Setting up/building an iray server at home for Daz Studio
RemiliaSutton
Posts: 173
in The Commons
Is there a way to build/setup an iray server in my house instead of renting one? There's gotta be. The upfront cost migh be a bit steep but at least I don't have to pay monthly fees or whatever. Has anyone done this? If so please tell me how. I'm proficient with hardware and most operating systems. I've just never taken on this type of project but I've been wanting to.
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As far as I know, there is still a monthly fee for the Iray server license, but it's almost certainly less than using a 3rd-party service.
Doesn't Jack Tomalin run an Iray Server ? You could message him through the forums. My understanding is you need a server running Windows or Linux, not sure about which CPU, how much memory or disk space but as many Nvidia GPUs as possible. There is information on the Nvidia website somewhere.
Best Wishes
Steve.
I would be willing to pay for a version of Daz that used something besides Iray. Metal would be popular.
Sadly right now it's pretty much an impossible task, profitibly.
The ginormous hurdle is going to be getting your hands on the GPUs. If you can manage to find a source to buy a bunch of RTX cards at MSRP, please PM me.
Redacted
The perks of running server in your own home..? You might as well just remote into a machine and run DS on the desktop.. rather than spefically set up an Iray server. But yes, they have a yearly license to pay.
What is Metal in this context? The only one I am aware of is an API on Macs, not a rendering engine - and certainly not soemthing that would be available to Windows users.
Daz [Studio] does use soemthing other than Iray - 3Delight, and for some purposes Filament, plus Octane if your OS supports the plug-in. Most of those don't even require you to pay.
I'm tempted to use octane since I'm planning on ditching Ultrascenery due to size of the plots but will it use more gpu vram then iray and will it render better not necessarily faster? Or will I be better adding a second gpu to my workstation. Ie a m4000 to my m6000 or if the fourth stimulus check comes (which I'm strongly thinking it's not coming) a second m6000 24gb (doubtful I'm getting that more like a m4000 and maybe a second one much much later) enough vram for iray in large scenes 24+ Gb vram (which is rare but sometimes happens once in a while but DOES happen as a 24+ vram gpu or even a $$410+ gpu is OUT OF THE QUESTION!!! I saw m4000's for then less than $400 from reliable sellers I've bought gpus from many times
Filament is not at all a good replacement for iray and forget 3delight. It looks like trash (yeah I'm a bit of a perfectionist) and doesn't support most of my assets
How much are we talking for the iray server license????
The upfront cost might be worth it
Redacted
Does octane use less vram than iray? Because if it does use less than I'll go with that. I've done octane for smaller scenes and I like the results
Based on my understanding of iray server software, the advantage of using that rather than setting up remote access within your home (or physically going between the computers) depends on your situation....
So one advantage of iray server is, first you still need to make sure all your Daz content files are on both PC's or at least accessible on the second one, but once that is done, one advantage is you can just queue render jobs to your second PC using iray server. So this is a bit easier than manually going between the two PC's
Iray Server also allows you to do "stream rendering" where you basically use the second PC as additional rendering power for your host PC (only works with specific GPU's though on your host PC) which can (potentially) speed up rendering times substantially.
With iray server you can also setup multiple PC's, should that be your home situation as a render farm in your own home, so yeah there's that too.
I see people saying it is a subscription fee. But I just checked and for me it shows up as a 300 USD one-off payment that gives you one year access to new updates for iray server and after that you still keep access to the software you just can't get the latest updates anymore after a year. At least that's how I've understood it.
I'm no iray server expert though - so take above with grain of salt it could be wrong but it is my interpretation of the available information. I've not done it myself yet as I'm still on fence about the upfront cost of the licence fee.
*EDIT*
So I've decided to try the 30 day free trial. My setup is (both devices on same home network);
Main PC where I use Daz3D Studio = i9 9900K + RTX 2080
My laptop that I used as an iRay Server = i7 something (don't remember by heart) + RTX 3070 Ti
So setup was easy, on iRay server official website there was button for free trial, put in my details and got the file. Installed iRay server ONLY on my laptop. Ensured GPU drivers up to date and started iRay Server on laptop. Got my local IP from my laptop 192.xxxxx and setup the login and password for iRay Server on the laptop
Setup a scene on Daz3D Studio on my main PC, went to the render advanced tab and entered the local IP, login details and connected to the iRay Server on my laptop. All went fine.
Then I tried two different modes on Daz3D Studio, first I tried the Streaming mode, so on my setup what happened then is that Daz rendered like you normally do without iRay Server except that my laptop GPU was used 100% and the CPU load was split between my laptop and my desktop. My desktop GPU was not utilised.
