I may abandon IRay and revert to 3DL, however...
thrain9
Posts: 103
in The Commons
I may abandon IRay and revert to 3DL, however I have invested a lot of time and money into IRay products. Does anyone know of tutorials, guides, or products that will help me convert IRay shaders and materials to 3DL materials?
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https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/139326/irayto3delight-conversion-script
I can also give you tips on using Iray if you want to lay out what problems you may be having.
..I've pretty much done the same, Prices for GPUs that can handle a moderately busy scene (like a 1070) are ludicrously expensive right now.
If you can pick up Parris' IBL Master which works in either engine, but in 3DL is renders much faster compared to using UE and gives just as good results. It's just been updated as well to deal with a known artefact issue in 3DL default render mode.
thanks for the response, I will get back tonight in a couple hours... wife has stuff for me to do so...
To clarify>>> My problem with IRay is my render times, taking up to 15 hours to render a single HD character against a simple background with a classic 3 light setup. I actually love the results IRay gives IF I can keep my pc from locking up or crashing somewhere in the 6 to 8 hour point.
That is not something I can fix with a few tweaks and some post processiing, I am not the best at any of that, but I am no greenhorn either. I have tried a lot of different tricks, but when you are locked into CPU rendering only, you are not going to improve to a two or three hour render time with tricks. I am building a new pc in a few months, but am on a strict budget (ie. fixed income) so I have been saving for two years .... and now the nice 1070 series nVidia cards cost as much as all the other components combined! Short story, no nVidia card in the new machine, so CPU only rendering is it.
I think my only hope to continue this hobby is to revert to 3DL.
I bought IBL Master on an intro sale in december, and have been using it in IRay, but had no idea it also worked in 3DL! Got some learning to do, but at least lighting is less of an issue. Now for the textures and IRay shaders.
While I'm still a fan of 3DL, I will say that you don't need the top of the line card for Iray. I've only got a Geforce 960, for example, and while I have to resize or remove some textures to keep my machine from freezing up, I can get fairly decent render times with it. (Simple character portrait in interior set with three lights was under an hour. Probably would have been faster if I'd pulled more of the stuff that was out of the shot.)
And that is the rub while the scourge of GPU crypto mining exists, buying a relatively good GPU at a good price is nigh on impossible.. When a card that has a RRP of say $400, are now going for $800 to $900 which is beyond ridiculous, and makes one wonder what is the point..
...I'm in the same boat (on SS), Was attempting to save what I could for a 1070 as I do fairly complex scenes (and likewise am terrible at post). Then almost overnight prices streaked into the stratosphere and have stayed up there for months. I've seen some 1070s going for about the original retail price of a Titan Xp, and in one case, almost as much as a refurbished 16 GB Quadro P5000 I found at Newegg that cost 1,500$.
Sadly 3Delight isn't supported much anymore and it's only going to become less and less supported over the next few years. I know you're on a budget but my advice is to try and save up for a Nvidia card and upgrade your PC when you're able to.
...that is fine until you have a something like a large Stonemason set with a tonne of texture files to do that to (one by one) and create highly involved scenes like I do with 8 to 10 figures, lots of props and surface effects to give it a gritty "lived in " look (I just can't abide by a city street, factory floor, or back alleyway that looks clean enough to eat off of).
Thus why I picked up the Scene Optimizer, which does all the resizing for me. (there's a script in the freepository that works similarly, but it keeps breaking on me.)
...I don't take much stock in the "sky is falling" for 3DL. Outside of Daz it is an extremely powerful render engine which major film studios use and capable of some stunning results. Alas the version here in Daz has been a bit hamstrung.
That being said, there is a core of very skilled individuals her working on unlocking more features of the render engine. One of those people created the IBL Master, There is also what I refer to as a 3DL "Mega Shader" system currently in beta testing that will be forthcoming.
While it may seem a bit on the technical side, there is a thread on the forums the 3Delight Laboratory Thread devoted to tips and experimentation where some of the development work can be seen in in progress.
Here is a re-worked scene I have been using as a test bed for experimentation, currently am working on improved glass surfaces (shelter windows and the bottle).. This BTW uses IBL master and one AoA advanced distant light.
