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Ok..trying to sum all this up in a nutshell. :)
Reality is a plugin to bridge/export the gap between Daz to Luxrender for rendering scenes/characters created in Daz.
Luxrender is a 'scene/character' rendering program similiar to 3Delight and Iray except it is a stand alone and not built into Daz. So if a person so chooses can render a scene and still create a new one(s) in Daz while you wait or make changes on the fly by using the Reality plugin. Which is not completely possible to do in Daz using its renderers. If time and workflow is of importance this might be a way to make it better.
Luxrender at this point is free like 3Delight and Iray. It is just a person may need to 'buy' a plugin to use it with whatever 3D platform you use like Daz, Blender, Poser, Carerra, Maya, etc. It also may be a faster, may be a less cpu/gpu resource heavy render, and may even create better images in some instances.
Reality plugin: settings or setting up of lights, cameras, textures, shaders, etc can have a learning curve, but they all can depending on the person's learning process, capabilities, and patience.
Some issues could be due to older hardware and/or software being used and/or user's limitations such as money, learning, etc.
As for myself, I will have an upgraded pc hopefully soon and so that should not cause me issues from what I can see in the hardware/software area. Except my gpu might not be beefy enough at the moment. In due time though it should. I can upgrade my memory ram from 16 Gb to 32 Gb if needed. I will have plenty of hard drive space. :)
As for my learning curve, I have no photogenic memory never have. Ha! So, will it take me a while to learn, yes probably. I am starting with 3delight just because I am on a laptop atm with not much beef for a graphics card and it was available. It was set-up originally as a business pc and upgraded with more hd space and memory.
However, from reading what people have shared here depending on my scene, I could use any one of the three renders that work best for it and learn for that specific set-up to create the best scene/images/characters. Some renders are better than others depending on what a person is aiming for outdoor, indoor, realism with skins, etc.
Cash can be an issue, it always is. In my world, if I have 2 pennies to rub together something decides to break down or wear out at the most in opportune time causing me to spend where I either had not planned or expected. lol
Ok, if I missed something please add. I am just making a list to help me make a decision.
Point well made and is completely dependant on the user, their learning capabilities, and how flexable and non-biased they are. I am like you in that I have no preconcieved notions or whatever. So learning all 3 renderers is possibly an option for me, especially if I focus on their strengths in doing my renders. :)
Like I said good discusion from my point of view and lead me to do some digging and learning to get to this point. Thanks everyone!
I had Reality in my checkout page at $3.59 at one point tonight after spotting it in one of the "Very Best of 20xx" promotions. Then it went up to $8.97 when returning to the checkout - and it had disappeared from whichever "Very Best of..." promotion it had been in. The store is very strange sometimes. Needless to say I manually calculated that the discounts were correct on my selected items before buying*. Reality didn't make the list in the end - seen too many problem reports. The price (both!) was nice but the real cost is my time time trying to learn a potentially troublesome renderer with potentially little future (what with Iray in the mix).
* Usually if the store is misbehaving when it's late, I simply empty the cart and go to bed. There's always another sale.
I seen something similiar myself in the store tonight and my cart just not as cheap. I have made up my mind to keep it in my wishlist for now and get it down the road. I have other things beckoning at me to get that would be more useful at this point. :)
That particular response was to people saying buy it if you see it for 10 to 12 dollars. If someone was to pay full price which is still cheap it's a great additional tool. Something I am working did not quite work with lux but is working better in iray and vice versa. The more tools the better. I suppose since I have a good nvidia card I could also Octane but that's a bit rich for my blood specially since I can manage with both..
It can do that but the butt hurt can be worth it. Also has potentially little future (Paddington gives DAZ a hard stare). You already know the Bryce forum is a helpful, friendly place.
$10 is a lot better than the $50 I bought it at 6 months ago. ;) (But, yay returns!)
If one pays $10 or $50 if its not for them its not worth it either way.
