It is a 99$ plugin that will upscale your renders in batches. Render your iray image sequences at half size and upsize in gigapixel.

Can you post before/after image for comparison (or upscaled -vs- same resolution rendered natively)?

Reallusion Certified Director / Reallusion Best Visual Award / Reallusion Certified Content Developer
See all the G-Tools Plug-Ins available for iClone here: G-Tools Plug-Ins

I wont be able to for a day or two, I'm out of town. But there is a free demo...

This is a demo shot of what Jarret is talking about .... (it's one of Gigapixel's own demo shots).
In the past, I would have been sceptical about what seems to be 'getting something for nothing' (impossible). After all, if the detail isn't in the image to start with, how on earth can you bring that 'unrecorded detail' back into existance? You can't - all you could do was sharpen the low res image to give the appearance of higher resolution. But with Gigapixel it's different. They use 'machine learning' to actually add back detail that wasn't there in the original. Interesting......  *If* the results are as good as they claim then rendering Iray scenes at say 1280 x 720 may be sufficient for upscaling to 1920 x 1080 using Gigapixel, thus offsetting Iray's inherently slow render times.




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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time!   - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1

I did acquire a license for AI Gigapixel recently and mostly happy with it. Original vs upscale screenshot might not tell much (although the result is pretty much impressive).
You have to actually render and upscale an animated sequence to really see the difference and draw conclusions.
Fine texture such as hair might have some wobbling artifacts, but for the most part AI gigapixel would be a greats solution to cut render time with Iray substantially.

Here is my test.
Originally rendered with 1280x720 and upscaled to 1920x1080 with AI Gigapixel

I was just about to ask for "video evidence" and 4u2ges delivers!

One thing CG doesn't suffer from is a lack of sharpness... I always upscale from 1280 to 1920 to save time, and let the bicubic filters take the 'edge' off.  Sharpening of any kind - even supposed "machine learning" (buzzword of the decade) will eventually show itself and will most likely be unpleasant.

Hey 4u2ges, how about uploading a new video that starts with the 1280 resized without GigaP (and no other sharpening) and then the 'after' with GigaP?

@Mark >>> " .... will eventually show itself and will most likely be unpleasant ... " <<<
Are you referring to the types of issues that 4u2ges was mentioning ie: hair having wobbling artifacts?
I'm wondering if gigapixel would be better suited for 'backgrounds' then?
But then again, if your background plate/elements (whatever) are going to be de-focussed during compositing, I'm wondering if there's any need for more than 1280 x 720 backgrounds anyway?

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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time!   - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1

How does total time compare?  Is there a time savings?
Time to render 1920x1080 in iRay
-vs-
Time to render 1280x720 in iRay + Time to upscale from 1280x720 -> 1920x1080 in Gigapixel AI?

Reallusion Certified Director / Reallusion Best Visual Award / Reallusion Certified Content Developer
See all the G-Tools Plug-Ins available for iClone here: G-Tools Plug-Ins

Hey 4u2ges, how about uploading a new video that starts with the 1280 resized without GigaP (and no other sharpening) and then the 'after' with GigaP?                               

Replaced with originally rendered sequence in Iray  (720)

It took about 15 min to upscale this sequence in AI Gigapixel (368 frames)

Render times with x2 1080ti:
500 samples with denoiser (this a bit an overkill, could have probably settled fine with 350)
1280x720:  ~ 40 sec per frame
1920x1080: ~ 82 sec per frame

Just do the math