I tend to do a lot of post work, so I think you could easily do stuff in 3delight and get good results. There are some great examples of excellent promo art by artists like Oreshnick in the gallery. In fact I almost prefer his 3delight art. He really did have a master of lens flare and his art was so colorful.
...there is also a fair amount of "in render" effects and stylistic shader content for 3DL here in the store as well that will reduce the need for postwork. One of the reasons I still like 3DL.
"The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." - Mark Twain
I mean this with no disrespect or intended snarkiness. There are many here who continue to insist that 3Delight is on a steep downward trajectory, but they tend to be to Iray-only renderers (who feel compelled if not driven to always justify their Iray-preference) and PAs who will not support 3Delight as they have determined it to not be cost effective.
Even though 3Delight is not 100% supported across all DAZ products, it is still very widely supported. I'm making this obsevation from experience. I tend to buy only products that support 3Delight and I have not at any point been at a loss for products to purchase since I returned to the hobby last September. DAZ originals seem to support 3Delight about 90% on recent pro bundles and PA releases seem to be a 50/50 mix.
Honestly, I don't have a dog in this fight; I'm very likely going to adapt at some point to at least some degree of Iray rendering to whatever extent my current system can handle it. But as visually stunning as Iray can be, it is important (and fair) to note its limitations and understand why many of us continue to depend on 3Delight, especially in regard to workflow and productivity. As kyoto kid noted above, Iray can be very limiting in its scope (small scenes with few figures and elements) and a visit to Galleries tends to bear this observation out.
I just don't understand why everytime someone starts a thread about 3Delight, it has to turn into a you-know-what contest.
They’ve been talking about 3dl shader fixes for years. And while I certainly hope they happen, I wouldn’t base any immediate decisions on it.
Things to speed up Iray:
Set Render Settings/Optimization/Max Path Length to 2-4, depending.
Eliminate unneeded objects and textures. Most figures have closed mouths; you don’t need maps of teeth and so on.
Get rid of all translucency that you can! Unless you are doing close portraits, human figures honestly don’t need it. For glass and water, eliminate refraction and either use opacity or reflection.
Try this and see how it works.
Wowie said:
For the commercial pack, there will be a base preset for glass, metal and dielectric, various levels of roughness presets, some presets based of IOR for dielectrics and several metal types ie gold, silver, etc. Plus some scripts to manage specular maps (mainly copying from the first specular strength to 2nd specular 2 and coat strength.
The workflow goes something like - apply a metal shader, apply a metal type, then apply the roughness. Dielectrics and glass follow pretty much the same workflow - apply the base dielectric, apply an IOR preset and then the roughness preset.
There's also some SSS scatter/absorption profile presets, mostly from Jensen's paper. I did find some other measurements from Anders Langlands, but not really sure about them.
Last but not least, shader presets for typical character surfaces and base quick character MAT presets for Gen4, Genesis, Genesis 2, Genesis 3, and Genesis 8. These will be generic, non-mapped presets and if I made them the right way, shouldn't replace/remove existing maps. I don't have non DAZ characters, but you should be able to use the shader presets for those.
As I noted, the shader will import most settings from dsDefaultMaterial, Human Surface Shader, UberSurface and UberSurface2. The only thing it won't import is specular maps inserted into specular color. If you happen to have such materials, you will need to copy/place the map into the specular strength map first before applying the shader. Actually made a script to do just that.
The shader will likely not be compatible with iray Uber Shader and its presets.
Yes, that's correct. You will need to use an environment sphere or use an actual scene. The shader only does pure raytraced reflections. No environment maps.
It's done to avoid the coordinate spaces mess used by UE2 and also means users don't need to update to DS 4.10 beta. My go to setup is your typical DAZ sphere primitive with one of the scale axis set to -100%. Doing so means the texture is oriented properly when raytraced from within the sphere. It does mean the sphere is totally black in the viewport, but that's unavoidable since the sphere still has its normals facing outward. I did try exporting a sphere primitive and flip the normals in a modeller, but the re-imported prop always have the UV mapping mangled.
I'll try again, who knows? Maybe it was just bad luck.
