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This weekend I got a chance to talk to the DAZ 3D developers about the progressive render settings and what they do. Here's some clarification on those settings. I did not know some of this myself until I had a chance to ask this weekend!
The progressive render settings are found in the "Render Settings" tab in DAZ Studio and the "Editor" portion of that tab. The important settings are:
Max Samples: Short version: The Max Samples count is the maximum number of samples Iray will achieve before it stops the render. The default number is 5000. How long it takes to get to 5000 samples varies by what kind of hardware your computer has - it will get to 5000 much faster on an Nvidia graphics card than a CPU or an AMD card.
Longer version, as best I was able to learn from web research: In any kind of rendering, the engine is trying to depict a 3D image as though it were in real space; in real space your eye views all images as continuous, but in the rendered image, the image has to be broken up into a finite number of pixels. The process of sampling is how a render engine tries to compensate for working with those pixels and the fact that visual information "stops" between them, creating the visual artifacts that you probably associate with a "bad" Iray render. But importantly for now, the more samples Iray calculates, the more it can smooth out the 3D space between the pixels into a continuous image without "jaggies" or "fireflies." More samples make a smoother, more complete image.
Max Time (secs): Iray can also be told to stop the render when a certain number of seconds have passed. The default value is 7200, which is two hours.
Important take-away: Iray will quit when it gets to ONE of these two values, normally. If it gets to two hours but has only done 2000 iterations or samples, it will still quit. If you have older or lesser hardware, you need to set the time much higher to get the same samples.
Rendering Quality Enable: If this is set to OFF, Iray will just use the Max Samples and Max Time to determine when render stops. If you want render time to go just based on those, turn this to OFF. If it is off, the Quality and Convergence sliders don't matter.
Rendering Quality: This linearly increases render time each time you raise the number: 2 is double the value of 1, 3 is triple the value of 1, etc. It overrides the time and samples counts. Use this only if you really want to try the "render forever and tell it to stop when I like how it looks" method. Otherwise just leave it at 1.
Rendering Converged Ratio: This is a function of the time and samples counts. I did not realize this until a dev told me, but apparently this is actually impossible to get to 100%, so to avoid errors it's better to converge to 99.9% instead if you want to make sure everything runs long enough without resorting to the Quality setting. I've probably caused myself and other people some crashes with this, and I'm sorry about that.
The progressive render settings are found in the "Render Settings" tab in DAZ Studio and the "Editor" portion of that tab. The important settings are:
Max Samples: Short version: The Max Samples count is the maximum number of samples Iray will achieve before it stops the render. The default number is 5000. How long it takes to get to 5000 samples varies by what kind of hardware your computer has - it will get to 5000 much faster on an Nvidia graphics card than a CPU or an AMD card.
Longer version, as best I was able to learn from web research: In any kind of rendering, the engine is trying to depict a 3D image as though it were in real space; in real space your eye views all images as continuous, but in the rendered image, the image has to be broken up into a finite number of pixels. The process of sampling is how a render engine tries to compensate for working with those pixels and the fact that visual information "stops" between them, creating the visual artifacts that you probably associate with a "bad" Iray render. But importantly for now, the more samples Iray calculates, the more it can smooth out the 3D space between the pixels into a continuous image without "jaggies" or "fireflies." More samples make a smoother, more complete image.
Max Time (secs): Iray can also be told to stop the render when a certain number of seconds have passed. The default value is 7200, which is two hours.
Important take-away: Iray will quit when it gets to ONE of these two values, normally. If it gets to two hours but has only done 2000 iterations or samples, it will still quit. If you have older or lesser hardware, you need to set the time much higher to get the same samples.
Rendering Quality Enable: If this is set to OFF, Iray will just use the Max Samples and Max Time to determine when render stops. If you want render time to go just based on those, turn this to OFF. If it is off, the Quality and Convergence sliders don't matter.
