Iray is the New 3Delight
Nyghtfall3D
Posts: 765
Before Reality was introduced five years ago, the very idea of working with an unbiased render engine was a foreign concept to most 3D art hobbyists. Whether you use DAZ Studio or Poser, we had two main, built-in choices: 3Delight, or Firefly. And, depending on your preference, you had a pretty good idea how content would look when rendered with either of them because vendors still use one or the other for their promotional material.
Fast-forward to two months ago. Reality is now on version 4. Despite its phenomenal success among artists, I have yet to see any content advertised on either of the two sites I shop at most - DAZ 3D and Renderosity - in which the vendor used Reality as a marketing tool. I've seen occasional mentions of an "External Render" listed on some products at Rendo, but they never specify which, and there are currently three engines on the market that I know of: Reality / Lux, Octane, and Luxus (open-source).
Today, thanks to DAZ 3D's brilliant decision to build nvIdia's new Iray engine directly into DAZ Studio, there are now over two dozen new products on DAZ's web site that come with both 3Delight and Iray shaders, effectively eliminating the need for novices to learn how to create their own, or tweak any material conversions. We now live in a load-pose-and-render age of hyper-realism.
I think that is absolutely incredible.
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Actually, Shifting Images has used LuxRender via Reality for soem promos, and has included Reality materials. Several items in the store have Octane promo images, though I'm not sure if they include octane material settings. You are however broadly right.
there are a handul of octane material products on the daz market. and there have been some PA's that used Octane in the past. but I'm sure many of them will use iray since it makes sense to the average daz user. Sell them what they can use, and everyone can use iray.
Though I've seen dozens of gobsmacking iRay images, I've also over the years seen many terrific 3delight ones. But the whole thing came home to me by accident today. I was checking out greys and placed a sphere, colored it 128-128-128, and changed the background color to same. I then hit render and wowie. I was rendering in iRay when I thought it was set to 3Delight (I go back and forth). It was like a revelation.
Yeah, I know what's going on under the hood: the automatic conversion to iray materials, the built-in iray shadowcatcher, the new headlamp, etc. And I did get the info I was looking for about greys and lights. With only 1 gig of ram on my nvidia card I will still go back and forth between renderers depending on content used, but wow, iray is, well, gobsmacking.
IMO Iray is both easy for the beginner to get decent looking renders, and without much in the was of an upper limit for advanced users. Reality (I only have expirience with 2 as I never got 4) Is good for a but definitely has some upper limits (say when it comes to things like setting up shader presets and the like, or tweaking materials settings 50 times). Cycles is great on the upper limits, you can do pretty much anything you could ever want to do, if you can figure it out, and thats a big if. 3delight is neither easy for the beginner (better than it used to be, but still horrid), and has some hard upper limits (spec and relflection not being connected is a big one)
Basically, yay Iray!
I'm meh, about Iray personally. It won't ever replace 3delight,- for me- but I know I am in the minority.
I have never really strived for photo realism, and I don't like the look of stuff rendered in it...
But everyone likes different stuff. =-)
The thing about Iray that draws me in isn't even the realism.
It's 'logical light sources'. Which I suppose is sort of realism, but knowing that, say, if someone is standing next to a red curtain, there will be some backlighting without having to set up all sorts of weird pseudo lights. I just put some sensible lights where they should be. Done.
The other thing I like is that glass and water is way easier.
In other words, it's not that the results are realistic, it's that the flow is... realistic?
Iray is a tool. It's like a Phillips screwdriver. It does what it's designed to do, very well. 3Delight is a flat screwdriver. Luxrender is a Torx screwdriver. Octane is a hex driver. All of them will put in/take out screws...but each one does it a bit differently. Learn the strengths of each and how to use them to the best of THEIR capabilities and then you can do anything you want.
...there are some things I feel theat 3DL does better. Itay is a photo real render engine, and uses real world physics for lighting. As 3DL isn't "real physics" based it offers many more "possibilities" for acheiving a specific unique style. When I look to create a more "illustrative", or "painterly" look, I'll turn to 3DL as I can play with a lot of effects that are difficult or downright impossible to do in Iray (or any PBR render engine) without a lot of postwork.