I'll be including a scene subset of the setup on the commercial pack, so users could just load that instead. I do plan on making a new ambient surface though. With it, you could effectively rotate the map via a tile offset rather than rotating the sphere. Should be less hassle to work with, particularly when doing lookdev with IPR.
What else?
Oh yeah - the shader doesn't include glossiness so surfaces with it applied will have a white look in the viewport from the 1st specular. I did thought about using glossiness instead, but that means messy parameter remapping that's just not worth the effort.
Here's a draft of the readme. No pictures for now, but it should provide a fairly good idea of the features.
aweSurface 1.0 Documentation
aweSurface is a new, robust, highly optimized physically plausible shader for DAZ Studio and 3Delight employing physically based rendering (PBR) metalness / roughness workflow. Using an Über shader approach, it can be used to render materials such as dielectrics, glass and metal, or a mix of all three within the same surface zone.
Features Highlight
Physically based BRDF (Oren Nayar for diffuse, CookTorrance, Ashikhmin Shirley and GGX for specular).
Microfacet energy loss compensation.
Transmission with Beer-Lambert based absorption.
BRDF based importance sampling.
Explicit Russian roulette for next event estimation.
Raytraced subsurface scattering with forward/backward scattering via Henyey Greenstein phase function.
Physically based Fresnel for both dielectric and conductor materials.
Unified index of refraction value for both reflection and transmission.
Artist friendly metallic Fresnel based on Ole Gulbrandsen model using reflection color and edge tint to derive complex IOR.
Physically based thin film interference (iridescence).
Other important features:
Toggle switches for each lobe.
Oren Nayar diffuse based translucency with support for bleed through shadows.
Separate front/back facing side diffuse.
Two specular lobes for the base, one specular lobe for coat.
One reflection lobe for the base, one reflection lobe for coat.
Anisotropic specular and reflection (with Ashikhmin Shirley and GGX BRDF) with mappable direction controls.
Glossy Fresnel.
Can use either roughness (default) or glossiness/smoothness (with a switch).
Heavily optimized opacity handling
Imports most settings and values when converting materials from dsDefaultMaterial, HumanSurface Shader, UberSurface and UberSurface 2.
Overview
The aweSurface material consist of a base layer and a toggle-able coat layer. By default, the material is set to dielectric. To render metal, simply change Metalness to 1. Similarly for glass, change Transmission to 1. Metalness takes precedence over Transmission. Both parameters accept texture masks.
Unified Mode
For those who prefer a unified approach, Use Base Values allows most of the base layer properties to be controlled with just two controls – Base Color and Base Roughness.
As per PBR conventions, in this mode both metal and transmission color will use Base Color and any texture inserted in this slot. Likewise, specular/reflections and transmission roughness will use Base Roughness.
Reflectivity of each layer can be adjusted via each layer's respective Index of Refraction settings, though this only applies to dielectric parts of the base. By default, this is set to 1.5, which is common for glass and most dielectrics.
Classic Mode
For those who want more control, you can fine tune each section to get the material you desire. To do this, simply disable Use Base Values.
This mode allows for robust flexibility in fine tuning the shader to get the look you want. You can choose to have fully reflective or glossy specular reflections, while keeping a rough diffuse or transmission look. Vice versa, you can get fully smooth diffuse or transmission, and have rougher, less glossy specular highlights and reflection.
In this mode, Fresnel for metal will be derived from reflection color and edge tint. The resulting render will be pure metal and does not take into account Base Color or Diffuse Color. To override this, simply toggle Use Diffuse Textures switch so the shader takes into account the diffuse texture. To adjust its influence, simply use Diffuse Texture Strength until you get the look you want.
Base Layer
Diffuse (enabled by default)
Diffuse is based off Oren-Nayar BRDF, with a roughness parameter from 0 (zero) to 1 (one). A roughness of 0 (zero) will give pure Lambert diffuse.
The diffuse lobe supports translucency and double sided shading, each side with a separate color and/or texture. Translucency will allow raytraced shadow cast onto the front of the polygon to be visible on the back. Double side shading is also supported with translucency.
Translucency Shadow allows you to cast colored shadows based of the translucency color of the material. You can adjust the intensity of the translucency shadows to be weaker ( near zero will be closer to standard shadows) or stronger (1 will be fully translucent, colored shadows).
