Sometimes you might apply a shader to something in Daz Studio but cant see what it looks like unless you render it.
Quick solution - open an auxiliary viewport and turn on ipr which will show a small preview render that also updates as you change your shader settings
Just a basic shadow catcher for Daz Studio 4.9.3 3Delight renders. Useful for adding shadows when you have an image as a background such as grass where you want a shadow cast underneath your object
Add a plane, select it and apply shadowcatch to the plane surface
Let me know if you find any problem - actually don't ...ok DO ...but I probably cant fix it :-)
Related on Daz - pw Shaders Bundle includes a Shadow catcher and much much more!
Continuing with the Amazon Web Services rendering tests
Network rendering from Daz Studio - This time it's Iray Server on AWS using...
G2.2xlarge instance - 1 GK104 GPU 4GB(from GRID K520), 8 vCPU's (from Xeon E5-2670 cpu's) 15GB Ram
C4.8xlarge instance - 36 vCPU's (from Xeon E5-2666 v3 Haswell CPU's) 60GB Ram
G2.8xlarge instance - 4 GK104 GPU 4GB (Grid K520), 32 vCPU's (from Xeon E5-2670 cpu's) 60GB Ram
P2.xlarge instance - 1 GK210 GPU 12 GB (from nvidia K80), 4vCPU's (from Xeon E5-2686v4 CPU's) 61GB Ram
P2.8xlarge instance - 8 GPU's 12 GB (from nvidia K80's), 32 vCPU's (from Xeon E5-2686v4 cpu), 488 GB Ram
The Test Scene is a Benchmark posed by SickleYield on the Daz Forum although I did not delete any spheres in these tests.
The finished render (scaled down) below...
Results...
AWS G2.2xlarge instance - 21 minutes
AWS C4.8xlarge instance - 9 minutes 55 seconds
AWS G2.8xlarge instance - 6 minutes 45 seconds (note. 1 of the 4 GPU's would not work)
AWS P2.xlarge instance - 8 minutes
AWS P2.8xlarge instance - 1 minutes 14 seconds
Note. Once the iray server was set up on the Instance, the scene took a about 4 minutes to upload from DAZ STUDIO to the server before rendering to the times above. My upload speed is around 7MB/s
An update to my AWS tests. This time Using GPU - G2.2xlarge instance.
Stop the clock! Setting up the nvidia driver to use the GPU was not pleasant and I nearly gave up. I'm not going into it here but it was very messy
My original cpu only test is here
This test was done using the same scene file in blender 2.76a - a 2000x2000 resolution basic "Aiko with hair and clothes" render..
Results/Specs
AWS G2.2xlarge Nvidia Grid (4Gb) 1,536 cuda, Xeon E5-2670 CPU, 15Gb Ram - 69 seconds
MyPc GTX760 (4gb) Core2Quad, 8GB Ram - 2 minutes
So the G2.2xlarge instance was quite a bit slower at rendering the scene than the CPU C4.8xlarge instance (25 SECONDS TO RENDER) used previously and faster, as expected, than my home pc.
As I now have windows server set up with the Nvidia Driver, my upcoming G2.8xlarge test should be better (I can now also make an AMI copy of the instance and use Spot Price on new Instances)