For one, atmospheric effects are much simpler to produce in 3DL (there are even a number of tools to assist with this) than in Iray. So are different graphic art styles from making it look like like an oil painting to looking like a page from a comic book (actually saw a pretty nice Frank Miller influenced work once) .
I feel that both IRay and 3DL have their unique place, as both do an excellent job at what they were developed for and neither is overall "better" than the other.
To be clear, I'm not saying one is better than the other. I'm saying the built-in nature of Iray has helped vendors make it easier than ever for artists to work with whichever engine they prefer, to achieve the look they want. Whether it's a painterly look (3Delight), or hyper-realism (Iray), there is content available that comes with two completely different sets of shaders for each engine that are ready to load and pose.
To that end, I have never seen such a huge explosion of products made that come with multiple shader options - not for Reality... not for Octane... not even for Luxus...
That's what I think is so incredible.
And had any of the other choices...Octane, Luxrender, Povray or ANY other renderer been so tightly bundled with Studio, the situation would be the same. It's not the render engine...it's the bundling.
My point exactly. Again, brilliant decision by DAZ.
I agree with the OP's comments together with j cade's and mjc's.
I overall have nothing but positivity towards to inclusion of Iray. I agree Blender Cycles is fun and with enough time and patience you can get some good results from it. I have used Luxrender via Luxus but boy was that a PITA to set mats up. But having an unbiased render engine built in to make favourite User Interface, love it. The ease of using it is a joy to have another TOOL in the toolbox. This is not to say 3delight is dead for me, it isn't by a long way. I do miss micro displacement. :)
SO yeah to echo Nyghtfall sentiments, very well done DAZ3D for a very user friendly (IMHO) unbiased render engine
All I can say was that it was about time. I really didn't like working with Lux and I hated the render time even more. I liked Octane, but I didn't like their business model where you buy the plugin and when the plugin updates, you basically have to -purchase the upgrade to a plugin. It's too bad, because I really wanted to try out the Redspec Shaders. The other thing about them was that when it first came out, if you put two models in the same scene with the identical texture maps, it would render one, and the other one would render white. I'm sure they fixed it, but that wasn't a very good first impression. The thing I like best about Iray is that it didn't take a degree in rocket science to get a decent result on the first couple of tries. I'm with Serene Night in that I'm not really looking for realism, but I do want to be able to have a light in a scene look like a light. With 3Delight I was having to fake a lot of lighting just because you couldn't assign a lightbulb shader to a lightbulb and have it project light like a lightbulb. I was having to do a lot of trial and error for something that should have been very simple. Now, I can just assign a 40 watt lightbulb shader to it and poof! it lights the scene like a light.
I'm more interested in toon style renders, but getting the lights right really make a difference!
It's the tool in the hands of the artist. Lux made lighting make sense for me, I can talk to professional photographers about it and I don't even own a camera (or know what one is!) it's my go-to engine. Cycles: I'm hopeless., Octane: I personally can't justify cost and product requirements, Iray, I lack the HW to really take advantage of it but AFAICT in CPU mode it's slower and not as realistic as what I can already produce elsewhere. I'm sure others with my exact HW could utilize these other engines in ways I never imagined, I've seen 3Delight renders out of Studio's throttled down version of that engine that were sublime, and still cant get a 3Delight render to look like anything but an over exposed disaster, and I've been using DS since it CAME OUT!
The limit to any rendering engine a lot of factors, but mostly its me,
you cant get a retna iMac with anything bigger than a 2GB Nvidia, and Nvidia is not an option on a new Mac Pro. If you want a mac with a 4GB Nvidia GPU your options are becoming increasingly limited by Apple. TIm Cook turns out is a Poser fan.
I do all my design and most of my renders on a 2013 Macbook Pro Retina, which despite its Nvidia card needs to be CPU only. (Turning the CUDA drivers on crashes Daz when I'm 95% finished a render, consistently). Honestly, I don't think it takes materially longer than 3Delight, and most of the time it's a lot faster -- and this is with Architectural and Caustics turned on, on large images.
