IRAY Wins Me
laststand6522732
Posts: 866
Rendering, I thought up until lately, was a simple matter of spit and polish. As soon as I realized there was more to it than that, I began to groan. I agonized about which path to follow. I've decided to get set up to use Iray.
DAZ crashes on me when I edit using the Iray display in the viewport. I am using a mere 380 cores. This video shows what 2000 cores can do. I will soon see how 2800 works out. I expect I will like it. :-) Santa Claus will be bringing me a 980ti this year, a bit early in fact. I want to do what the guy in the video did.
And, this thread talks about using a second box and a NAS to set up a network rendering machine. I knew this must be possible, now I know how. I already have more than half the parts to do this.
Rendering, which I thought was like putting a coat of wax on the car, is turning out to be fun!
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Comments
That's what this hobby is all about. Learning new things. Making pretty pictures.
I have to wonder how well the folks at nVidia understand the impact of their CUDA and iRAY efforts. I assume they have a pretty good reading on it.
I read stuff all the time (in mac forums) where folks suggest that ATI is actually the better technology, but nVidia is winning the game in research (CUDA) and for hobbiest 3d artists (at least here at DAZ). Of course, I have no idea if ATI's newest stuff really is as great as a lot of folks claim, but having a decent ATI card in my iMac doesn't do me any good. I even paid extra to upgrade to Apple's top of the line...but a few months prior to the official release of public iray support in DS...
As far as I can see, nVidia is stepping into the lead in the GPU business the way Intel took the wheel of the CPU business two dozen years ago.
Betamax/VHS...Blu Ray/HD DVD...the 'best' tech doesn't always win.
And windows...;)
I totally agree. Though, when I was young enough to spend time reading about CPUs and whatnot, I was a huge AMD fan. Of course, I was a sadly poor student during those days, so the price was very important and AMD were the underdog. Now, ATI is still the underdog (aren't they owned by AMD nowadays?) but, I don't care about that. I just want my pictures to render as quickly as possible, lol.
The old Betamax/VHS story again? I hope not.
But the best software will, ATI need to get it's act together on it's software not it's cards. We seriously need them to be completive so the prices stay down or Nvidia will charge what ever they like.
Quadro prices for an entry level 1050? I sure hope not...
...yeah, however there are a lot of us who cannot afford a state of the art GPU or building our own render farm. This is where Iray fails many of us, along with the lack of good skin and grass shaders.
Iray hasn't failed you. Life is about choices. You've made yours. Iray renders on CPU. You think that takes too long, then use 3DL.
Kyoto: 'lack of good skin shaders'?? That's just flat out not true. At all.
It takes no more work to make a good skin in Iray as it does in 3DL... granted, I think it can be hard in both.
To that end, this is a simple test. It ONLY uses the default Iray skin converter and Iray Uber applied to the hair. No post work (other than shrinking it from double size)
I think it looks pretty decent... I mean, it could look better, but for out of the box one-click skin? WAY easier than nearly every struggle I've had with 3DL. And most of the basic fixes are easy (like, I'd probably copy the face texture onto the lips to remove that way too sharp glossy difference)
3DL skins can be a nightmare. Some of them (AoA subsurface) take _forever_ to render, some of them look way too dry and nothing like real skin (US unless you adjust it JUUUUST right), and so on. Sometimes they look almost black, sometimes blown out, etc. I've had to occasionally blow light levels way up and set Diffuse Strength to 300%. Sometimes diffuse strength should be 80%.
So, yeah. Generally I've found Iray skin way easier to work with than 3DL skin. (That said, there are loads of things I can do with 3DL that are difficult or flat-out impossible in Iray)
Yeah, I could never really get 3Delite to look as good as I wanted (coming from poser using the tools that are available to help with skin shaders there). But, with Iray, it resolved my issues almost immediately. It is very hard to take two good skin shaders from different artists and render them together in the same scene and render them to look right, so there is still plenty of work to be done to get it to look best, but, I am much happier working with iray than I ever was with 3Delite.
So true.
I'll add my favourite to the list, Amiga /IBM PC.
