Reality 4.3 - DAZ Studio Edition
richardsorba
Posts: 26
in The Commons
I am a little confused by this product. I have bought some iray scenes, people, objects, etc. Can I use them and render the scene with Reality? Reality seems to have very few materials, but maybe it is not important… Oh well, I am confused about this product. Any help would be welcome :)
Richard
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Comments
Reality is 'just' a bridge to a 3rd party render engine, LuxRender. It was, I believe, the first PBR render engine directly available from Daz Studio and, like every render engine going LuxRender has it's own concept of materials and shaders. Reality does a decent job of converting a lot of stuff for use in LuxRender but as it was out before Iray it probably won't do that sterling a job on Iray shaders and will need manual intervention withinReality.
I've got Reality but I haven't used it for a while. It was created before Daz Studio had Iray. It is a plugin that alows you to use LuxRender for rendering. LuxRender is free. It is a physics based renderer like Iray but it doesn't use the same shaders as Iray, it has it's own shading system. Reality is designed to import 3Delight textures and convert them for LuxRender. I don't know how well it imports Iray textures.
Reality is a bridge from DS to Luxrender which is the renderer. Lux is unbiased very much like IRAY. The biggest difference being that IRAY is built into DS and Luxrender is not. No two renderers handle materials the same way, so there is always going to be tweaking. The principles behind IRAY shaders is very much like the ones in Lux, so tweaking them isn't that far of a stretch. I have used Reality for years and have gotten great results with it (see my DA gallery for examples) but I use IRAY pretty regularly now simply because the interactive preview window saves me a ton of time when I tweak materials. Luxrender is slightly faster for me though
...Luxrender faster? On CPU? I had the opposite experience where even after 13 - 15 hours the image in Lux was still very noisy, about where I would put Iray at about 35% - 40% convergence in comparison. .
The one advantage however is Lux renders indepndently of the Daz programme. so you don't need to keep the scene that is rendering open, or for that matter, even the Daz programme. Lux does also let you pause and resume rendering, allowing you to turn off your machine and restart it later without losing anything (not sure if that applies to a W10 auto reboot though).
I bought the 4.1 release of Reality when it was on sale a while back. I've just started messing with it. I've got to say - it's agonizingly slow compared to IRay. I'm not sure I would recommend it to anyone.
Well, thanks a lot for your answers, I am less condfued now :) !
Reality / Lux is still one of my favorite renderers , having transitioned back to Daz Studio (long time, exclusively Carrara user) , to use Genesis 3 content. Most Iray and 3Delight materials settings, Reality auto-converts for LuxRender for you.
Sure, there's the odd material you'll want or need to tweak, or even susbstitute with from Reality's own provided Library of presets (you change and apply within Reality) .
If a scene is very slow to render, and has lots of noise, it's probably the lighting you have setup, needs to be tweaked of refined a bit. (Same goes for Iray.) Kyoto Kid said it best - you can pause, save, load and resume the render at any time or stage.
The other useful option Reality / LuxRender has, once you've got the scene rendering in Lux, you can actively tweak, adjust and modify the lighting from your various lighting sources / types - IBL, Sunlight, Sky, Bulbs - point & spot. Change their brightness, color temps, strengths, as needed.
LuxRender's own "IBL Dome" you can visually see in the Daz Studio workspace, when you load an IBL or sIBL or exr, you can see where the sunlight or light sources are coming from and rotate the dome. Takes the guess-work out of it, and you don't need to start rendering a preview.
Iray's in-studio live preview render mode is nice if you have a good nvidia video card to power it, though if stuck using the cpu, even the beefiest rigs out there it bogs the computer down, and there's fair bit of lag and delay to update and re-preview the workspace. Its a handy feature but only if you have the hardware to make use of it.
Regardless of which render engine, they both produce great results if you know how to use them. I use both, and choose which is better suited pending on the project i'm working on. And its quite easy to switch back and forth, try doing a small render of the scene with each engine.
...however hasn't the Lux team finally solved GPU rendering issues? With that new 16 GB Pro Duo card coming out, that would speed up the process significantly. even for my epic scenes particularly since it has over 4,000 streaming threads as it is a dual GPU card The only way to get 16 GB from Nvidia for Iray is to plop down 2,500$ for a Quadro P5000 and I could pretty much build an entire system for that price.
The funny thing is, I initially sprang for a pair of Radeon R9 290X's 4gb models in Crossfire mode to do GPU rendering in Reality / Lux, and ended up just going back to CPU rendering. Adding a 3rd 290X for Tri-Fire mode only sped things up an extra 25%. (Nicely handles any gaming i throw at it though). Turned out I, 4gb was still not quite enough for some of the scenes so now I just default to CPU rendering.
Still love LuxRender, even though came across a couple texture sets that just doesn't translate well using the iray version, and the 3delight version lacks the normal mapping effect that the iray version does with the iray render engine...
Otherwise, yeah 99% of the time the Reality interface does a pretty good job of converting both 3delight and iray material settings to Lux.
I do see your point though, the price is really good, can't beat AMD for their video card pricing. Same reason why I went initially for the pair of R9 290X's, price of 2 was still cheaper than a single Titan at the time, and out performed a single Titan.
Also, if you're going to plop down $2500 for a Quadro P5000, you'd might as well spend double the amount , forget about the nvidia or quadros and just get yourself a dual CPU Intel Xeon workstation with a single AMD Radeon of your choosing. You'd be much farther ahead, and the render times while not quite GPU render speeds, still easily blows any single cpu based system out of the water and your also not locked into either or any type of propreitary (if we can call it that) render engine.
...actually my design for a render system is dual 2.9 GHz (3.5 GHz turbo) Sandy Bridge 8 core Xeons and 128 GB of quad channel DDR3 1600 memory. No way that will dump to swap mode.
I had problems recently with Reality finding textures when I had all of my content installed via connect and decided to delete everything and install via DIM instead. One of my favorite things with lux is the ease of setting up network render nodes. Once you start a network render it transfers all of the scene data, textures & etc. to each node so no need to manually copy things across. Plus I love being able to stop a render in progress and resume it later while not needing DS open and consuming resources all the time.
Same here I remember Mike (FSM) offering alot of tips and help in my early Reality days. I too getting results I am happy with using iray. I too have alot of cool stuff in my galleries using reality lux. One thing I don't miss is all the workarounds due to glitches in Reality back in the day. Like I said jockingly a while back the video star killed the radio star...No diss to Paulo he always did his best to offer support.
Thanks for the new comments. It seems Lux is not dead, then. But as I am a newbie with Daz3D, I would not know how to tweak llights and others things.
@richardsorba for tweaking lights one of the best features of DS is the ability to switch your viewport to look through the light and it makes it much easier to visually adjust them.
Tahnks, greymouser69. The lights baffle me.I'll make a new discussion about them.
If you are new to DAZ Studio you should become proficient with the build in renderers first, i.e. 3DL and iRay. After this you could look at 3rd party renderers like Reality/Luxrender