Jencredible #3 ...

Nice work Lfan and Gin

Peace.

/K

Looking forward to this!

Me too!

My little GeForce 1070Ti is cranking as fast as it can...

To give you some idea, my JenCredible3 folder contains 137 renders with 6 more to come. That's more than I've posted in total to DA over the last three years. Not all of them will be used in the final product (for example, I had to go back and redo a bunch of pages when I realized the armored car I had picked was unusable.)

Each scene has to be set up, tested, agreed on by myself and LFan, and rendered. Render time for a scene is anything from an hour to 8 hours, depending on the size and complexity of the scene.

Then LFan does the post-work manipulation, FX, and lettering. Sometimes that leads to a request for another scene or variation on an existing scene.

I'm surprised it doesn't take us twice as long to do each issue...

I don't know how you're doing it at all. My laptop had a 1080 and it crashed every time I tried to render anything with 3 or more assets.

Bully_pup wrote:

I don't know how you're doing it at all. My laptop had a 1080 and it crashed every time I tried to render anything with 3 or more assets.

I'm lucky that I'm working with a desktop, so heat is less of an issue than it would be with a laptop.

I've learned the limitations of my rig and ways to work around it. I know that it can handle two people in a scene without a problem but adding a third is going to require some finesse.

Any asset which isn't in shot is hidden and I try to limit what's in view at any one time. Some assets are just too much (the armored car I mentioned is one) and I have to find lighter alternatives.  As a second-to-last resort, I sometimes use a plugin called Scene Optimizer (www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer) that reports on large textures and poly counts and makes it easy to reduce them. If something is far away in the scene then it's fair game to reduce its textures or poly count. As a last-last resort, I've sometimes had to combine two or more renders in post.

Actually, the real last resort is telling LFan that I can't do what it is he wants and we have to rethink the scene.  That's usually a case of coming up against the limitations of Daz.  As was mentioned in another thread, it has very limited capacity to manipulate and edit models.

Yes, it sounds like you're dialed in and making it work for you.   I just got super frustrated and bought an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 for my desktop.    
 

Is there any software some of us members could download and add are computer as some sort of off-site render rig for you guys?

I asked Bullypup the same thing a while back. Kind of a pool of off site rendering cycles. Nothing. The best I was able to do was install the software myself and try my hand at it. No way to send the prep files to someone else to run however. I've got a decent PC with a gaming 3080 card that I would have loved to let run all night to render one or a series of images. Someone invent that site or software and it may take off.

Daz Studio has Render Queue (if I remember right) where you can setup a list of render and let your PC get on with it.

Scene Optimizer is a very handy tool to use also.  You will find that there are plenty of ways you could optimize your scene to make it render quicker.

My personal workflow is to render out in layers and then composite them in Photoshop.  There are downsides to doing this, so you need to make sure what elements you need to combine per layer. For example, if you render a human figure standing next to a car individually, the car will not pick-up the shadows cast by the human. And vice-versa. You can get around this by doing a shadow pass, and then comp it together in PS.

There's a few tips and tricks you can pick-up over time working with 3D packages.

Peace.

/K

I once experimented with rendering online using an EC2 instance with Amazon since some of their machines offer extremely beefy rendering capabilities.  It's very fiddly to set up - I only managed one successful render - and more expensive than was worth it.  Things may have changed but back then there was certainly no "plug and play" option for off-loading.

It looks like these people may have done something similiar: irendering.net/iray-render-farm-service/

Honestly, for the workflow Lfan and I have at the moment, render time is not the bottleneck.  It's finding human time (mine and LFan's) that's the issue.

Looks like no one is doing much like that
There are 2 rendering projects listed in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects 
BURP and renderfarm.fi

Theres www.gpugrid.net/about.php but its for biomedical simulations

A patent for multigpu rendering but in one machine.