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Jumping back in here :) I will point out that Iray as used with DS does indeed pause. If you hit cancel in either the render progress window or the Render pane you then get a resume button in the render pane. Note this even works if the render "finishes." In the finished case you can adjust the ending parameters and resume. (So if 7200 seconds wasn't enough, add more and resume or if 95% convergence was not enough, change it and resume.) the limitation is you can't close the window or DS in order to resume. :)
...a side note, on my screen the title in the top black banner shows as "Speed vs Fun"
Driver conflicts would tend to make that unstable.
Yeah...and most of the conflicts are OpenGL ones. Even if it didn't make the whole system unstable, it probably would make things that depend on OpenGL unstable.
I was told it was not a good idea I already have $400.00 set aside in case I do decide to swap out my ATI.
I'm sticking with Reality 4 and LuxRender. Tried iRay and...meh. I have a VERY (like last week) up-to-date NVIDIA system with very high-end video cards. Still much prefer Reality and Lux. Slower render but MUCH better control and way better quality, especially in regards to lifelike skin renders and lighting. The film control is a true boon. I have yet to run into any issues with Reality 4 on DAZ 4.8 and am just, well, loving it. Another great thing about LuxRender is I can offload renders by collecting the textures to another machine and keep working.
Paolo cheating customers? No way. Every time I have a question, he replies within minutes. Super responsive and always helpful.
Who said anything about cheating?
Nobody.
I was saying he was being overly optimistic on projecting a date of 'very soon'.
It's now almost two months since that exchange and Luxrender is STILL at 1.5RC1. There is at least one more RC release BEFORE 1.5 goes live. Hell, there hasn't been a 'weekly' in almost 6 weeks!
Don't expect anything in the way of a 'production' release BEFORE October...
Which is fine by me. I'll gladly wait. Not like it's a life or death thing, it's a software thing. As an engineer, I know there are usually delays.
MJC guess you were right. Perhaps the announcement was made in light of iray being released who knows. I may try upgrading to win 10 on my laptop this week wish me luck..
I too am putting up with the render times for now and will make my final decision once 4.1 is released. I am used to setting the materials and getting pleasing results with Reality lux.. All the positive assets Fuengiroa mentions. Mind you having said that I am sure iray will evolve...
I've been using Luxrender since well before the 1.0 release (0.4 or somehting)...since Tofusan's first exporter. and in Blender. I'm very familiar with how slow the releases can be...and I know how hard they've been working on it.
I use both Luxrender and Iray,
I love them both.. Iray has far superior GPU capability and Lux has far superior scene adjustment and CPU capability, especially with its ability to network render..
But its important to remember that Reality and Lux have been in development and active in this market segment for nearly FIVE years..
Iray was only impemented back in March.???, so FIVE months of use and development in the market place.!!!.
S.K.
p.s. I also use Octane... ;)
Iray was implemented in Autodesk as far back as 2010 and it's developed by a team of engineers at Nvidia. DS has a fraction of the user base Autodesk/Maya has. Iray is hardly the new dog in the fight, not by a long shot.
That was exactly my point Spooky. ;)
Although Iray has been about since 2010..it has not been In the Hobbyist market sector very long.., not as long as Luxrender with Reality.
Anyway I like them all, and look forward to DAZ3D's further development of Iray within Studio.....(hair/fur) hint hint.!!!!
S.K.
I think that was a referral to implenetation - both Luxus and Reality are UI for Luxrender. The same, DS is the UI for Iray. As such, it has only been around for a few months, compared to many years for the other two.
My 2cts about strategic choice.
I have both poser and daz, I have both reality and iray.
Knowing this kind of industry for a (very) long time, I always do my choice, not only for the product itself but the future of it and its industry. Wich means: my preference went to firefly render engine in poser but the productivity, the ease of use etc...went by far to daz. I choose daz. I learnt it. plaid with it a lot. then I tried reality. realy slow. The supruprise move to iray was for me a real big deal anoucement. Not because of the possibilities of the soft itself but because it was NVidia+adobe. strategic move for daz. I'm pretty sure that the future development of daz3D will be centered around iray and industry standarts. (g3f is kinda first step).
So, even if today reality is better than iray, there is no way it can compete in the long term run. My bet is: all in on iray. (especialy with the Physics add on, the MDL, etc...). So, I invest all my time learning iray and it goes well. The instant preview, the realtime render are a big plus in the learning curve and the productivity. The twick of parameters allow to get many type of rendering (shaders etc..).
And for conclusion: not only my 2cts but I invested on a nice nvidia 980Ti : real time preview, render in a blink of an eye, shader changing in real time, etc...
I can't go back. ;-)
(and by no way in this post I affirm that one render engine is beter than the other)
These are all the things I did in Lux while this was rendering, that you can't do in Iray:
* Tone Mapping > Kernal: Switched to Linear and clicked Estimate Settings - Estimate Settings tells Lux to automatically calculate the most ideal Film ISO, Shutter Speed, and f/Stop based on lighting conditions in the scene. This is especially useful for novices like me who have no experience with manually adjusting camera settings for taking real-world photographs. You can still tweak them afteward, to fulfill your artistic vision, but the function serves as a really nice learning aid.
* Light Groups: Tweaked the Gain on the Mesh Light until I found a setting I was happy with. It's set to 0.80.