Specular (enabled by default)
By default, the specular BRDF is set to Ashikhmin Shirley. The chosen BRDF will be used by both specular lobes and reflection lobes. For models without UVs, Cook-Torrance is recommended to avoid shading artifacts with direct lighting. GGX BRDF will give highlights higher peaks and longer tails, but incurs a rather large performance hit when reflections are enabled.
Roughness have a value between 0 and 1, where increasing values will render increasingly rougher highlights.
As noted before, both specular and reflection is controlled by Fresnel via the base index of refraction. For metals, Fresnel will be derived from specular/reflection color and edge tint. For plausible materials, it is recommended to use the same value for both specular lobes.
The first specular lobe is a specular only BSDF that respond only to direct lighting. The second specular lobe is both a specular BSDF and raytraced reflections (indirect specular).
Each lobe have separate control settings so they can be controlled separately.
This arrangement allows you to mix and match between the two. You can simply turn off the specular on the 2nd lobe and rely sole on the 1st lobe for specular. Or you can disable reflections completely and rely solely on both BSDF specular lobes.
As the name implies, anisotropy controls anisotropy of each lobe. The anisotropy direction uses a color value to control the anisotropy angle/direction. Of the three channels, only the first (red) and second (green) channel is used. The default values ( 255, 0, 255 ) gives a horizontal angle while using cyan ( 0, 255, 255 ) gives a vertical angle. Values in between will be a mix between the two.
Anisotropy direction accepts maps as input, so you can control the direction with textures. It is recommended to only use models with subdivision with anisotropy. Low polygon models may display facets with very high anisotropy.
Both specular lobe and the reflection lobe is enabled by default.
Transmission
Resulting refraction is controlled with the same index of refraction value as specular and reflection. Both Transmission Distance and Transmission Color directly determine the resulting absorption color when rendered. Transmission Color will not have any effect when Transmission Distance is 0. To avoid confusion, Transmission Distance is set to 0.5 by default
Transmission Roughness controls how blurry or cloudy the refraction will be. A value of 0 (zero), which is the default, will give a clear glass look while increasing values produce a more frosted / rough glass appearance.
To render non-refracting glass, simply enable Thin Glass. The resulting material will not have refraction, but can still exhibit absorption.
Enabling Transmission Shadow will produce colored shadows based off Transmission Color.
There are no toggle for transmission because it is directly controlled by the Transmission slider in the root Base section.
SSS / Subsurface Scattering (disabled by default)
Subsurface scattering in aweSurface solely employs 3Delight raytraced based subsurface scattering. Like many other contemporary shaders, it allows anisotropic (directional) scattering via the use of Henyey Greenstein phase function. This is controllable via the Subsurface Phase slider, where 0 (zero) constitutes isotropic / neutral scattering, negative values produces more back scattering and positive values produces more forward scattering. Recommended values are between -0.75 and 0.75.
The subsurface scatter/absorption color and strength is based of values found in literature, mainly Henrik Wann Jensen's paper. By default, the values are set to Skin2 profile found in the paper.
aweSurface employs this scheme so it can import values used by preceding shaders, mainly UberSurface2. As a rule of thumb, think of scatter color as the inverse of transmission color (1 – transmission color). Those who prefer transmission color can simply toggle Scatter is Transmission switch. In this mode, the shader automatically does the conversion for you.
Subsurface Scale determines how far subsurface ray travels below the surface. Generally, result below 1 is appropriate for most materials. As the name implied, Subsurface Boost will boost the subsurface scattering effect with the chosen multiplier value.
Use Diffuse Texture with SSS is a convenience function. When enabled, subsurface scattering will take diffuse texture into account without having to insert diffuse textures into the subsurface scattering color inputs. This is enabled by default. Textures inserted into subsurface scattering color and strength will still be taken into account even when this is enabled.
Coat Layer
The coat layer is a dielectric coat with controllable thickness. By default, thickness is set to 0 (zero) to simulate infinitely thin coat. With values more than 0, Coat Transmission Color can be used to tint the base layer. Similar to Transmission Color, the color chosen directly determines the tint applied to the underlying base. Appropriately, Color Transmission Color have no effect when Thickness is set to 0 (zero).