I had been using Reality since version 1, I stopped at 4.x because of the troubles I had and the wasted time. I decided to stick with Iray. There were just too many issues for me with Reality. One of the strangest was the sharp jagged edged shadows. Also, I have an excellent GTX 960/4 GB card and Reality just will not work with it no matter what I tried. It kept giving me all sorts of errors.
With Iray I have had no issues. I was up and running with my GTX 960, no muss or fuss. The results? Excellent:
My personal taste:
1- Iray
2- Luxus ( http://www.daz3d.com/luxus ). Another bridge to LuxRender. Bigger learning curve but more options. Cheaper than Reality, but I don`t know if it keeps updated. Fully integrated inside the DAZ Studio interface. The main difference between Luxus and Reality is that Luxus allows you full control of LuxRender options at the cost of being a bit overwhelming at first, Reality on the other hand spoon-feed you a light version of what the average user would use the most and presented in a very easy, but limited way, still, enough to produce incredible images.
3- Reality. Awesome when it was the only option around, I prefer the other two. Still, between 3Delight and Realitty, I`d pick Reality for sure. Render times may be slower, but setting a scene is faster and easier in my case and the results are infinitely better in my opinion.
A bit way off topic....lol Yep, I do on all accounts! I got Bryce cheap enough that if it sinks like the Titanic no biggie. I can still play with it and I will. I am determined! Though I would prefer if Daz (stares with Paddington) would update it for all of us new and old users. :)
Thanks for the input. I will keep this in mind. :)
now, if the reality folks here would like to point me to easy to understand "how to get the surfaces you want in Reality so you don't have to just use the latex preset" guide, I could change my tune :)
Not sure what the latex preset is but are you talking about skin settings? For me, skin is one of the things that Reality does very well.
By the way, I have the identical iMac to your specs (except RAM - I have 24GB) - I'm surprised that you can get anywhere with IRay. Mine just sits and thinks about it for hours.
I hope this quick Reality 4.2 render gives an idea. This is with a single IBL, no mesh lights. Render time just over 10 minutes so it isn't nearly as clean as it should be. You might notice the problem with jaggies - I'm assured that is being addressed in the next release. I hope the forum allows the full sized image.
Lighting in Reality is identical to lighting in a photo studio so most of the guesswork has been taken out by countless photography sites who's info is identical to what you would need (create a light source, position it, power it with wattage) so it's not like 3Delight were you can spend a while guessing what your lights will do and the size of the lights is fixed and throw out a half a dozen test renders trying to make it happen.
LuxRender will allow you to change light intensity (for group and/or individual lights) while you render, Iray will not, LuxRender supports AMD cards along with Nvidia cards, Iray does not. If you're planning to buy an Apple computer anytime soon Apple dropped all 4GB Nvidia cards from their line up so you need additional 3rd party HW and custom flashed Nvida cards (read +$$$$ for this type of stuff) if you wish to make use of the GPU rendering in Iray. LuxRender supports multiple nodes for render farming, Iray does not. Unless plan to invest in an Nvidia card (my older cuda enabled card does NOT support Iray btw) or if you want to use a newer Maxwell card (Windows 10 is needed to support Direct X 12 which apparently will not be supported in anything previous) or you want to buy a cheaper but more effective AMD card then GPU rendering will not be an option and Iray is not much faster than LuxRender when it's a CPU affair.
LuxRender also allows you to render an outdoor scene with one light "Sun", positioning it like a camera as to where you want it in the sky and it renders very quickly with no overhead so anyone who says outdoor rendering is complicated in LuxRender is going out of their way to complicate a procedure that is 4 steps that does not involve any words that have more than two syllables:
create a new distant light
name it "Sun"
change camera to "Sun"
move it around.
In Universal presets, under cloth, there's Latex. So you can make lots of fetish ware.
But if you want a silk or satin dress? you're SOL.
