Render samples act weird

Yina

Hey!

I'm relatively new to DAZ and to the forum, so I hope this is the right place for my problem.

I have a specific scene, where whenever I push the "Render" Button, it just renders the scene with 1000 samples, no matter what I put in the settings. I restored the render settings by clicking "defaults" and I also tried other render settings I have available, restarting DAZ also does nothing, always the same horrific looking 1k samples. I never encountered this problem before.

I have two suspicions:
1) Somewhere there's an option which can override the samples I put in the render settings tab. (could be a product I used, and I just don't know about this option..)
2) It's just a bug and this is my life now.

Has somebody else come across this weird problem? Do you have a solution?

Richard Haseltine

Are you sure that it isn't just stopping for another reason - by default it will stop at 2 hours or 95% converged, as well as for samples. Check the log file (Help>Troubleshooting>View Log File) to see why it stopped.

Yina

Hey, thanks for the suggestion. I will look at the log as soon as I'm back at my PC. It doesn't just stop, the progressbar says it's 100% done. This takes only a couple of minutes, and observing the iterations while rendering, it's at 100% with 1000 iterations.

Richard Haseltine

That sounds as if it is reaching the target convergence (95%), since that is what the progress bar measures (the percentage of actual convergence relative to the target value, not the actual convergence ratio itself).

Yina

Hey, thanks for your help. I understand what you are saying, but I'm lacking some knowledge. 95% of what? I set the render settings to default and only bumped up max samples to 10k, like I always do without issues. How is the target conversion then around 1k? And how do I change that? I'm sorry if I sound stupid, I really don't understand it.

crosswind

Yina said:

Hey, thanks for your help. I understand what you are saying, but I'm lacking some knowledge. 95% of what? I set the render settings to default and only bumped up max samples to 10k, like I always do without issues. How is the target conversion then around 1k? And how do I change that? I'm sorry if I sound stupid, I really don't understand it.

Have you turned off  'Rendering Quality Enable' in Render Settings ?

Yina

crosswind said:

Yina said:

Hey, thanks for your help. I understand what you are saying, but I'm lacking some knowledge. 95% of what? I set the render settings to default and only bumped up max samples to 10k, like I always do without issues. How is the target conversion then around 1k? And how do I change that? I'm sorry if I sound stupid, I really don't understand it.

Have you turned off  'Rendering Quality Enable' in Render Settings ?

Ah. That was a surprisingly easy fix. Weird I never stumbled across this problem before. Thank you so, so much!

crosswind

Yina said:

crosswind said:

Yina said:

Hey, thanks for your help. I understand what you are saying, but I'm lacking some knowledge. 95% of what? I set the render settings to default and only bumped up max samples to 10k, like I always do without issues. How is the target conversion then around 1k? And how do I change that? I'm sorry if I sound stupid, I really don't understand it.

Have you turned off  'Rendering Quality Enable' in Render Settings ?

Ah. That was a surprisingly easy fix. Weird I never stumbled across this problem before. Thank you so, so much!

You're welcome. Happy Rendering! 

Richard Haseltine

Yina said:

Hey, thanks for your help. I understand what you are saying, but I'm lacking some knowledge. 95% of what? I set the render settings to default and only bumped up max samples to 10k, like I always do without issues. How is the target conversion then around 1k? And how do I change that? I'm sorry if I sound stupid, I really don't understand it.

An engine like Iray doesn't have a final, finished state - the pixel values keep getting more and more refined as it fires off new light paths to trace. Convergence measures, roughly (I don't know the full details), how stable the pixel's colour is, when it falls within a certain band it is regarded as converged ("done enough"). When the target percentage of pixels are in that range the render stops, with the Render Quality Enabled on (the actual Render Quality value determines how fussy the engine si about counting a pixel "done enough").

crosswind

It's old but could be a reference.- https://raytracing-docs.nvidia.com/iray/manual/index.html#iray_photoreal_render_mode#convergence-quality-estimate

Yina

Richard Haseltine said:

Yina said:

Hey, thanks for your help. I understand what you are saying, but I'm lacking some knowledge. 95% of what? I set the render settings to default and only bumped up max samples to 10k, like I always do without issues. How is the target conversion then around 1k? And how do I change that? I'm sorry if I sound stupid, I really don't understand it.

An engine like Iray doesn't have a final, finished state - the pixel values keep getting more and more refined as it fires off new light paths to trace. Convergence measures, roughly (I don't know the full details), how stable the pixel's colour is, when it falls within a certain band it is regarded as converged ("done enough"). When the target percentage of pixels are in that range the render stops, with the Render Quality Enabled on (the actual Render Quality value determines how fussy the engine si about counting a pixel "done enough").

Perfect, thank you so much for explaining. That makes so much sense now! :)

 

crosswind said:

It's old but could be a reference.- https://raytracing-docs.nvidia.com/iray/manual/index.html#iray_photoreal_render_mode#convergence-quality-estimate

Thanks a lot, I'll look into that. Great to have an opportunity to learn more about this. :)