The coat layer also doubles as a thin film coat. Simply toggle Coat Thinfilm and the shader will produce an iridescent coat. To control the appearance, you can use Coat Thinfilm Thickness and the coat's index of refraction. It is recommended to use at least an IOR value of 2 to see the result.
Coat Thinfilm Thickness is employed as a percentage of the value between 250 and 400 nm. For example, a 300 nm thin film would be 33% ( 250 nm + ( 50 / (400 – 250 ) ). This parameter mainly determines the color you will see on the coat.
Controls for the coat are similar to those found in the 2nd base specular/reflection settings, with the exception of specular/reflection color and edge tint. This is because the coat will always be dielectric.
Tiling
Tiling controls are provided and follows the scheme employed by dsDefault material. Both vertical and horizontal tiling is supported, as is a tiling multiplier and an offset value. For flexibility, the base and coat layer can be tiled independently of each other.
Bump and Displacement (enabled by default)
Both bump and displacement mapping is supported and affects both base and coat when enabled. Controls are similar to dsDefault material, with the exception being Trace Displacements is off by default. To render actual displacement, Trace Displacements needs to be enabled.
Options
Additional options are available to control specific features of aweSurface. They have been categorized into subsections – general, specular and visibility.
General Options
Use Face Forward (disabled by default)
This is a toggle-able switch between shading a single side and both sides of the polygon. This should only be enabled on infinitely thin surfaces with single side normals (for example, the planet primitive).
Use Face Forward with Reflection (disabled by default)
When this option is enabled, raytraced reflections will be enabled on both sides Only affects dielectric materials, there's no need to toggle this for metals.
Light Category
This feature allows light linking between surfaces and a single/ group of light sources. You can include or omit certain lights from affecting certain materials. By default, this is empty so surfaces honor all light in the scene.
Usage Syntax (enter these values in the Light Category field without quotes)
"" (empty field, default) - Matches all lights regardless of their category.
"name" - Matches lights that belong to category ‘name’.
"-name” - matches lights that do not belong to category ‘name’, including lights that do not belong to any category.
"*" - Matches every light that belongs to at least one category.
"-" - Matches nothing.
Example: “specular&-crowd” - All lights in the "specular" category but omit ones in the "crowd" category
Trace Group & Trace Group Membership
Similar to light categories, but applied to reflections and refractions. To omit surfaces, enter the Trace Group Membership of said surfaces in the Trace Group field of the surface that has the reflection and refraction.
Usage Syntax (enter these values in the Trace Group field without quotes)
"" (empty field, default ) - Objects which don’t belong to any group.
"group1" – Only objects which belong to group1.
"group1,group2" - Only objects which belong to group1 or group2.
"+group1" - Objects which belong to group1 or which don’t belong to any group.
"-group1" - Objects which don’t belong to group1.
Example: “metal,-dielectric” - All materials in the "metal" category but omit ones in the "dielectric" category
Max Diffuse Depth and Max Specular Depth
Sets each respective ray bounce depth limit of the material. By default, max diffuse depth is set to 3 bounces, while max specular depth is set to 16. If maximum trace depth in the renderer settings is lower, it will use the limit set in the renderer settings. Vice versa, if maximum trace depth in the renderer settings is higher, it will use the max depth set in the material.
To optimize render performance, it is highly recommended to set Max Diffuse Depth to 1 when either Transmission or Metalness is 1. This avoids shooting diffuse rays that will not be used anyway and does not contribute to the final image.
Specular Options
Multiply Specular & Reflection with Opacity (disabled by default)
As the name implies, this option honors opacity values, either the absolute value in the Opacity setting or a texture mapped to the parameter. Disabling this allows you to have opacity affect diffuse, but not specular and reflection.
Normalize Specular Map & Specular Map Strength (disabled by default)
Convenience features to deal with very low, dark specular maps. It will only work when a specular map is used. Applies to all lobe (1st specular, 2nd specular/reflection and coat specular/reflection) when enabled. Normalize Specular Map will try to normalize values in the specular map so values are closer to 1, while Specular Map Strength will boost values found in the map with the chosen multiplier.