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In Iray, If I keep the pixel size down while setting up, I can get enough of a render to see what I need to see in 10/15 minutes, better for just an object rather than a scene. For final renders at large size, yeah, it takes overnight, and often I don't even have 1% convergence after 10 hours. For a while I had the CUDA stuff enabled and could use GPU to boost, but the computer got VERY unstable, and I began fearing I'd melt something.
Reality 4 is on sale right now at the time of this post
http://www.daz3d.com/reality-4-daz-studio-edition
and AFAICK it woks with Gen3 figures just fine. Paolo released a preset for M7 skin this week for it.
Having been an early adopter of Reality because I just could never get 3Delight to work right for me I found it to be amazingly simple and it opened the door to LuxRender which then had me pursuing 3D modeling and getting my hands dirty with Blender, otherwise I would still be on the freebie forum asking for a lot of things I can now make.
I would like to learn more about adding textures in Reality as well but haven't really made much of a concerted effort in finding the information. Its like anything else, you are going to get out of it what you put into it. Its a tool like any other, once i learn how to use it well I am sure its going to be a very useful tool as well.
There is still stuff to be fixed. If one uses more then one light in any accelerated mode with SSS ther are patterns on skin. This *should* be resolved with lux 1.6.
Been using reality for years and never even looked at the universal presets section, LOL
Hmm. Wish I had picked it up at $5 or 10 or so. For that price, it'd be worth picking up just to play with a little.
How fast does Luxrender handle a typical basic scene? (Roughly speaking, I realize it doesn't 'end' exactly)
depends on your system, the lights in the scene and the types of materials
I was trying some new dynamic outfits with the new plugin and this scene had G3F, heavy hair, 2 lights and custom surfaces and ran for 4 hrs
Liana, I'm pretty new to DAZ3d and Poser (since December), and my computer specs are similar to yours. I caught Reality 4.2 on sale and got the versions for both programs. There is a learning curve, and half the time I don't know what I'm doing. I've gotten a few things to come out well. One thing I didn't understand about Reality (until I read their support forums) was that it continues to render forever. It never stops until you tell it to. I'm still getting used to the concept that it renders light by what the camera sees, not by what your eye sees. That makes adjusting the lighting difficult, and I've ended up with a lot of grainy renders.
I think the software is a worthwhile investment, and I just saw an email that there are now free downloadable presets for G3M. There might be one for G3F as well. Their support and tutorials are fantastic, and the renders being done blow me away. I'm a long ways from being able to do Iray, so Reality is a good alternative to 3Delight, which ties up my computer for hours. Hoping to build a better computer later this year, but until then, I'll keep playing with Reality and 3Delight.
I need to try out that built-in scene the new Reality comes with -- being able to just render from the Perspective Camera in Iray along with shadow catching on an invisible ground plane have really spoiled me in Iray.
I can find no presets. I can find no material packs. I can find no recipes for settings.
The user guide doesn't help. Paolo's book doesn't. I may be missing somehting,but it's like there's no support, no user community...nothing..every Reality user is just supposed to figure out how to make different materials by themselves. And I don't really have the phyciscs knowledge of modeling fabric.
Paolo Ciccone will be chatting with us over in the Art Studio in the Reality thread I set up, it's for new and experienced users to ask questions (and have them in one place) and also to showcase the Reality renders in one location. If you haven't tried Reality, I provided some links to get you started so you will have an idea what the UI looks like. If you have questions for Paolo or comments in general, it will be 8PM Eastern time, this Friday, Feb 26th. Please help spread the word as it's so nice of him to share his time with us. The thread is already open for you renders, I'd like to have some on the thread before Friday please. (I just started with this two days ago, but I did post my first bona-fide render, other than that temple tutorial.)
This is the thread.
Fairly new to 3d reality user here, a few comments if I may...