I've got a WinBox I'm setting up as a rendering server -- it involves copying stuff, setting up the render and walking away, since we're without Server for now, but it works). That's going to be faster for my renders, obviously, but I'm still going to do my work-a-day on the Macbook, because that's what I have with me. I really look forward to a Server option.
As for the high end graphics card costs...
...well, let me make sure my experiment works, and if it does, I'll tell folks about it. :)
*** trying, unsuccessfully, to delete a comment.
You might do what I do with my non CUDA capable main box: use the CPU remembering the POV-Ray times, in which a single chrome sphere on checkered floor took one hour to render...
I love Iray, but one thing it hasn't done is replace 3Delight's practical use. For quick renders, that I just want to test what something looks like without hassle, 3Delight remains the go to engine. For more reaslistic looking stuff, Iray is where it's at.
Thus, its inclusion is wonderful.
When you posted this, you were probably right but since then but now we have the atmosphere camera for Iray and the ability to turn any object into a light source means that we can finally light our scenes the way they were meant to be light.. with the lightbulbs being a source of light.
http://www.daz3d.com/atmocam-for-iray
I don't care what anybody thinks.. IRay is way better and 3DL is no longer a delight.. its outdated rubbish and I'm happy to never look back.. I'm embracing all the new tech and loving it...
Have a great day.
Until Iray becomes far more effecient using the GPU..like not needing everything loaded in memory at once, it won't become a must have tool (or NVIDIA pays daz to drop 3Delight).
Of course, NVIDIA has no reason to make it work on their smaller cards...they want people to shell out for the 8gig+ stuff.
I am on a Macbook Pro and while I have a good nVidia card, there is a heat problem with using GPU on these laptops, so I use Iray with CPU. Does it take longer? Yes. There are ways to make the renders more efficient at times. Overall, I'm very pleased and while I have much more to learn about Iray, the results have been very nice, imho.
I've been experimenting with Iray since we first got it earlier this year, trying every combination of lighting and postworking I could think of to get an improved look that allows for colorful, contrasting fantasy-like postwork. Iray isn't built for it.
Today I went back and experimented with 3Delight for the first time since trying Iray. Lighting is definitely easier in Iray, but I was able to get results I was fairly satisfied with in a half hour.
Iray is the new Reality, not the new 3Delight.
Those who like or prefer Macs, but are having problems with integrating a Nvidia card into their current setup, should think about their next CPU purchase and consider building a Hackintosh. There are no problems I know of integrating (single or multiple) Nvidia cards into such a system, with all the advantages one could only dream of when using iRay. You can start look into building such a system (how it's done), the components you'd need to buy (based on your individual budget), and the cost of same here: tonymacx86 (dot) com
I believe there are also external solutions where you can plug a card into the macbook and it connects to an external case where you could plug in an Nvidia card as well. This would take care of the heating problem.
@ 3dbug and Male-M3dia
Daz said they cant support a flashed mac card or hacinsoh vocally, but the external card solution will work with TB and TB2 equipped macs, it's just not as fast as PCIe but to what degree you could measure just by looking at it I'm not sure. The chassis start at a little over $300.00 and go up to about $999.00 for three cards in SLI, those prices are w/o card but if you have $3K so spend on 3 Titan X's ($3K+$180.00 each to flash) you can probably loose another grand for the box so you don't have a grounding problem when your cat walks over to see what's making your desk so warm-y.
I was however looking at this thread so like any solition it often comes with it own set of problems.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7028915
@SnowPheonix
3Delight is incredibly powerful, what Daz gave us was a throttled back version of it to keep it simple and usable. Unfortunately Daz's implementation of it has unintentionally led many Studio users to think it's dino-ware, it's far from it.
http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php
3delight is a very capable renderer. 3delight in DAZ Studio is a just a shadow of what it really is.
Most of the shaders readily available don't even use most of the new advanced stuff, except for Mustakettu's Radium shaders/lights. What irks me the most is DAZ Studio not enabling ray caching by default. Where are the diffuse Oren Nayar brick in Shader Mixer? And newer specular BRDF models like GGX and GTR?