Then I tried the normal queue mode, which sends the data to the iRay Server on the laptop and just has the laptop render the full thing on its own while my PC is free to do whatever I want with it, including make new scenes, etc... For this my laptop CPU and GPU were used fully though you can change the settings on iRay Server on the laptop to only use CPU or only use GPU or use both.
In both streaming and queue mode iRay Server simply follows your entire render settings from Daz
One very very important advantage of iRay Server that I've yet to see anyone mention, you do NOT need to setup any files locally or even remote access for them on the iRay Server device!!! Daz automatically sends the data needed to the iRay Server and the iRay Server device then renders it.
So iRay Server already is very practical even for within a home network environment as you do not have to duplicate your library on the other device or even setup access to the files. Daz simply sends what the log calls "Render snapshots" to the iRay Server which has all the data iRay needs to render the image in the same way it would if you rendered it locally.
So yeah my personal feelings is that iRay Server is well worth it. I've gone ahead and bought it. The fact I can just queue up renders on another PC in my home all straight out of Daz without switching to remote access and without having to duplicate my Daz asset library and without having to setup access to my Daz asset library within my home network is just extremely useful.
In iRay Server you can set an output folder either locally or a network drive, so I made a folder on my main PC as shared folder within the network with read/write access and on laptop on iRay Server I set that up as the output folder. So my laptop renders the files from the queue and then outputs it back automatically to my main PC. Literally the best and most convenient rendering time saver I've ever found for Daz3D!!!
Now Iray Server is free ive decided to run it on the laptop. How would I set up a cluster? Working fine in standalone mode.
Tried --cluster <ip> --master on the master - but It cant see it on the main GPU server.
Hi, please tell me why the hdri map is not displayed on the Iray server when rendering.
They are there, hidden by the transparency layer. You can use a tool like photoshop to separate out the transparency layer.However, I find it easier to just copy the completed job and edit the bit depth from RGBA to RGB. The completed render will have the HDRI map and it will be visible.
Where do I get the free iray server @onis13 ???
https://www.irayplugins.com/iray-server/download.php
I'm not very computer-savvy, but I would like to set up my own render server someday when the upfront finances present themselves. In the meantime, couldn't you theoretically use your now free iray server license to send render queues to a cloud service you've rented?
Yeah. I was able to do so with an EC2 instance on AWS.
I was able to set up an iray server on an old machine I had lying around and it certainly can do the job. I wrote a Daz script that I could use to submit jobs to the server. Since Daz bundles all the required content in the request to the server, it meant I didn't need to copy or expose the content directories to the server machine. Seemed to work fine.
Some caveats, of course:
- This approach only works for iRay renders for obvious reasons
- The hardware on the render server has to be sufficient to render the scenes in a reasonable amount of time (for whatever that means in your workflow). For example, a different approach might be to start up a second instance of Daz on the same machine where you are running Studio and just use that to render. Depending on the resources you have on your Studio machine, that would be faster than sending it to the iRay server. For example, my main studio machine is maxed out on ram and is running an RTX 4090. Compared to my server machine which is running a RTX 2060. Depending on the scene size and complexity, it could make more sense to just use the second instance of Daz Studio to render the scene instead of sending it to the iray server. My point is that the iray server in and of itself needs to work in your particular workflow and limitations.
- My particular workflow involves tinkering with the scene a lot of doing test renders. If I were to beef up the resources on my iray server machine, this would probably serve my workflow well because I'm not wasting time loading the scene in the second Daz Instance or waiting too long for the iRay server to render -- I just click the button, send it to the server and let it do its thing while I continue to tinker with the scene. I can imagine I'd have a lot of renders queued up pretty quickly and could examine the older ones as the newer ones are still being rendered.
It is certainly possible to do so. I set up an iRay server on a spare machine I had (used to be my old Daz machine) and then wrote a Daz script (I tied it to an Action so I can do it on a keypress) that submits the current scene to the iRay server queue. Renders just fine. It's been a while since I ran the experiment, but may get back to it at some point to polish the script and add some more configuration options.
The limiting factor is still the hardware. My old machine has an RTX 2060, so it's not like it's going to break any records rendering the scenes. That said, if your goal is to simply have something sitting there churning away on renders while you continue to tinker with your scene, it is one option. Personally, I'm more of a mind to bulk up the hardware, replace the 2060 with one or more newer cards, on the render server machine so I can just have it render images as fast as possible. My workflow typically is to do a lot of test renders, and this scratches the itch of having the rendering happening while I can devote the full power of the machine I'm running Studio on to tinkering with the scene and setting up the next render.
I think someone mentioned using an AWS EC2 instance for the iray server and the principle is the same. Do you spend your resources on AWS or you own hardware. Both have benefits and drawbacks.