Why No Love For 3Delight?
I've been using Daz for a few months now and I love it. My question is: Does everybody using it have a render farm at home? Everything in the Daz store seems to be for iRay. Some of it works well with 3Delight, most of it produces weird results. I have a decent computer with a single Nvidia 1070, and it takes about an hour to render a single frame on iRay with a moderately complex scene. So for me, rendering an animation is out of the question. I am absolutely willing to sacrifice a little bit of quality for a LOT of time saved on rendering. Since Daz seems to be geared more towards the hobbyist, I wonder why most of its users would be willing to wait 24 hours to produce a Hollywood grade 3 minute video. Why not more love for 3Delight? I do mostly tutorial videos where illustrating something in a way that it is well understood is more important than having perfect reflections and shadows. I understand that someone doing more creative work might want the extra quality, but I'm still puzzled why users of an app geared towards the prosumer would be willing to invest so much time in rendering, especially considering the computer becomes barely usable for other intensive tasks during the render process. No disrespect to Daz or Daz users. Like I said, I love it. I just wished 3Delight would get more love.
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There is no subjective answer to the 3DL versus Iray issue so I can only give my own personal view, based on my own personal experiences.
I was never happy with the lighting in 3DL, even using the various commercial products available in the store. I find Iray lighting much easier to use.
Cheers,
Alex.
I too find Iray much more intuitive, but will note the recent advent of the Iray to 3Delight converter, and a brand new shader system for 3Delight has me intrigued.
https://www.daz3d.com/rssy-iray-to-3delight-converter-and-merchant-resource
https://www.daz3d.com/aweshading-kit-10-for-daz-studio
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/130611/show-us-your-3delight-renders/p1
I prefer 3DL but I don't do realistic renders, just cel-shaded toon. If I were doing photorealism I'd use iray.
As I mentioned in the Iray Only Content thread over in the Daz Studio forum, this is also a decision by the vendors on what will help them make the most sales. Everything about producing content requires time. Making two sets of material options probably ends up being an time investment with very little return. The number of people who would only buy a product if it has both Iray and 3Delight materials is relatively small.
That said, I wonder if there would be a market for a "3Delight Add-On" product for some things? Similar to how at first there were "Iray Add-on" products for content that originally only had 3Delight materials. If there were a way to recoup some of the time invested it may be more worth it for the content creators.
I like 3Delight but I use Iray as well. I find 3Delight faster if I stick to the basics but if I start using some of the more advanced shaders and ambient lighs then 3Delight render times can go up quite a lot.
I think you are in a minority doing animations. I do still images and I think most people posting in the forums do. For me waiting an hour or so for a still image to render isn't too bad but an hour for each frame of an animation is more than I could wait.
There are products you can buy that try to convert Iray textures to 3Delight. I've got one but I haven't had time to use it very much so i don't know how effective it is. And some PAs do include 3Delight and even Poser versions of their products. I still have Poser although I use Studio more thees days.
Thanks for the replies guys.
Has anyone tried the iRay to 3DLight converter? I've read about it briefly. I also have Poser, but I don't really get along with its 90's style interface. It's basically abandonware.
I'm doing an animated series in Iray and yes, some shots like the one that's currently rendering at home has been going for four days, but it's like 200 frames or something. When I can, I do things in layers to speed it up, but sometimes the lighting is just perfect from the environment I loaded that recreating that lighting would be too frustrating, so I prefer to just let the computer render for a few days and get the shot perfect. I also tend to limit my iterations to 2000 and for the most part you can't tell that things didn't fully render. And if there's a few digital hits or something, I just throw it in FCX and apply neat video and it clears any pixelation right up.
Iray, to me, just looks so beautiful with how realistic it can be with the right lighting, and the shadows are wonderful. Plus, I've been making films for 15 years, so the way lights work in Iray make it feel like I'm on set with an unlimited budget lol.
What I've also been doing is on my PC with the 1080ti card, I render on that, and while that's rendering I've got my iMac next to it and I'm setting up the next few shots so something can always be rendering.
Do you need a lot of patience to render Iray animations? Yes, but looking at what I've been able to get has just blown my mind.
One great thing with 3DL is it can produce realistic renders on pair with IRay using the aweSurface with scripted pathtracing, or it can be dumbed down in ways that are impossible with IRay, if you need very fast rendering:)
But I agree that DAZ could have done more updating the current 3DL implementation and unlocking to the end user features that have been there since 2010 or thereabout;) Luckily people like wowie and mustakettu85 have managed to do just this with aweSurface, so there sure is some love around for 3DL;)
Maybe they don't do 3 minutes videos? I most certainly don't and have no intent to. I did *once* a super simple animation of a couple seconds, just to try it. Otherwise, I've been doing only individual images, so one hour of rendering (the longest I ever have was 6 hours, but typically it's rather 1h30 maybe...although you'd have to add the "start a render, realize there's something terribly wrong, fix, render again, realize again there's something terribly wrong...etc...) really isn't a problem, and much less time than I spend on preparing the image itself.
Those are interesting products. Thanks.
Just want to throw in my support for 3Delight as I think there are far more people preferring this than is imagined (though actual sales might prove me wrong). It suits my workflow far better than Iray, plus I've not had any problems re lighting when producing wall art or book covers. I also think the term 'photo realism' is overworked re Iray as I rarely see images here or elsewhere online which look any more 'real' than 3DL. On the other hand I have seen fantastic Iray images which have oodles of post work in Photoshop, et al, but then ditto re 3DL.