I read years ago that the reason IBM PCs use Intel chips was because the team assigned to design the PC had just finished another project using Intel chips so they knew how to use them. At the time IBM weren't convinced that the personal computer would catch on so they didn't put much effort into developing them.
I did a bit of assembly programming on DOS PCs and I thought the memory addressing scheme on the 8086 was a real bodge job. The Motorola 68000 chips use in the Amiga and ST computers was a much better design, it was actually 32 bit internally while the 8086 was 16 bit processing with 20 bit addressing bolted on.
To go back to the original post, I still like 3Delight. I've bought a lot of special shaders, cameras and effects that only work in 3Delight so I intend to keep using it as long as I can. I was getting to like Iray a bit when my desktop died, now I'm on the laptop I'm less keen. If I manage to get the desktop going again, or save up enough for a new one, I might become more interested in it.
The only way I could ever get 3DL to look good with skin was with Wowie's kits. They still rival the better ones in Iray and Octane.
Here are two comparisons.
The first is Marius in 3DL (AoA Subsurface, what the skin comes with), then using basic skin converter in Iray. Lighting is obviously not exactly the same and each could use tweaking beyond the skin, but... just a base comparison. I think the two are in the same ballpark.
The second comparison is Marius run through Amazing Skins in 3DL. I think I went a little too far toward 'cold,' which would be fairly easy to adjust (there's a bunch of settings), and I could make the skin glossier if I wanted. (One of my mild criticisms of a lot of skin stuff, particularly in Iray, is this overwhelming tendency to think all models should be dipped in oil) The Iray image uses Iray Skin Converter.
Overall? It's always seemed to me that skin in Iray and skin in 3DL is at least roughly 'as difficult.' I tend to find it easier to get Iray skin to my satisfaction, but part of that is a lot of practice and experimentation, and 3DL skins come in such a dizzying variety of options (Daz skin shader, HSS, AoA Subsurface, Ubersurface, etc)
...I spent a fair amount of time following the Fiddling With Iray Skin Shaders thread and it just got too deep and technical for me after a while. Even using what I could glean from it, my characters still look like rubber dolls when in scenes with a lot of hard surfaces. I also do not have the resources to purchase new characters just to get Iray optimised skins.
... I have considered going back to 3DL, but most new products don't support it anymore and converting Iray shaders to 3DL is a lot tougher than the other way around. Crikey, Iray will even auto convert on the fly if you don't mind waiting a little longer, 3DL does not do that with Iray materials.
...however render with a hard surfaced prop or set and it will stand out noticeably. Again I have used a lot of the tips I picked up from the Iray "skin thread" and still the characters don't look as "real" compared to the rest of the elements in the scene..
I rarely ever had issues with AoA's SSS. You need to watch how you set the sampling, once you get it to what you want, save as a materials preset.
kyoto kid, I agree with you that Iray shines when rendering hard surface / architectural items. Incredible results there. I think in 3DL it was easier to make characters and props look like they belonged together becuase generally neither looked especially real except in the hands of the best artists. So they worked as a coherent peice of art even if they didn't always seem like a photo. But in Iray, put a "ripped from real life" bakgdrop against a character with skin that's not exceptional and the uncanny valley pops up unless you work hard. With skill, though, and effort, it's possible. Not by me, I stink. But there are artists here who blow my socks off. That was true with 3DL too, though.
I will say this, I started using DAZ Studio ten years ago and the quality of a render I can put out (even with my meager skills) in a few minutes now would have been unthinkable back then. I guess all you can do is pick the tools that you like, create the art the best you can with them, and enjoy it as best you can and know that the tools are only going to get better and better.
...as I mentioned though, part of the rub is most new stuff is coming out with only Iray shaders and there is no conversion tool or script to translate them to 3DL as there is from 3DL to Iray. it seems like 3DL is rapidly becoming the unwanted stepchild in favour of Iray. Unfortunately until they get skin textures that can match the quality of hard objects when rendered Iray sort of loses me.
