7 ways I used to render the scenes (Patreon)

I want to share with you a story about how we got the beautiful renders you can see in FreshWomen. It’s a story about overcoming challenges with creativity.

Solution 1: cheap graphics card

At the beginning of this project, I only had a weak 6 GB graphic card, and rendering was a big problem. It would take 2 hours to complete a single render, and renders with 2 characters would not work at all.

Solution 2: RTX 2060 Super

So I bought a RTX 2060 Super ($399) for my artist, Daisuke3D, and we finally could render scenes with 2 and 3 characters and detailed backgrounds. Still, rendering was a task that blocked Daz Studio from being used for 2 hours until it completed the render.

Solution 3: Render Queue Plugin

To avoid having Daz Studio blocked, I started to use the Render Queue Plugin, where you list the scenes you want to render while you sleep. This new process allowed Daisuke3D to create the scenes during the day, and render them during the night. It helped a bit, but we only have like 8 hours of rendering per night, and so we only could get 8 renders done per day.

Solution 4: Jack Tomalin Iray Server

After more researching, I found out about the Jack Tomalin Iray Server with 4x 1080 Ti ($50/month). We uploaded our scenes to Jack’s Server, where it’s rendered in the cloud and they sent the final render back to us. At first our internet speed was very slow, so uploading a scene would take like 30 minutes with the Daz Studio blocked. After we upgraded our internet speed it was usable, with uploads taking around 3 minutes. The problem was that there were too many people using Jack’s Server, so the queue would accumulate 10 hours of waiting. Also, there were a few bugs on the renders.

Solution 5: My own Iray Server

So I made my own Iray Server. I rented a 1080 Ti GPU Server ($100/month) and bought the Iray Server License ($299/year). It worked well for like 3 weeks, but then the time to upload the renders became a huge delay in the creative process. Also, it was impossible to render animations. So I had to refund it and look for another solution.

Solution 6: RTX 3090 GPU server

I combined two previous strategies into one: Rent a dedicated RTX 3090 GPU server ($250/month), that could render 24 hours for my team, and use the Render Queue Plugin. This was the solution we used for 4 months. It was an excellent solution, and we could render a few animations on it. Yet, manually selecting scenes to be rendered daily was a chore, and the Render Queue Plugin can’t render animations.

Solution 7: Auto Render Queue Plugin

And then we got to the point we are right now. I finally learned how to write Daz Script and made my Auto Render Queue Plugin. This plugin can automatically detect which scenes need to be rendered and send the results directly into the Ren’py project folder. It can also render animations. Plus, it can render quick previews of any render in 4 minutes. Any render posed in the morning will be ready to be reviewed by the end of the day.

It took us 11 months to release Episode 1, but we developed so many systems during that time that we can now be sure that Episode 2 will take much less time to create.

Thanks for reading, guys,

Sincerely,

Oppai-Man