Vendors: We all don't use Iray ...
WillowRaven
Posts: 3,787
in The Commons
It's getting frustrating looking at new products when the description and/or the promo renders don't bother to state if there are 3Delight materials or shaders. I'm not going to buy something if it's not going to work for me or if only Iray is all that's being shown. I get it's the new shiney toy, but not all of us are sold.
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This is true, and I am one who for now is sticking with G1 (for reasons that have been given time and time again), and 3Delight.
However, Progress doesn't stop, just because I've decided to stick with the old, and have to accept that at some point I will be left behind. I do agree that I wish vendors were a bit more forthcomming in there descriptions as a whole. There have been too many times where I look at a product, and I'm not sure if it'll work for me because things weren't specified. sometimes i've taken a chance and got something better than I hoped, othertimes, not so much.
Personally, I have been unimpressed with the Iray renders in the various "see-what-I-can-do" threads. Low contrast, washed out colors, sick looking skin. For now, I have zero interest in Iray. Then again, I'm still lamenting ever leaving crayons.
While I adore Iray and think it's awesome, asking vendors to provide accurate information is totally justified.
Who's left crayons? I have the mega-set ... all 152 colors :D And G1? I'm a V4/M4 girl, lol.
I'm not saying some Iray renders aren't cool, just not cool enough to make me switch from 3Delight, which has taken me years to get results I and my clients like. I'm not saying progress isn't good or going to happen whether I follow or not. But since 3Delight is still part of the Daz platform, you'd think vendors would either provide materials and/or shaders for both, or if not, at least tell us if it's only for Iray.
Information is all I'm asking for. The more I know, the more likely I am to spend.
I at least do minimal 3Delight support and pretty much only where Daz requires it (for e.g. on character skins). All my renders are done in Iray now.
There has been a lot no poser supported items as well. they use to offer dson , you don't even see that anymore with new products. so you have too fxb everything into poser, which has been hit or miss if it works or not. I'm guessing Daz is moving to Studio software proprietary content only. meaning it will require you to have Studio if you want to use the content. I seen this especially with environment content lately.
I thought it has more to do with the vendor's preference on wether they provide Poser support of their product, like Stonemason, who has come out and said he will no longer support Poser. There are still some vendors providing content for both, like Petipet and Andrey Pestryakov.
I don't care that much about textures beyond: material zones laid out and labeled sensibly (so you can change the window glass independently of the entire wall or even the entire house), reasonably high resolution texture maps.
Given those two things, it's not terribly hard to apply whatever shader types you prefer, to your taste. Maybe I take retexturing for granted, I don't know, but I don't think I've even used Iray products out of the box without tweaking.
Now, I'll grant you that large scenes with built-in lighting can be real pain; I had an older 3DL-only product, a big space hangar, and... well, trying to light the thing was a nightmare. Although I think it's a lot easier to add 3DL lighting to a scene built in Iray than the converse.
If a render for a post-Iray product says DAZ Studio but not Iray then it should be 3Delight.
Yes you are right, :) its has been the VENDORS that have choose not to support poser. But mostly because poser does not eaily support. daz content file format anymore or vice-versa
This. I usually tweak things to my liking, and I'm amazed at how many single map 1 zone items there are... I just want to change the flower color form red to blue, bur end up having to rework a map... but it is interesting at how much faster I'm getting at fixing these things...
Only problem here is that you are assuming that it is 3Delight, I've always been taught not to assume.
thats sad. used to enjoy yoo products
I agree that it needs to be clear which render engines are supported. I also think it should be somehow standardized so that people know exactly what to look for. Getting PA's on the same page remains much like hearding cats however. As far as promos go the brunt are always going to be in the engine that the artist feels they are most comfortable and satisfied with. Yes, if your supporting a different render engine you should have at least an example of how the product preforms in that engine. I've said that since people started tacking in Studio materials and then only showing Poser promos. The truth is that many PA's much prefer Iray to 3dl so they want to work in their preferred engine as much as possible. I know for some of us the simplest solution and the one least likely to lead to threads like this is to do Iray only products.