Specular Map to Roughness and Specular Map to Roughness Factor (disabled by default)
Another set of convenience features to derive roughness values from specular maps. A factor of 0 will be the same as not enabling the feature, while 1 and 2 will scale roughness value resulting in more glossy/reflective looking material.
Glossy Fresnel (enabled by default)
Toggling this will change the roughness of the material to be more glossy/reflective near grazing angles. Affects all specular/reflection lobes when enabled.
Roughness is Glossiness (disabled by default)
Toggle this to convert the specular/reflection roughness into glossiness/smoothness. With this enabled, increasing values will result in more glossy, reflective highlights. Lower values will produce rough, wider highlights.
Trace BRDF Override (disabled by default)
When enabled, forces reflections to use Ashihkmin Shirley instead of GGX BRDF, for both the base reflection lobe and the coat reflection lobe. Useful if you like to use the GGX BSDF only specular, but do not want the performance hit of raytracing GGX reflections.
Visibility Options
As the name implies, visibility options toggles visibility of the material in certain scenarios. Toggling camera visibility on and off will make the material visible or invisible to the camera. Diffuse and occlusion visibility controls whether or not the material is visible to occlusion and indirect light / global illumination. Reflection and refraction visibility does the same thing, but determines whether or not the material will be visible in other materials raytraced reflections and refraction. Last, but not least, shadows visibility determines whether or not the material cast shadows or do not cast shadows.
Opacity Optimization
You can find this control inside the Opacity section of the shader. The slider controls the level of optimization used by the shader. Only applicable when a texture is used as an opacity mask. Defaults to 0 (zero) which employs a more relaxed optimization. A setting of 1 works best with dark and saturated colors.
Decided to combine two shader into one.
The soft shadows is calculated automatically based off the environment sphere. The scene literally is just an environment sphere, the metal/diffuse sphere and a plane. Both the metal/diffuse sphere and plane used aweSurface.
aweSurface now has shader based, global illumination. This is based of the variance based adaptive sampling GI shader I've been working on. With this enabled, you don't really need any other ambient, IBL, indirect light. Just use a primitive or an environment sphere with ambient enabled or have a scene and light it with any standard lights. You'll automatically get indirect / bounce light.
This image has been resized to fit in the page. Click to enlarge.
It also smartly disables shooting indirect / bounce rays for parts of a material that doesn't have diffuse (ie full on glass or metal). Or shoot additional needed rays for translucency.
This image has been resized to fit in the page. Click to enlarge.
I've also successfully made an environment sphere with correct orientation. Lets you actually see the environment texture in the viewport. The catch is that you need to disable 'Preview Lights' for the viewport since your scene is technically inside a solid sphere. Just remember that like omnifreaker's simpleSurface, you need to load the same texture into the diffuse color slot and ambient color slot.
This image has been resized to fit in the page. Click to enlarge.
Last but not least, a new ambient shader for the environment ball or any other ambient-only surface with tiling controls. Since it has an offset, you can actually rotate the environment texture without manually rotating the sphere. It also comes with the usual visibility flags - camera, occlusion/indirect light, reflctions/refractions and shadows.
Quote
Post edited by wowie on January 12
I've only been around for two years and in that short time I've seen a STEEP decline in 3Delight support and only getting more and more pronounced. But ok, keep thinking that 3DL will be widely supported for years and years to come. I just don't think that it's logical to think that considering the evidence. But you do you, boo. :)
...oooh, can't wait. Was hoping there would be a Glass preset.
Well folks know my stance on Iray, I use 3DL mainly because the work I do does not need uber realism.. And at the current cost of Nvidia cards going into Iray just got a whole lot more expensive..
Some PAs may be not supporting 3DL but DAZ still is as DAZ_Steve stated a couple weeks ago in this thread: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/227911/is-daz3d-going-to-phase-out-3delight
DAZ_Steve said "I can definitely tell you that Daz has no plans to phase out 3DL."
When it comes to larger scenes, 3DL is a breeze with no issues of GPU memory. It is more animation friendly with motion blur, no issues after 2 frames of rendering for some, it keeps on going. You have good displacement. And with Parris' IBL Master you can have the best of 3DL and Iray.
