what happens generally if you render a 3Delight scene in Iray?
Drekkan
Posts: 460
Was just curious does it actually make render times slower? obviously the scene would not come out in Iray form but would it be any faster or slower than if you were to do a proper 3Delight render for it?
Post edited by Drekkan on

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It depends. It would only be faster comparatively if it has less texture maps for instance than a typical iray scene. But I don't think there is any significant speed increase on the whole, since Iray is a different rendering technique. The light calculation + the number of bounces + texture display are simply more complex, so it will take more time, all other variables being the same.
Daz Studio will automagically try to to interpret the materials and convert them to iray, which takes a bit of time. So, overal, it generally takes a bit longer to render than if you had those materials set up for iray in advance.
Results vary a lot, some surfaces may suddenly turn into emissives, other surfaces may change color or shade (though still have the appropriate main textures assigned). Transparent materials usually loose their transparency. Lights also work totally different in iray, so you may end up with a pitch black render. You have to be very aware of where your lights are placed, whether any light can actually reach your scene, and probably also crank up spotlights a few hundred times.
I believe there are some tools in the store to convert 3delight materials to iray in advance. No conversion is going to be perfect, but they may give much better results than the standard proces.
If they use one of the standard 3Delight shaders - custom shaders will not be converted.
Transparency isn't usually an issue in my experience.
DS tries to automatically convert 3DL materials to Iray if they're based on one of the supported base shaders. You can find a list of them in the first post of the DS6 evergreen thread. Conversion results will vary depending on which settings were used initially, sometimes you'll need to do an explicit conversion and adjust the materials.
If they use another base shader or a custom 3DL shader, the object will typically render solid white.
In 2019 I re-started using DS after a 12 year break. I re-started using my 3DL version of Jim Burton's Glamorous Vickie 3 in Iray. The very matt figure on the left is the Poser 4 era (2002) 3DL render settings automatically converted to Iray and is an answer to your question. The figure on the right was from me starting to tweak the automatic Uber settings, so is not an answer to the question.
The automatic conversion doesn't introduce any sub-surface scattering, normal maps or anything like that. The displacement maps.. hmm, can't remember what happened to them. Bump maps are used, but I think their strength had to be tweaked.
Could be I'm going too far back for you.
Regards,
Richard