"But mostly because poser does not easily support. daz content file format anymore or vice-versa"
They would get over it if the money was there. It isn't. Daz was able to afford that support longer than most individual PA's could. Jack/Plat is still able to because he has subset of users has a higher than average percentage of Poser users. Daz and the PA's are not so much moving as being pushed by economics.
I don't care if vendors only want to support one render engine over another or one figure over another. What I care about is product descriptions and/or promos not informing potential customers what render engine is supported. I don't see what's so hard about stating 'Iray only' or '3Delight and Iray materials'. Just one sentence and maybe one render if both are supported. I don't expect everybody to support everything, but I would like to know what is supported.
we been posting this plea for months now, it goes to unlistening
I agree with this as well. and honestly, if it doesn't say I don't buy. Not that I am against using either Iray or 3Delight, I am new enough that I am going to end up learning both at the same time. But I really really hate doing a scene, get things in place to do the first test render and half of it doesn't show up because its not supported by one or the other.
How hard would it be to state: IRAY only, or whatever.
It seems less than, well I'll be kind and say polite, to ignore it.
Requiring PAs to but somewhere in the text what they've supported provided should be standard; leaving it to chance is NOT professional.
I mentioned that in a thread elsewhere, as in a reference to having seen it said and was asked to provide provenance so I'd not be willing to say that was, actually, the case.
I completely agree.
What's more, DAZ dropped the ball. They should have made this a searchable field. Just like you can check off 'Genesis 2 Female' and 'Contemporary' and so forth in the options, they should have provide a 'supported engine' field with the options of 3DeLight, Iray, etc. Then if you are searching for clothing, you could check 3DeLight and uncheck Iray, and it wouldn't even show you Iray. Or vice versa.
Agreed. The problem I have is even if the item is 3delight compatible, the materials really don't look the same in 3delight as they do in iray.
Without completely new base surface shaders, built on the 'physically plausible' model that is in the most recent releases of 3DL, that is darn near impossible to pull off.
This is why showing what the software can do is important to 3delight users. Having a texture with a shiny lip gloss that works with iray but not 3delight doesn't show what the texture can do- at least to me.
That's a characteristic of pretty much all physics based renderers. The answer is proper use of "tone mapping" algorithms. Unfortunatley, of the 12 parameters in the "Tone Mapping" tab of DAZ's IRAY render settings, only two actually control tone mapping, the "burn highlights" and "crush blacks" controls.
Believe it or not, this is not actually DAZ's fault. IRAY and LuxRender both use the original Reinhard tone mapper, which, to use the technical term, sucketh (that's why there's now Reinhard 2, 3, etc. I think he's up to 9). You need to pipe the IRAY or Lux output to a more interesting tone mapping algorithm: Gradient Domain (aka Fattal), Durand, Retina Fast, etc. There's a ton of good tone mappers in the libraries OpenCV and pfstm.
To get an idea of what some of these algorithms can do, Luminance HDR wraps up all of pfstm in a crude, but usable, GUI. Ignore the HDR creation section of the workflow, and proceed directly to tone mapping. It has, I believe, eight different algorithms, including the three I named. It is available for both actual computers and fruit-flavored computer-surrogates.
http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/
"we been posting this plea for months now, it goes to unlistening "
Maybe because only a a few PA's really read the forums avidly. Some will read them occasionaly or do a search on their or the name of a product that has just been released. Most don't read them at all. It is not that the plea is falling on deaf ears it is that the plea not anywhere that it will be heard. The people who do read it are the same forum readers that read every thread about this and agree with it. You would be astonished how many PA's only contact with anything Daz is when they submit or fix errors.
Excellent information, it validates my observations and opens a window onto a whole new world of complexity that I'm never going to enter.
Why oh why did I give up crayons? 
Why oh why would you give up crayons? I haven't.
That is very good to know, thank you. Knowing that will save time and effort trying to accomplish things that just cannot be done in the renderer, things that are best suited for postwork.
fruit-flavored computer-surrogates
thaz poptarts, yes?
I was just about to buy the Old World Knight for Genesis 2 products and thought I'd better check out what the promos where done in..
Only iRay... and I use Carrara which doesn't support it.. saved a few bucks there I guess!!