Digital Art Zone

I’d say LuxRender is probably the equalizer… but just out of the box… It really seems to now be a case of 6 of this and a half dozen of that… Sometimes I will render an almost identical scene (as close as I can match) and just choose which one seems to look better. I like DS for outdoor scenes more at the moment… certain models of mine seem more natural looking in DS, but when doing interior renders I’ve been favoring Poser. I’m sure skill level also has a lot to do with it though… I’m average, at best. Often when I look at comparison promos for well prepared models, you can barely tell them apart.
But that is just an opinion.

lordvicore - 07 November 2012 01:20 PM

I’d say LuxRender is probably the equalizer…

Not really…For a few users maybe but for most it’s just another option for creating poorly done renders.

And I’ll go out and say most luxrenders don’t look good at all. Because again it goes back to learning the tools. What lux has for it is that it does light things very realistically. A lot of people use Reality/LuxRender as it is “out of the box” and don’t modify textures or really spend time on lighting.

So lux won’t bring the quality of poser/daz content up necessarily. But time with the tools will.

KaribousBoutique - 06 November 2012 11:31 PM

larsmidnatt - 06 November 2012 09:20 PM

those are actually very close in look, Very impressive. Sure there are differences but I couldn’t pull that close of a look in two different engines at all.

The time for daz fairly slow compared to Poser for certain.  Sorry for being stupid here but are those minutes or hours?

Minutes.   It was a test render, so I wanted it to render quickly.  My normal render resolutions are usually at least 2000 x 2000 or so.  That’s why time is so important to me.  A 3 minute difference in a small, simple scene equals a HUGE difference in a large, complex scene.

Oh, and I even used the same map for the HDRI light in Poser and the Uberenvironment color map, to try to keep the lighting very close.  That was the most challenging part of this for me—lighting the scenes so they were using the same types of lights, but with the same look.  UE and Poser handle the same image very differently, so intensity adjustments are required.

Kendall Sears - 06 November 2012 09:23 PM

In studio, from the surfaces tab set “Raytrace” to Off for the Hair.  That will speed the rendering greatly.  EDIT2:  If the Raytrace: Off option isn’t available, then you’ll want to apply the HSS to the hair, and then turn the raytracing off.

EDIT: Also, in the new 3DL you may find that using full raytracing to be faster than Shadow Maps in some cases.

Kendall

Turning Raytracing off for the hair means that if I’m using raytraced shadows or reflections, the hair isn’t there.  I could make the hair invisible to raytracing in Poser, too, which would also speed up its render time in exactly the same way.  For the purpose of a render comparison, I wanted to keep the options as similar as possible.  If I was creating a scene in Poser, I would not turn raytracing off for the hair, so I needed to keep it on in DS, regardless of whether it speeds up render times. I also could have turned SSS off in Poser, which would have knocked a minute off of the render, but that didn’t seem fair if I used the HSS shaders in DS.  Just wanted to keep things equal, as much as possible.

And I still really need to look more into the new 3DL. Sounds very promising! Wish I had more time to experiment.  *sigh!*

They’ve got one of the newest builds of 3DL in 4.5.1.6, 10.63, I believe…so I’m not sure how much ‘newer’ they can get.  It’s the version that fixed several problems, including a nasty raytracing one.

larsmidnatt - 07 November 2012 01:44 PM

lordvicore - 07 November 2012 01:20 PM

I’d say LuxRender is probably the equalizer…

Not really…For a few users maybe but for most it’s just another option for creating poorly done renders.

And I’ll go out and say most luxrenders don’t look good at all. Because again it goes back to learning the tools. What lux has for it is that it does light things very realistically. A lot of people use Reality/LuxRender as it is “out of the box” and don’t modify textures or really spend time on lighting.

So lux won’t bring the quality of poser/daz content up necessarily. But time with the tools will.

 

One thing, most of the time, Lux is NOT faster…but I do know of a way to get very nice Lux results in a fraction of the time…use SPPM and then edit the snot out of the lxs file to tweak it even further.  I’ve set up a tweaked SPPM profile that gives very nice results in under an hour, with comparable results being in the 2 to 4 hour range with DS and 1 to 3 hour range with the stand alone 3DL on my machine.

Materials tweaking in Lux/Reality is an absolute MUST.  By default, unless the material is specifically set to Matte, in DS, it will translate as a ‘glossy’ one in most Lux exporters.  And transparent materials will give you a Mixed mat in Lux…null/glossy.  Glossy is one of the most ‘expensive’ Lux mats around. 

Another thing, Lux is very brutal.  It WILL highlight EVERY flaw in a texture…so crappy textures aren’t going to be improved upon by Lux…they will just be more realistically rendered, which usually means ‘look like s***’, instead of just ‘bad’.  So, low res/quality textures are going to look it.

Poser Pro 2012 (x64)
• V4 with SSS
• All Poser mats
• 1 HDRI Light
• 1 Specular Spot
• 1 Spot with depth-mapped shadows
Render Settings:
• Raytracing, shadows, SSS, smooth polys, and displacement on
• 1 Raytrace bounce
• 100% Irradiance Caching
• Pixel Samples = 10
• Min Shading Rate = 0.8
TIME: 3:32

DAZ Studio 4.5 (x64) with Native 3Delight
• V4 with HSS
• All DS mats except hair and earrings
• Uberenvironment with 65% occlusion, 128 occlusion samples
• 1 Specular Spot
• 1 Spot with deep shadow map
Render Settings:
• X and Y pixel samples = 10
• 1 Raytrace bounce
• 100% Irradiance Caching
• Pixel Samples = 10
• Shading = 0.08
TIME: 6:04

I haven’t tried poser yet so I’m not sure on the Shading Rate of the Render Engine, but is the .8 you used in Poser the same as the .08 in Daz?

No, I really don’t think so.  But if you render this in DS with a 0.8 shading rate and uberenvironment, your results will look like a sandbox. I was trying to get the renders to LOOK as close as possible and compare the times, not get renders at the same times and compare the quality.  The latter would be enlightening, too, I suppose.

KaribousBoutique - 08 November 2012 12:20 AM

No, I really don’t think so.  But if you render this in DS with a 0.8 shading rate and uberenvironment, your results will look like a sandbox. I was trying to get the renders to LOOK as close as possible and compare the times, not get renders at the same times and compare the quality.  The latter would be enlightening, too, I suppose.

Check the default shading rate within the Uberenvironment settings it comes in at a very low quality 32, I think. Even at the highest quality preset its only increased to 8.
If you set it to 1 within Uberenvironment then the main shading rate can be set to .8 and still get equivalent results.

Did you use ‘Occlusion/shadows’, ‘ILT/shadows’ or ‘GI Bounce’ as the Uberenvironment environment ?