Card cost is a big barrier to many wanting to use Iray efficiently. 3DL can run on today's computers without issue.
It will still be in use and maybe grow when more people find out what it can really do.
I don't see why you have to give up one to use the other, both renderers are in DS using one doesn't disable the other. Use both; if you have time to let the render run then use Iray if not then use 3dl. I only have a 4GB 1050ti, I find work arounds to fit my scenes on my card, I saved for over a year just to get the card I know some people wouldn't be satisfied with it capabilities but I learn to use what I have.
Items will need their mats tweaking and in some cases completely redoing if you are going to use 3dl, and this doesn't just relate to Iray items, for a long time the mats produced were for Poser DS/3dl had no support frrom vendors, it was only with the introduction of Genesis line that most vendors started to take DS users seriously and learn to do DS 3dl mats correctly and well.
I would not buy a 1070 if you are on a budget but get a nvidia 780 6gb edition from ebay if you can find one. I would like to point out if you are carefull and patient you can get a nice Titan X (Maxwell) used on Ebay around $500 if you are patient. Speaking of patience> I was fortunate on ebay someone did not want to ship an Alienware Area 51 R2 so local pickup only! I got a working 2nd Alienware PC with a Nvidia 1080 for $400. I think patience is the answer don't be hasty and buy things when they are overpriced. Just wait and the demand will go down and so will the price. This rule applies to everything. Just because it is shiney and new >>don't be tempted to give in and buy expecially if it is overpriced.
Due to the present scalping situation with NVIDIA graphics cards, DAZ could help immensely by updating IRAY to allow rendering on more than one machine at a time....nudge, nudge, wink, wink say no more : )
I know, DAZ has an agreement with NVIDIA for IRAY, and the terms only allow for one free license, but hope springs eternal!
I agree that high-end gfx cards are not for everybody at this time. I also feel this will be a permanent situation, since it's going on for quite a long time, but it's just my feeling.
Anyway, Iray is some sort of brute-force approach to PBR so it requires a good card. But there are alternatives. For example Blender uses Cycles that is much smarter and resource friendly, you can get good results with it even with mid-level cards such as the GTX 1050TI. Furthermore Cycles works fine with ATI cards too so you have more choice.
It is a shame to renounce PBR rendering for market whims. There are alternatives to Iray and DAZ Studio.
I love both renderers, if artists provide all common textures maps, their products should render with the same quality in any renderer, CG theory still apply despite the chosen renderer.
Some 3Delight renders:
I guess it just depends on your perspective. I certainly can't disagree that Iray is the renderer of choice right now. But DAZ is clearly not abandoning 3Delight any time soon. A STEEP decline? Again, a matter of perspective. I'm pretty much a glass-half-full kinda person so I still see plenty of options here daily to meet my 3Delight needs, and from my perspective, that = "widely supported."
You imply that I'm assuming that 3Delight "will be widely supported for years and years to come" but I never made any statement to that effect. Predicting the future? Not even going to try. I'm not an either/or person, I'm going to adapt to Iray as needed. It's just not very helpful to me right now.
Even though I am mainly an Iray user, this interests me greatly as I am really a shader junkie at heart ;). And even though I have two computers with decent graphics cards that are Iray friendly, I will admit that Iray is a beast when the scene gets too large. Being able to have an alternative that makes things easier will be a welcome addition to my toolbox and I'm looking forward to this :).
Laurie
To all responders, a big thank you!!
It does seem there are more options than I thought, that even include some IRay, and the new tools coming out soon sound amazing. At least I won't have to decide between Daz or No Daz.
I have tried reduction of scene content and elimination of SSS. Didn't help me very much, but may work ok on the new machine when I finally get it built.
(my old machine is 12?? years old using a Radeon 6800 GPU and an AMD three core CPU, and 8 GB RAM, so anything new should show much improvement)
Lack of support for 3DL is not much of an issue to me, I have a lot already many can be kit-bashed, plus other vendor sites still have a lot of products available in 3DL formats. How long that lasts is anyones guess, but I believe I will be in good shape for a very long time.