iray vs reality
Sfariah D
Posts: 25,700
What is the difference between reality and iray? I am thinking of doing tests, but that requires reality to be installed. What has others found out?
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Reality is the "translator" for Daz Studio or Poser to Luxrender (depending on version). I used Reality/Luxrender with PoserPro2012 for several years, and while there were many bugs, I was pretty happy with it. One advantage is that Lux is free, and you can run a render on as many computers as you want at the same time, even if they have different OS's. Luxrender has a Linux version so you can build a renderfarm without Windows. Also, it works with both NVIDIA or AMD GPU's, or any CPU, as long as there is a supported OpenCL driver.
Luxrender generally renders slower than IRAY in cpu mode. There are acceleration modes built in, but these trade image quality for speed to some degree. Reality attempts to translate Firefly (Poser), 3Delight and IRAY shaders automatically, but manual tweaking is generally required. IRAY translation is the most difficult.
Unfortunately, the recent driver and opencl updates "broke" the opencl versions of luxrender, so combined CPU/GPU rendering does not work any more unless you can get the drivers rolled back. Luxrender 1.6 (the current version) will not be updated. Instead, a new team is rebooting Luxrender using the Luxcore system. http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=13485
It is anticipated (but not certain) that when the "new" Luxrender is available, that Reality will get a corresponding update. No one knows exactly when this might be.
The FB page for Reality/Luxrender is active, and the folks there are friendly and helpful. https://www.facebook.com/groups/RealityArtists/
As I build my new hardware, I plan to keep Luxrender as an option, particularly if they have an updated version.
The catch, in my experience, with using the OpenCL acceleration is that Reality doesn't properly write the output file and you have to manually edit it and load it into LuxRender for it to actually work.
Now that is very interesting! Had not heard that before.
I'd played with Reality a few years ago and got some nice renders form 3DL translations, but that was more due to me having a photography background and finding physically based lighting more intuitive. I was never that thrilled with the materials, and it certainly wasn't fast. I'd fallen out of 3D for awhile but have recently returned and finally bit the bullet on trying CPU rendering for Iray as my 5k iMac has an AMD GPU that's useless for Iray (although not for DForce, yay!) and have been really impressed with the quality I'm getting with "out of the box" Iray materials, and simple scenes are fine. I've been sketching some characters for a comic idea that I have so I've just been doing realistic renders against a coloured background and they render pretty quickly. I've been playing with sketchy a bit to see if I can nail an NPR style that I'm happy with and can manage more complex scenes in a reasonable time.
ditto on not knowing that. Do you happen to have a quick reference to the specific edits (or fixes to look for) that you use to get the Reality outputs to where the renders to work?
thanks in advance,
--ms
Paolo is currently working on an update plan for Reality & hopes to share more information in a few months time
That is good to hear - thanks!
I used Reality exclusively for a few years while I was committed to a Mac. I had a second Linux box so network rendering made the render times almost acceptable. However, the biggest drain on my time was in setting up scenes by adapting materials to work well with Reality/Lux. I would spend hours doing that and if the scenes were one-offs it was just not worth the effort. So, eventually, I bit the bullet and bought a PC with a GeForce GPU which is what I've been using for 2 years already.
Reality and Lux remain an alternaive but not while I have a working Iray compatible GPU. Another alternative will be Blender - especially with the new Eevee render engine - however, I'm guessing the same time-drain will apply when it comes to converting materials even if we have an efficient way to transfer complete scenes between DAZ Studio and Blender.
The video star killed the radio star... I was using Reality / Lux but have been using iray I find skin better. Built a monster rig with a 10 core procesor and 1080ti approx 10 months ago. I dont render as much as I used to these days...