Reality loads its own presets automatically for any given figure, if they exist. If they dont you can adjust the materials manually, which is much easier than 3delight once you take the time to figure it out, or you can apply universal presets by right clicking the material you want to edit and selecting from the drop down menu. Reality has a decent selection of ready to go materials built in so for ex converting an object to glass involves right clicking the object in reality's materials list and selecting 'glass'. And thats it. Or from there you can tweak the glass to your hearts content in the materials editor using predefined settings for glass, or you can adjust them yourself manually. Or leave it alone and hit render. So easy and flexible.
The user guide certainly helps but I too wish it was more new-to-3d friendly -- my issue is it does not offer much in the way of context/examples. It tells you how things can be edited etc but not necessarily why, so for a relatively new user like myself if was less helpful than I needed it to be but also turned out to have explanations for many things I did not understand until I knew enough to phrase the question I wanted answered.
As to support and the user community, both definitely exist, without them I would have gotten nowhere so I am just going to call BS on that one:
http://forum.runtimedna.com/forumdisplay.php?303-REALITY-3-Official-Forums
Paolo watches the reality forums and usually answers questions the same day they are asked, and the rest of the reality community is imho friendly and supportive. There are also a decent amount of user-generated tips and tricks and guides and whatnot in the forums, so for ex when I wanted to understand how to set up genesis 2 skins (or hair) in reality I found a guide (or several) in the forums and followed through the procedure, and after getting a few dozen renders under my belt can now take a new figure with no presets (for the sake of argument) and have it fully set up in the reality materials list in about 3 minutes. There may be more tweaking after but the intial setup is pretty quick now with the ability to edit multiple materials at once (fairly new feature).
Since fabric was mentioned I'll also point out that cloth is a reality material. So if I load a clothed figure, add lights and camera, render scene and dont like the default appearance of the clothes I can go to the reality materials list and see whats up. Sometimmes clothes are seen by reality as glossy material type, and I can tweak those settings (usually looking at diffuse color, glossiness, specular color, bump/disp settings, opacity), or I can convert the clothing to 'cloth' material and see how that looks, including being able to adjust the weft and weave.
Basically what Im saying is that reality is in fact pretty damn easy to use even for a noob like me. I started with 3delight and Uberenvironment like many here, and it was pretty good once I figured out how to produce decent renders (somethign one has to do with all render engines I assume, reality is no different), but once I started with reality I couldnt go back. Yes there were some odd and sometimes showstopping bugs, like reality not seeing objects in the scene or doing weird things with cameras, but most of the big nasties has been fixed, and generally even when the bugs did exist there was usually a workaround. Like deleting and undeleting an object would often cause reality to see it when previously it could not.
Anyway, I recommend checking reality out, even at the full price its a steal compared to other unbiased renderers out there. Plus with reality you can launch a render and keep working, unlike 3delight or iray. And see results that give you a good idea of the final product in minutes, sometimes seconds with simpler scenes. Many hours I have lost seeing something at the bottom of a scene that needs fixing while using 3delight, since feet are down there and any problems with people sunk into the ground or floating above etc dont show until the render is almost done.
And finally, a tip for any current reality users out there for no-muss-no-fuss placing reality mesh lights - in order to see EXACTLY where your light is aiming, go to the light parameters in daz and extend the handle. Placing reality lights always a struggle until I realized this simple trick.
Since you mentioned it, I'll point out that in 3Delight you can see your whole image much faster by hitting Progressive rendering On (in Render settings). Also, you can do spot renders of small parts of your image.
Only thing I'll say, If you are the sort of person who finds a lot of material tweaking a big part of your workflow, I would not recommend any version of reality. In 3delight and Iray I can use the aux viewport and get a very small realishtime preview as I adjust materials. In reality I would have to export out and wait for lux to load the object and textures for every single little tweak. Not the most recent version, but just that loading usually took 2-3 minutes. Lets say I have 5 objects in my scene and I adjust each material 10 times to get what I want, thats around 2 hours just waiting for lux to load everything and not even any rendering.
With 3delight and Iray, when I'm ready to adjust materials I tunr on IPR or rendered view in the aux viewport it loads in a minute or 2 and I adjust all my materials and lights in one sweep.