New Product Iray Only???

Flipmode

Just a few thoughts of mine...

About 3DL not being worth the time investment for vendors.
This is likely true for vendors who started out after the Iray release and who are not super familiar with 3DL.
For me, the time investment feels rather small, certainly worth it in order to reach that customer base.
The by far biggest chunk of my work time goes into actually building the sets.
When it comes to the target platforms, for me, doing the Poser version takes the most time (this really edges on not being worth it), Iray is usually in the middle, and 3DL is the fastest version to build.
That`s likely in part due to me coming from the 3DL area, in part due to some of Iray`s disadvantages often affecting me, e.g. the lack of per-pixel displacement.

Anyway, that`s just me, both vendors and customers are fortunately free to support whatever they are happy with.

About the render quality itself ... donno, with my own sets I would fail to declare any platform better than the other.
When doing my promos, I sometimes go into shock when I realize I like a Poser render best, despite my personal dislike of the software.
Other times I prefer an Iray render, other times a 3DL render, it really varies from product to product.

Last thing I`d like to mention ... Even though a business for vendors, I think this is still more of a hobby for most customers.
In that light, fine nuances in quality or technical sophistication are probably not all that counts. There should be a fun-factor to it all, because why would anyone pick a hobby that isn`t fun to them?
Erm, I`ll leave it at that. ;)

WillowRaven

For me to buy something that doesn't include 3DL ... it has to be really impressive an worth it for me to retexture using 3DL shaders. I do know I've spent more money elsewhere as a result of fewer and fewer 3DL products. The vendors that continue to offer 3DL are always the first to get my money and promotion. 

Taoz

Misselthwaite said:

kocammy said:

Is it just me or do a lot of the new products in the Daz shop only come with Iray material presets?  I use 3Delight and don't see a lot of new product including 3Deligh material presets. Is 3Delight being squeezed out?  That would be a bummer since this is a hobby for me and I'm not real interested in putting out the $$$s for a machine with the right graphics cards to run Iray effeciently.  Is there a way to convert Iray material presets to 3Delight?  

Am I wrong about the lack of 3Delight materials available on new products?

Thanks

Cammy

You are not wrong about most new products only having iray.  Hopefully you are not right about Daz 'squeezing out' 3Delight, but I suppose only time will tell.

DAZ said not long ago that they had no plans for stop supporting 3DL.

Silent Winter

scorpio said:

Sven Dullah said:

Divamakeup said:

Oso3D said:

The problem is that any render base takes time and effort to become really familiar with it and to maintain skills.

True that! I only discovered 3D art and Daz Studio well after Iray was already established. And I've only been a PA for about a year now, as such I never learned how to work with 3DL or to create mats for 3DL and every time I've tried I've gotten extremely disappointed and frustrated at what I was seeing. Like you, I've never seen skin rendered in 3DL where I was anywhere close to happy with how it looked. 

I'm still learning a lot about Iray, but I've at least been able to get some decent results and have gotten closer to being happy with skin. If I was an artist that created environments and other non-organic objects, I'd probably be a lot less hesitant to try and delve into learning how to create 3DL mats. But since the vast majority of my products are "character-centered", it's extremely difficult for me to even consider putting in the massive amounts of time and energy into learning how to create organic materials for 3DL that would come anywhere close to being something I'd be happy with distributing to the customers. 

I agree that skins and hair are a major challenge, no matter the render engine:) And I'll take what you say as a challenge. Do note that aweSurface is still under development, lot of improvements in the latest version, and more to come, wowie has already managed to quadruple renderingspeed and improve quality (less noise) since the first version, so going in the right direction:)

@Sylvan, @Silent Winter,  @Daywalker Design and all PA:s

Making physically realistic 3DL materials using the current implementation and included shaders/lights is not easy, UE2 is old tech and doesn't really work well with any shader, if you go for realism. So I can understand how that feels. Thus, my honest opinion is: DAZ should advertise aweSurface and scripted pathtracing more! One major reason being, those who don't have those NVidia cards can make realistic renders 4 times faster than with IRay, which is a lot.

The aweSurface is free, and making presets to share for free is allowed. So I guess making presets in a commercial pack would be ok? Actually I've been thinking about making some stuff to help people getting started, as I fully well know how much time it takes to get into something like this. I've been learning aweSurface since the release last September, and there are still a number of aspects I haven't looked into yet;)

This said, everytime I look at a product and read 3DL mats included, I get happy and atleast look at the promos and read through the description, and if I have the money and think I could use it I buy it. If the description says optimized for IRay, it really has to be something I've never seen before or extraordinary in some other way for me to purchase it. I know I can convert stuff if needed, but some of the new products don't have enough material zones for it to work in a reasonable amount of time, for example an electric prop would have only one zone and rely on emissive maps for the lights or panels, such things. Or it uses a custom shader that don't translate easily...

 

L'Adair said:

Sven Dullah said:

3Delight has had physically correct pathtracing for many many years, long before IRay... it's kind of odd that the users have to rely on other end users to make that available, DAZ has not upgraded the 3DL implementation for a very long time, it's basically the same as 2010 or thereabout when I started fiddling with it:/

The first iteration of DS 4.9 included an update to 3delight version 12.0.27. I recall Iray in the 4.8 beta came out in March 2014, so 4.9 was released maybe by the end of 2014 or so. I don't remember exactly when, but I do remember there was a lot of talk about how much faster 3DL was with v4.9.

Yes you're right, it improved render times, but didn't improve render quality or introduce some new groundbreaking technology;) That's why I said it has not changed much since I started using it. It kind of baffles me that pathtracing has been around for so long, but not to DS users until last September. Well now we have it along with the dumbed down version. I love to be able to do blistering fast renders if I need to;)

From what I gathered the free awe surface is the basic, the full is for sale

https://www.daz3d.com/aweshading-kit-10-for-daz-studio

I'd be surprised if Daz push it at all its a PA product, it wouldn't really be fair to the other vendors to give priroity to just one PA, and  they never pushed the Ubersurface 2 shader when it came out so I can't really see them doing it with this.

Personally I think twice about buying a product that supports 3dl because I wonder how much  the vendor had to increase the price to make it worth it to them,  and I don't like paying for something I'll most likely not use.

   For myself it doesn't increase the price (probably because I'm not doing this for a living). I tend to charge the minimum the store (Rendo in my case) allows for the set. But at the end of the day, you can only decide if the price is worth it to you for the parts you will use. It's not like the price is higher than your other option since no non-3DL-including version is available. That's true of any product though - it's either worth it to you now, on sale, or not at all.