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I know the tricks as far as speeding up renders as much as possible (hiding objects, culling cameras, restarting Daz, making custom HDRs). Still, these render times are killing the fun of doing my project. So I was wondering if using some sort of cartoon shaders or effects in Daz would speed things up. Plus I'm flirting with the idea of doing a more stylized thing rather than photorealistic.
My answer will be from a broader 3d art perspective rather than DAZ specifically...
It depends on what "cartoon" means. If it's a stylized render that still includes some sort of global illumination or raytracing (think of the lighting in Pixar-style animations) then it probably won't be appreciably faster. On the other hand if the lighting model is really simple, renders will be much faster, and can even be realtime or close enough.
Other factors can be involved in render times, but I find the lighting model used is really the biggest one. If GI/raytracing is involved, expect long render times regardless of which art style you pick.
I think a lot of the toon-style images are rendered in 3Delight or Filament so in that case much faster.
As a bit of a Toon aficionado, I've found that there are some things in iray you can do to speed things up by a lot. Here are a couple of simple things:
- Select everything in your scene at once and open the Parameters Tab. Within that tab, look for General -> Mesh Resolution. Turn down both Subdivision Resolution and Render SubD Level (Minimum) to "1". Often, it's set at 2, 3, or even higher, which unnecessarily lengthens render times. I only turn it up if I'm rendering a massive image (as in, 4k or larger), or if a mesh is 'chunky' looking to begin with. Most render image resolutions don't even break 1080p, and most newer meshes are just fine as they are.
- In the Render Settings tab, go to Editor(subtab) -> Filtering. Turn Post Denoiser Available to "On", and set Post Denoiser Start Iteration to something sane - 450 or so to start with, and maybe lower if you want a more toonish look, or if you have low lighting. The lower you go, the more toonish it will look (and the faster the render).
- Turn up your lighting! If it looks a touch too dark, you can always slap in a cube primitive, shove it off-frame (out of camera view, like up on the ceiling), and in Surfaces, turn on Emissions (meaning it now gives off light.) A brighter scene renders faster. This isn't always possible (because sometimes dark is what you're shooting for), but it does help with render speeds.
- Dumb question, but check anyway: Do you have your preferred render hardware set to GPU, and not CPU? Go to Render Settings tab, the Advanced(subtab) in it, and uncheck any checkbox that says "CPU" next to it. You do have to have an NVIDIA GPU video card, incidentally. Otherwise, iray is probably not going to work at all for you without being very slow and very tedious.
There's a lot of lesser things to tweak and do, but those are the big ones that will give you the greatest impact.
HTH!
The Oso toon shader might help for giving a more cartoon look but it likely won't save you a whole lot of time. Raytracing is time-intensive unless you throw money at it. You can speed it up if you sacrifice quality but the work will suffer for it.
If you go the route of the Oso toon shader keep in mind you'll be rendering in multiple passes and then doing compositing in Photoshop to get the toon effect. You'll also be manually replacing all of your shaders and making sure they are converted properly.
If you really want speed instead of raytracing quality I would recommend switching to something like Virt-A-Mate or Reallusion's CC/iClone and Unity instead.
Otherwise, save up for a 4070 or better and improve your render times without sacrificing too much quality. Rendering is not for the impatient.
In Unreal there are a few ways to do this, all add up to a longer render time.
You can create a post process material. Renders an additional pass after the main renderpass.
You can create an Overlay Material which is rendered on top of the first material at render time
You can create a custom material to add a toon style (these are just as exxpensive render time wise as the material is more expensive than a standard material calculations wise
My prefered option is one of the first two as you have a much more granular control over the final effect, especially if you expose all the paramaters in the materail so they can be customized in the material instances.If you want a 2d style material I have seen some interesting shaders created by setting the material to Unlit. Giving it all most a hand drawn style look.
But overall in unreal they are no faster and in most cases are actually a bit longer render time wise.
In order to get faster renders you need 2 things:
1) Use less geometry.
HDRI are a common trick (the environment and most of its light is all handled by one single special image), but you might also want to use more "cartoony" characters with cartoon hair.
They have a lot less polygons than the photorealistic ones and that will certainly speed up the rendering process by a lot.
On the flip side, you'll start to have to look for low-poly assets that fit with those models.
2) Use less complex shaders.
Complex light interactions such as caustics, particles, subsurface scattering, etc all make your render slower.
Cartoon shaders tend to have fewer "effects" and as such will definitely help, as long as they are simpler than the photorealistic ones.
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