Suspending disbelief is a lot easier when there is a visual continuity of all the parts involved. This is why so many RL films that are heavy with what I call "CG-Eye candy" fail for me I can see that it often doesn't match well with the RL surroundings. On the other hand, a film like A Bug's Life,Toy Story, Brave, Frozen, or Big Hero 6 I find far more successful and enjoyable as all elements have sense of visual coherence with each other.
On the time side, if I wanted to deal with renders that take a day or more, I'd go back to Reality/Lux as at least I can render in background with the scenefile/Daz programme closed to conserve processor/memory resources.
...or just stop creating the scenes I like, and then I may as well hang this whole mess up for good.
I've had way less trouble matching Iray skins with clothing and objects than 3DL, where a 3DL skin might be 100x lighter or darker or respond differently to light than clothing or tables or cars.
I'm honstly baffled by your experience, KK.
Those of you who know me know that I use 3DL extensively for my NPR work, and have only recently begun using Iray on a more regular basis. A few thoughts on my own personal experience (FWIW):
1. Conversion from a "proper" Iray material to 3DL is not trivial due to major differences in the way displacement is handled, the differences between diffuse/albedo maps, the variety of 3DL shaders out there in use, etc.
2. There is a lot of content sold that could be considered inefficient in terms of resources (VRAM) required to render. I would be pleased to see more PAs, as well as DAZ, focus a bit more on this. In the mean time, there are tools available to begin to address the issue (decimator, texture atlas, custom scripting, etc.). Also, it appears that Anagenessis may help to address this, as well as the use of procedural shaders (like Will's). Learning to minimize the resources necessary to render will be time well spent.
3. While I found Iray hard to use rendering CPU only, I would add that I was able to build and have shipped to me a modest i5 box with 32GB RAM and a 1060 with 6GB VRAM for under $1000 total. To me, this was a more than reasonable cost, and rendering in Iray is fun with it.
I consider my 3DL skills to be far more advanced than my Iray skills. I'll continue using 3DL in DS to render analysis passes for my NPR work, but I find the results I can get from Iray to be incredible. Even given my far greater experience using 3DL, I'm fairly certain that I couldn't produce this image for the Platinum Club Anniversary 2016 - Render Contest using 3DL:
Note: Less than 4GB of VRAM was used to render this @ 2400x3120, and the ability to dynamically tonemap the 32-bit EXR file was absolutely key.
- Greg
Looking better and better! Great work!
Actually except the lip gloss, it looks better than many iRay render skin texture sets.
I like using Iray Smart Converter by V3Digitimes and call it a day. If you want another choice, DZ's recent AnaGenesis thing is pretty nifty, too. Both are near one click solutions that offer numerous options. I'd say about 90% of the time one of these two items will perform a satisfactory result with very little effort. For the remaining 10% that don't, a little more effort is all that's needed. Iray Smart Converter is best Daz3d purchase I ever made.
What fails Iray for me is how bouncing light around murders your render times. Nvidia really needs to create a better solution for that. And not being able to share ram with vram is a bad call, when there other render solutions capable of doing just that. Even if it is slower, it most certainly would beat rendering in only cpu mode because you exceeded vram by a couple hundred MB. And the way it handles vram is inefficient in the first place. Iray should be able to figure out that certain textures are not visible and drop them out to save vram and calculations. Nvidia managed to improve VR performance significantly with just software. If they focused on Iray more they could do some pretty amazing things.
Well it would be nice if for example you could check mark the set & the props in the scene for video card RAM or vice versa, the characters for video card RAM, and leave the unchecked items for CPU rendering. I thought these video cards and DirectX 12 were all about more efficient parallel processing of video operations so with Windows 10 such a design should be transparent to the nVidia iRay developers. Of course prior to DirectX 12 it is more work to do similar but they could. Of course the true nature of light eliminates any mistaken believe that one can render a scene in parallel but I thought these realistic models were not quick true to nature.
...check out my comparison I posted of the girls at the bus stop scene in Iray and 3DL. In the 3DL rendered scene, the characters look like they fit perfectly with the surroundings. In the Iray version they look like rubber dolls that were photoshopped in.
I have a gallery full of Iray figures who don't look like rubber dolls. I've seen loads of cool Iray figures.
I don't think the problem is inherent to Iray.