JonnyRay's suggestion about 3DL add ons for Iray products is brilliant as I've said on another thread that I've not bought a lot of products that are Iray only which I would have done had there been 3DL presets or add ons. However I don't see the logic in "Making two sets of material options probably ends up being an time investment with very little return" as the designer is inevitably going to sell more by selling to two markets. As regards time investment, I'm also an author/self-publisher and you can bet it takes me a heck of a lot longer to write a novel or novella than it does to create even a complex environment for Daz, plus the royalties I make on books sales are crap compared to the profit margins on my wall art, but that's not going to stop me writing.
I'm actually surprised to hear that most people don't do animations with Daz. Even very simple animations like a camera pan, which despite being very simple, might take days to render in iRay. I do find the results amazing, but I just don't have the time and patience for that, and am more than willing to compromise on the quality (3Delight ain't no slouch either. I'm pretty sure anybody looking at a good 3Delight render will be delighted). That's the reason why I also use Daz exclusively for single images and do my animations in iClone. Sad though, it does have potential for animation, especially quick animations with animate2.
I'll try the addons.
Thanks.
This person claims to have plug-in named "Farm-It" that allows DAZ Studio to do farm rendering (3Delight and Iray) to a home network). It costs money but not sure how much...
http://www.pilning.net/FarmIt.pdf
Sorry don't know much about it. Just stumbled upon it today and thought I should mention it here.
PS: looks like the license is 10 UK pounds. http://www.pilning.net/Daz/dazplugins.php?action=1&input=20395956&pickplugin=3&year=2018&month=12&day=28&hour=19&minute=6
I downloaded FarmIT and having a bit of difficulty getting this to work. The documentation is sketchy and somewhat vague. A simple youtube video on installing, configuring and doing a FarmIT render with audio narration would help eliminate much of the frustration I'm having.
I'm no computer or networking newbie. I retired after doing 26+ years as a network sys admin first with Novel Netware later Novell's SUSE and later Windows Server.
Here's the thing. For doing animation without a Hollywood level renderfarm (and budget) using a game engine or something like Blender Cycles to record live is going to be much more effective, but it would require importing and rebuilding everything in the game engine (Unity/Unreal.) But there is no real way to come close to reasonable speed results otherwise.
This product sounds like a great idea and I was all excited to try it. BUT the documentation is lacking a lot of details and vague replies from GenerationX when asked add to the frustration. It also explains why the developer does not have a video showing a step by step of installing, configuring and rendering on multiple computers. Also the fact your content library must be copied to each computer or moved to a shared network folder is a BIG turn off. I have over 20 runtimes of content. The price is right but the frustration is not. I suspect if FarmIT had any true value he would be selling it on Daz3d.com.
For me I never do animations, but lately have been curious to give it a shot, BUT knowing how intensive Iray is and how a render can take and hour or two on my system depending on the scene, I can't imagine trying an animation in IRay and I have no interest whatsoever in 3Delight for several reasons, one is that I prefer unbiased rendering and the other is I have never used 3DeLight and have no idea how to get the best results out of it and lastly I have only ever seen a handful of 3DeLight renders that looked acceptable to me. I suspect if I ever get to a point that I really want to try animations, I'll finally start using Unity
Your PC is more powerful than mine.
To me, quality is much more important than quality: I prefer realizing a render per day, if it's beautiful to look at. If you learn how to optimize the scene, you can reduce render times: for your animations, try to have a fixed background rendered separately, then realize your animation, at it will take less than 10 minutes per frame. If it's still too long, reduce the textures size and improve your lighting.
I love photorealistic renders, 3Delight is obsolete for what I want to do, even if I know that many artists get a great result with it...I'm not them, and if I have to learn something, I prefer to learn it for Iray.
As they said, since most people who use Daz prefer Iray (I don't know about the Poser folk...it all seems obsolete to me, don't kill me, I'm just a noob xD), creators prefer to realize content for a bigger target. That's why, on the other hand, almost everything in our world is done in English!
My computer is powerful enough to render moderatly complex Iray scenes in an hour or two but it usually takes me several test renders to get things right. If it was taking me a day for each render I'd never get anything done. Also Iray does confuse me a bit, sometimes a scene that doesn't look very complicated takes hours to render, very occasionaly a scene I think will take an hour renders in ten minutes but I'm not often that lucky. I started with Daz Studio before Iray and I do still use 3Delight sometimes.
Poser does seem to be falling behind these days. If you've got Poser 11 you have their new renderer, Superfly, which can use nVidia GPUs for rendering. As I understand it this isn't strictly physics based but it uses a similar method. I have got Poser 11 but haven't used it much. My experiments so far seem to show Superfly is faster than Iray on my computer but I haven't learnt how to use it effectively yet, and there isn't as much support for it as there is for Iray.
Concerning render farms, the idea is good but the problem for home users is buying enough computers powerful enough to make much difference. If Daz ever considered supporting Linux I wonder if a render node on a Raspberry Pi would be any use. You can get a Raspberry Pi for around 40 pounds so most people could afford a few of them. It's a fairly powerful CPU but with only 1GB Ram and no nVidia it might not be powerful enough except for low resolution animations. And does the Daz Studio licence allow you to run 3Delight or Iray on multiple render nodes?
You can test your render selecting just a small part of the scene with the tool that has a camera and an engine, around top right.
If your PC is very powerfull, you could even see the preview in "Iray" (top right of the preview, where there's that globe). If you go to "Draw settings" you can set reduced resolution and "interactive" (not photorealistic) to lower the required resources, and that way you could have a good sense of how the render is going to be.
When it's like that, it's probably that you've passed the 8Gb of your 1070's VRAM, so your PC renders with your CPU and not with your GPU. As I said before, try to reduce the textures size with some utilities: sometimes a small ring has 8K textures, and it makes everything heavier. Again, check your lights! Iray is very light dependent.