Rendering Quality: This linearly increases render time each time you raise the number: 2 is double the value of 1, 3 is triple the value of 1, etc. It overrides the time and samples counts. Use this only if you really want to try the "render forever and tell it to stop when I like how it looks" method. Otherwise just leave it at 1.
Rendering Converged Ratio: This is a function of the time and samples counts. I did not realize this until a dev told me, but apparently this is actually impossible to get to 100%, so to avoid errors it's better to converge to 99.9% instead if you want to make sure everything runs long enough without resorting to the Quality setting. I've probably caused myself and other people some crashes with this, and I'm sorry about that.
Default VS. PBR Skin Shader: Alexandra 8 Tests
User @DigitalHallucination had some interesting comments and questions about shaders under the old Iray Surfaces tutorial from 2015. That led to some experimentation with shaders this morning, the results of which I will share now. Please, please feel free to comment and debate. I think this is an issue of interest to more or less all of us. I commented offhand that I didn't think the PBRSkin shader was an improvement, but that the maps in use were what made the difference, and DH disagreed with this and provided some comparison renders using Alexandra 8. They definitely looked definitive, so I decided to run my own tests. At first I tried it with base G8F, but that wasn't an apples to apples comparison because G8F originally uses the old glossiness method, so she's going to look worse compared to any shader that uses the new spec. So, like DH, I went to Alexandra. In this case I used the default lighting with the camera headlamp turned off, Subd1, Alexandra 8 at 100%, and the
Deviantart's Default AI Opt-In
EDIT: They put in a mass opt out! Thanks for letting me know when I missed the news, lovely watchers! I'm not thrilled about dA making AI opt-out and not opt-in, and putting it so you have to opt-out on each individual artwork. I have little to lose from this, because my product is 3D models and not the 2D promotional images, but it's especially predatory of people whose product and ouevre is 2D art. I don't know how many people are still here, but it's one more reason for people who draw and paint to delete their accounts.
Color Differences in DS 4.20.1.38
This was introduced by my notice by Snarl, and verified by my own render testing. I will show my results in the following discussion. There is a visible color difference in Iray render results in Daz Studio 4.20.1.38 vs. the pre-VDB, pre-ghost light fix 4.16.1.21 build I was able to test against. I rendered out to pngs and looked at both pngs on the same monitor to account for that type of differences. Here shown is G8F up close in default lighting on both builds. I checked all of the render settings to make sure they were the same, too, because if we could just change a render setting it would be an easy fix. This difference is relatively subtle. Let me show those separately so you can download them separately to compare. Here's 4.20: And here's 4.16: You might have to zoom in and set them overlapping so you see top part and top part or right and right, etc., but it's there. I don't know how or why this change has happened. Maybe it's because Daz decided the default was too
Babbling About Fluid Simulation
I have some feelings about sims right now. I have a lot of them, and I've just had caffeine. So I'm going to share them with you all. So, I recently submitted a water set for Daz Studio. Three times. You see, Daz3d didn't like either of my first two interpretations of the slosh pieces and pouring pieces that were simulated in Blender, so I ended up having to hand-sculpt parts of it and combine that with parts of the simmed pieces. The sloshes are entirely hand-sculpted from me staring at photo references, except for bits of the flying droplets I salvaged from the original simmed meshes. I wouldn't even have gotten that far if not for the very specific and detailed feedback they gave me, a privilege of working with the Review committee since 2011 and, I sincerely hope, demonstrating an eagerness to accept professional criticism when it gets me paid. I know for a fact that they have some artists where they just say an unvarnished yes or no because it's not worth getting yelled at
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I have found that setting max time to 0 removes the timer from the render and only uses the samples. I use it because i had renders that took days to get done with my old computer. The computers I use don't have a GPU only a CPU. So, I remove the timer every render, just in case it takes longer. I need to post some of my more recent work as my quality has gotten a lot better over the time I have been gone frome here.