot rendering. Inevitably, I find something I want to change after rendering the final scene. Rather than fixing it and rendering the full scene again, I'll select the Spot Rendering tool, change the option to New Window in the Tool Settings, and render a section with my fix. Because I render to a specified number of samples, I can render the spot to the same number of samples. (I then layer the images in my image editor.)

Using Spot Renders instead of rendering a full image again is a great way to save render time, too.

And finally, I generally set the image to render as I'm heading to bed, because then it doesn't matter that my computer has allocated all of it's resources to the render.

I hope some of you find this information useful. Happy rendering!

 

Don't forget that if your still not happy you can take the limits off max samples and crank the numbers for more..