* Film Response (A list of real-world camera film presets used to simulate their effects): I used Agfacolor Futura 400
* Lense Effects > Vignetting: Enabled (Darkens the areas surrounding the main subject to put more focus on the subject. I used a textured backdrop to compliment the effect)
* Switched between Lux and DAZ to experiment with various changes in the scene.
* Loaded Lux after recovering from a power outage and continued the render. I don't know if divine intervention was involved, but the power went off about 30 minutes into this render. My initial thought was, "WTF," followed by, "Oh, yeah, that's another thing you can't do in Iray". After rebooting my PC, I loaded Lux by itself and continued the render.
...again my big issue with Lux is the glacial render times. While it doesn't put as much of a heat load on the CPU as Iray (most likely as I also need to keep the Daz application open just as with 3DL), it still does so over a much longer time (about twelve fold on average in my experience). When I can get a clean render in a matter of a few hours compared to a day or more, that still translates less overall heat stress on the CPU.
I know there is to be the x10 speed boost with Reality 4.1 and lux 1.5 but even after watching the demo, I'm still not satisfied that some form of compromise hasn't been made since the tests were restricted to a limited amount of iterations and not allowed to converge to a full 100%.. It would also have been nice to see the CPU temps during the tests to see if the speed boost caused any increase in heat generation.
With Lux abandoning hybrid GPU/CPU rendering I'd be in the same boat of having to purchase an R9 290X (the Sapphire 8 GB model) to perform full CPU rendering (if indeed the bugs have been worked out of the process). The only render engine that has a good working hybrid mode is Octane, however the cost of the licence and plugin are more than I can afford.
It's only been a bit over five months since Iray was introduced in Daz. Even with a smaller shader library than say 3DS, the results are still remarkable True, integrating it into the programme has the downside of not being able to render in background but on the other side of the coin, I find working within the Daz UI makes it simpler to learn as I don't have to deal with swapping between two different UIs and essentially two different applications.
With Carrara there is the test version of the Lux Core render engine which i dind it speeds up rendering somewhat.
I don't mind the render times at all, not if it means getting something as perfect as it can be. No matter what I try at this point in time there is no way I can come close in iRay to what I can achieve with Reality/Lux. Not even close. Maybe iRay will catch up to LuxRender, maybe it won't. If it does, I'll take another look at it, but it will take an awful lot to get me to move from that which I am comfortable.
All about personal preference, I guess. :)
I think this will be make or break for Reality. I know that I will most likely be moving away from it if it does not live up to the hype. I have yet to dabble with iray save for just firing up a render with default materials but I know it is there if need it and am in agrement with Bois that it will evolve...
...I have an old (first generation) i7 that I really don't wish to overload with a rendering process that lasts for days on end. If it goes out, I'm done with 3D for quite a while as I cannot afford to replace it. Even if I could it would have to be a used one with "mileage" already on it as my MB has an LGA 1366 socket. I find Iray easier to understand than scripted 3DL (not into coding and that is where 3DL's real power is). I am taking the approach that this is still new for our (the hobbyist) sector and we have only seen the beginning. Yes Lux may produce more "realistic" results in certain respects, but cooking my CPU to death is not worth it..
The thing to remember about Luxrender (and by association, Reality and Luxus...any exporter) is that they are NOT a big multi-billion dollar operation. Their timetable and development schedule just don't have the manhours/warm bodies that something like Iray does. About the only thing that does have comparable people/resources is Pixar...not even 3Delight has the resources Iray does.
And like it or not, Iray in Studio is only a subset of the complete Iray, just like 3Delight. (maybe a more complete subset, but still a subset). Luxrender, on the other hand is complete...it's the exporters that need to catch up. And right now, Luxrender is going through a major feature revamp...more, better, etc. It's just going to take time. Luxrender is committed to the long haul...so yes, they are adding features that will speed render times up, but it's still several weeks to months away.
...well, I have not been impressed after 12 -15 hours of rendering in Lux when I still see a lot of noise and fireflies that in comparison to Iray would translate to the process being maybe 35 - 40% converged. My longest Iray render was just over five hours. My longest 3DL/UE render was 16.5 hours. I have yet to let a Reality/Lux render get to the point that I could call it complete" as I don't care to have my system tied up for more than a day. I don't have the resources (or space) for a render farm that I can shove the process off to so I can get on with other projects while it's cooking. With Iray I can get excellent results overnight on the system I currently have. .
Aw, ya panzy... call me when you've rendered something for 800 hours, and then we'll talk. ;)
There are things you can do to decrease render times in LuxRender, but even so, without a powerful computer, you'll be waiting. 10 to 15 hours isn't long enough for an image, nowhere near, when you consider that a great pic usually has around 10 kS/p. As for the noise and fireflies, I got those a lot regardless the number of hours a render was going until I learned how to properly set up lighting and a scene as a whole. Made a HUGE difference.
LOL Matt my times have tripled from R2 due to SSS on skin..
...if it took that long, I'd get nothing else done for over a month, that is provided my system didn't go China Syndrome before then.
...I find Iray lighting to be fiarly straightforward and even less of a pain to set up than 3DL.
Right now I am working on a 3 year old system that already is "legacy" hardware. Unless I win a lotto, I don't see myself being able to build a more powerful system anytime soon (even "Daz Soon").
Reality 4 had serious issues with recognising surfaces in the materials tab when exporting older scene files, which required a clumsy workaround (on top of the long render times). As I understand, this is something that will not be fixed. I need to go with what is the most efficient for the work I do and hardware resoruces I have. Given the situation, Reality/Lux right now is not a good fit..