Art for games

[Bruno]

I did a quick test last night with two area lights and it took about 3 minutes to render a 500x650 px picture. I should try it tonight with an HDRI light and reflection map instead, this is a great place to use them and might speed it up.

500x650 is a terrible size for printing, of course. Render time scales linearly with the number of pixels in a scene. So if you're printing @ 300 dpi and you want one on a 8.5"x11" page, with 0.5" margins, that's an effective area of 7.5x11x300^2 = 7,425,000px which is 22.85 times as many pixels, so will take probably about 69 minutes per picture.

So if it's 10 minutes set-up for pose and camera angle, then 69 minutes for the render, that's nearly an hour and a half per pose.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by Bruno

So if you're printing @ 300 dpi and you want one on a 8.5"x11" page, with 0.5" margins, that's an effective area of 7.5x11x300^2 = 7,425,000px which is 22.85 times as many pixels, so will take probably about 69 minutes per picture.

Yes, but if you're actually using an area of 7.5x10x300^2, that's only 6,750,000px, 20.77 times. ;-P

I print out scads of stuff around 150 dpi and haven't noticed a lack of quality. This came out quite nicely at ~195 dpi, though I did leave it in Lux for 16 hours. (Click on View Original to see it in 1:1 scale.) Last years version was only ~132 dpi, and it also looked fine printed out.

And, DAZ has an upper limit that a single length can't be longer than 9,999 px.

Originally Posted by Bruno

So if it's 10 minutes set-up for pose and camera angle, then 69 minutes for the render, that's nearly an hour and a half per pose.

Not through Reality/Lux, though. I'm sure to give it a good 8-hours for a 2 megapixel image to get about ~2k s/p.

And what kind of processor are you using? At 9x16 (5,625 x 9999px), I threw a picture in to the 3Delight renderer at 11:51 (mountain time) and I had successfully saved it to my drive by 11:56.

I mean, unless you've got some super-version of Lux that's beating out my "rendering farm" of 3 x i7s, that's going to take a day per picture. I'd dearly love to be wrong, and have you testing some sort of super-Lux.

[Bruno]

Doing it at 150dpi (and not-bad math for page size) would be only ~17 minutes per render (again, 3DLight, assuming two area lights, middling render settings).

I was rendering in 3DLight, although doing it in SmallLUX2 would also be pretty quick, and it does support HDRI lighting (not area lighting though...) That's the GPU-only one with limited shaders. They're testing integrating it into the main program, but it's not going to magically gain the ability to use RAM that's not on your video cards, or use the shaders it doesn't grok. Just let everything use the same interface and file types.

I'm thinking that full LUX would be severe overkill for the project. I also kind of want to do some trickery with shaders to put the muscles "behind" everything at full opacity, and that's basically the opposite of the LUX philosophy. I could just render it twice, once with everything else, once with muscles, and layer them, but that's not nearly as interesting. I know how I'd do it if 3DLight/Studio had one-sided polygons, but it doesn't.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Doing it at 150dpi (and not-bad math for page size) would be only ~17 minutes per render (again, 3DLight, assuming two area lights, middling render settings).

I love you, Bruno. I just had to tease you. But, I have to wonder what sort of processor you're using to get such a long render-time? With Lux, I'm using 3, i7s each with 8 gigs of RAM. My laptop is another i7, with 8 gigs, but I don't usually put it on the "farm" since it's all solid-state.

Originally Posted by Bruno

I'm thinking that full LUX would be severe overkill for the project. I also kind of want to do some trickery with shaders to put the muscles "behind" everything at full opacity, and that's basically the opposite of the LUX philosophy.

I didn't use any shaders, either, in my experiment. I might have forgotten how . . . I'll have to give it a try, later.

And, you know, there's no kill like "overkill."

Me, I'd probably just make the skin a low-refractive glass.

[Anthony]

Interesting discussion; I'd forgotten about it. I got to the point of downloading daz3d and then having my eyes glaze over as I was planning on learning how to use it (recommendations on how to avoid that stage?)

My basic scheme was just the illustrated man in various poses, with a moderate transparency so you could see 'this hits the stomach and the spine', and resolution is mostly a matter of how pretty you want it to be, for gaming purposes a resolution of 1" (so the entire picture is 72 pixels high) would probably work, though obviously higher resolution is prettier and better.

[sjard]

I have to ask, is there something special you do to render it? I usually just save as, and it takes less time than it took to click the button to save it.

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Interesting discussion; I'd forgotten about it. I got to the point of downloading daz3d and then having my eyes glaze over as I was planning on learning how to use it (recommendations on how to avoid that stage?)

Grab the "Create Firey Genesis" tutorial they've got in their free items section. (Alas, it's now "free with purchase of something else" instead of "really free".) It's a decent walkthrough for a first image, even if the image you end up making is rather minimalist.

Then ask questions, either here (Mark Skarr was very helpful to me when I was at the stage you're at now, and he still is helpful) or on the Daz3D forums. Most folks are happy to help - we still remember when we were the ones who needed the help.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by sjard

I have to ask, is there something special you do to render it? I usually just save as, and it takes less time than it took to click the button to save it.

Well Bruno and I, normally, use Reality/Lux for renders.
I've used this example a number of times, but the difference is night and day:
Daz 3Dlight Render
Reality/Lux Render
(oh, how I hate the new Photobucket UI!)

What you want to do is click Render -> Render and that'll put everything together in "high quality" mode. Me, when I use the 3Dlight engine, I usually just have it output to a PNG file, automatically.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

I love you, Bruno. I just had to tease you. But, I have to wonder what sort of processor you're using to get such a long render-time? With Lux, I'm using 3, i7s each with 8 gigs of RAM. My laptop is another i7, with 8 gigs, but I don't usually put it on the "farm" since it's all solid-state.

Well I only have one so there's my problem :D

AMD phenom II X6 1090T 3.2 GHz. Six cores, can't complain! But it's not 3 i7s. 16 GB of RAM but I don't approach that with 3DLight.

I'm also not using the default 3DLight render settings (I've improved the shading rate), and 3DLight area lights are not fast either. So it could be faster. That was just what I had lying around at the time.

[Mark Skarr]

Working on my GURPS I.S.T. game, and I developed:
Unity Station.

ETA: After some work, I made some changes to Unity Station to make it less ginormous.

(Clicking view original gives you a 1:1 image; sorry, but Photobucket has recently changed their interface to the world's most-useless interface, so I'm boycotting.)