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Have you put in feature requests for these?
Somewhere over the rainbow?
The 'new' stuff is a) faster and b) physically plausible...which is 3DL speak for being awfully dang close to being 'pbr'. Most of the 'real physics', though is behind the scenes and the familiar 'artist freindly' controls are still user facing.
Well being used to 3Delight for years the first time I clicked the iray button in the (just) preview window, and getting much better results than after hours of tweaking with light and uber area light and environment using 3Delight, I was like, wow! I also render much faster. :3
I tried many times to get it just right with 3Delight, waiting an hour or two for the render to finish after I loaded Genesis or G2F and setting all the lights and whatnot. I never EVER got it to look as good, and that was just the preview window. I'm still amazed by how realistic it looks, and how fast it is. 1-2 hour render in 3Delight (all uber lights and enviroment with all the bells and whistles) = about 5-10 minutes in iray producing much better results with just a few clicks.
My only concern with the advent of Iray is, just how numbered the days of 3Delight are. Sure we have the option to use either or now, but I've been seen some PA's confess that DAZ isn't accepting 3DL renders from them anymore. Now, I get that technology marches on and whatnot, and this is fantastic for Real World-type characters, but what practicality would something like Iray have for more Stylized and Fantasy/Sci-Fi renders?
I was very skeptical about the coming of the Age of iRay, mainly because it seemed to be just another baited hook to increase customer spending, but I find iRay much easier to work with than 3Delight. The progressive rendering usually gives me a good idea of how an image is going to turn out after just five minutes - and that is worth a lot in terms of productivity.
I have used Reality and Luxus in the past and have never been that happy with either of them. Although I am able to get "As Good as iRay" results from the LuxRender engine, the time and effort required is an order of magnitude greater; firstly, setting up the materials and then waiting for LuxRender to produce a result. The iRay integration and default materials in DAZ Studio make the whole experience much simpler and quicker. (It probably helps that iRay can use and does use my nVidia card for a lot of the grunt work).
That's just my take on it. I'm sure others will have different feelings. So, yes, for me iRay really is the new 3Delight!
I don't think you're in the minority at all. One of the best things about having choice is we get to pick the best engine for the scene we're doing, so it's really a matter of taste and depends on the sort of image you're going for. As someone mentioned in a post on the forum recently, the 'uncanny valley' makes photorealism a hit and miss. If you get it right, it's truly beautiful, but it's very easy to get just a few details wrong which makes the whole image look very wrong.
More stylized images, on the other hand, have a much wider degree of separation from real-world images. Because of that, we also have a much higher tolerance when something isn't quite right. We mostly ignore these little flaws, because the image as a whole is already very stylized so our minds are expecting to see them.
Besides, stylized images also have a much wider scope. Whether it's fantasy or fiction, you can get away with a lot more using the medium than you could with photorealistic art. It's harder to make a dragon look photorealistic!
Personally, it's always been a goal of mine to create an image which was indistinguisghable from a photograph, so Iray is a wonderful tool for me. So far I keep slipping into that uncanny valley, but my skills are improving little by little. I'm getting the gist of the materials, working with more dynamic clothes in my work and focusing ever so hard on the lighting, which in my opinion is the hardest thing to get right.
My goal might be unattainable, but the tools are laid out in front of me and I'm enjoying the experience.
Where did you hear PAs say that? It's certainly not my experience, nor that of any PAs I know.
DAZ doesn't tell us what products to make or which software to make them for. It's entirely up to the PA. And the same goes for promo pics. DAZ may say they think a promo pic could be improved, but that's purely from a Marketing POV, and nothing to do with which render engine it was done in.
mac
Seconding what maclean said. If a PA is having 3dl promos refused it is because the promo stank not because it was a 3dl promo.
I agree. I've had Reality since the day it launched and getting shaders to work has always been my biggest struggle.
The help desk answered they are forwarding the Oren Nayar brick problems to the dev team. Same with the ray cache paraemeter. I still haven't seen any changes on both, with the final DS4.8 builds. If those two are processed and taken care off, I'll put the request for GTR and GGX BSDF. And maybe the raytraced SSS too, since improvements to the recent 3delight builds focuses on improving raytraced SSS (and path tracing in general).
I'm skipping 4.8 completely, since I'm still working with 'old' shaders and lights that doesn't require or benefit much from newer 3delight builds. The way progressive rendering is done in 4.8 irks me, but that's not DAZ's doing. If later builds incorporate those changes, I might upgrade. If not, then I'll most probably switch to Maya and just use DAZ Studio for exporting assets. A lot more interesting renderers available like RPS, Arnold and even newer stuff like Corona and Redshift.
Those who are saying 3delight days are numbered should take a look at Chappie. :D Or Elysium and District 9.
I'm not sure that staging your requests is the best policy - putting them all in so that, if acted on, they can be handled with a single update sounds better. Otherwise you are asking them to do some 3Delight/shader updates in one build, then another batch in another build, which sounds likely to claim more resources and so be less attractive. Nott hat that's official, it's just a personal suggestion, so use your own judgement.
The feature request were submitted before 4.8 reached final builds. If I remember correctly, mustakettu did submit the Oren Nayar problem when DAZ is still using Mantis for bug reports and feature requests.
Let's see if they fix the oustanding ones first. Technically speaking, the shader code for the BSDF brick from 3delight have all of them. So if they do update, all the BSDF currently available in 3delight should be supported.
Regarding photorealism... frankly, I think it's easier to start with an Iray photorealistic scene and make it less realistic in post. (Which is what I've been doing lately) This has the benefit of reducing the chance of small details throwing you out of the realism, too.
There are specific exceptions. Things like shadowcatchers and weird lighting effects might be difficult or impossible in Iray. On the flip side, things like ACTUALLY GLOWING objects in Iray without jumping through hoops is a big plus in my book.
I posted about this in an Iray render comparison earlier this week. People keep forgetting Iray supports a semi-biased mode, Interactive, that lets you create some non-real effects, including disabling shadows. Iray also supports shadowcast and shadowreceive on a per object basis, but I'm not sure D|S has exposed that functionality in the shader or object settings.
And the ray cache one is either a value change or one line of code when passing the scene to 3DL to render...I can't remember which.
So on closer inspection is does look like they have exposed some of this functionality. When in Iray Interactive mode, a Casts Shadows parameter appears in the Display group for any selected object. I haven't experimented experimented much with this and I don't know if this sets only the shadowcast property, or handles both shadowcast and shadowreceive. But at least this feature is there for those who want to get tricky with their Iray shadows.