I had stepped away from DS for a while in favor of the latest version of Poser. I'm noticing my renders with 4.6 Pro routinely taking 4 and 5 times as long as the same scene in Poser. I'm wondering if there's some obvious step in the render setup I'm missing which is causing this. Has anyone else been experiencing extremely long render times?

Must be just you, I'm having no problems and haven't heard from anybody else having problem with renders.

Well, the program is running perfectly fine. Smooth in fact. Just when even a single character is rendered it's like running in mud.

What are your render settings?

I hadn't really paid much attention and was just using the default. I see that it's set to the turtle or best result with the slider. I'm using the Default Shader.

Well, that shouldn't be desperately slow - in fact the default shading rate, at 1.0, is a bit high. How are you lighting the scene - ray-traced shadows and occlusion with transparency are a good way to slow a render.

My experience is that render times are less in 4.6 than they were in 4.5 for the same scene and lighting.

Render times depend a lot on how you do the lighting and how much transparency is used in the scene. Some hair can slow down rendering a lot. Some other objects with a lot of transparency can slow do your render.

How are you doing lighting? What is in the scene?

Any transparency maps and I'm afraid DS just falls over, I still don't know why they haven't fixed this maybe it just the render engine they can't get around. So hair or fibermesh better off rendering in poser, in some case I found 15min poser and 6 hours in DS, so be careful what you render !

Quote - My experience is that render times are less in 4.6 than they were in 4.5 for the same scene and lighting.

Render times depend a lot on how you do the lighting and how much transparency is used in the scene. Some hair can slow down rendering a lot. Some other objects with a lot of transparency can slow do your render.

How are you doing lighting? What is in the scene?

My experiences of going from 4.5 to 4.6  match yours. Render times are noticably faster. I've also found that long, thick hair slows down the render.

Transmaps kill DS performance in my experience, and even though DS 4.6 is faster for me, a thick lush hair and 3Delight just grinds down to a snails pace.

I bame the render engine, no idea why 3Delight is so slow with transmaps.  Ugh.

Quote - Transmaps kill DS performance in my experience, and even though DS 4.6 is faster for me, a thick lush hair and 3Delight just grinds down to a snails pace.

I bame the render engine, no idea why 3Delight is so slow with transmaps.  Ugh.

It has to do with shadows, ambient occlusion and raytrace calulations.

Seems like all the render engines slow down on transmapped hair. But Omnifreaker figured out a way a while back to improve it with UberHair... http://www.omnifreaker.com/index.php?title=UberHair It has controls to disable some features to speed up renders yet still get good looking hair.

If it's not hair slowing your renders, check your settings. Perhaps something got bumped up or down. The new version of 3Delight in Studio is faster. But if you have the wrong settings, you will get slooooooow renders as before. Some of the higher quality settings are just not needed.

There are things that can really speed up renders in 3delight that aren't done because of maintaining some compatibility with the Poser Firefly engine and to keep things simpler for many users. There are things you can do with geometry which DAZ has done with Genesis that will speed things up, and you can use Texture Atlas or any photo editing software to reduce your texture sizes which will also speed things up. There are also lighting tricks like rendering a scene separately for each light used and compositing all the renders together blending your layers. Simple lighting renders much faster than complex as there are fewer calculations involved. You will get the same results by compositing each separately lit scene together as you got rendering with all the lights on but in much less time as shown in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F79cgGPEU_k

You can find various speed up tricks in the 3delight site in the manual and also there are some speed up tricks in the DAZ forums.

You don't have access to some of the settings in their manual since DAZ has the stripped down version, but many are there and at least you'll have a clearer explanation of why the settings work the way they do.

http://www.3delight.com/en/uploads/docs/3delight/3delight_52.html

And Adam's render tips at DAZ. I do believe his script works in 4.6 but he explains the settings so you can manually set them in Studio:

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/16085/