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What Reality does is export your scene to Luxrender , it is a different render engine than Iray.Just as with any render engine, you will need to change some of the materials over to the ones used by that render engine to get good results.
Iray has the benefit of having a preview mode in Studio.This makes it easy to make an iray scene , because you can see the what the finished lights, shaders, and materials will look like before you even start the render.In preview mode, what you see is going to be very close to what you get.
Setting up a scene for Reality to export to luxrender is alot like working in 3DL, you have to setup everything, run a test render to see what the lights, shaders, and materials look like, then "fix" the scene ,then test render,,then fix the scene,,then test render.... This has been made a bit easier now in Studio 4.8 with the new aux viewport and IPR turned on.It will do your test renders in a small preview style window instead of the main viewport.
I like both Reality/Lux and Iray for different reasons.Iray is by far the easier to work with because of it's intergration in Studio.I like Reality because I can keep working in Studio if I want, or shutdown studio and Reality and just let lux render my picture.Lux can load a render from a save file and continue rendering from where it left off at without having to restart all the way from the begining.
I've been spending the day getting some old PC's cleaned up and running so I can install luxrender to them and make myself a home render farm :) Mine will be made up of older 4 core machines, so it won't be anything of real use, more of just a "can I do it" sort of project.
ok thanks for the info on that, I will have to think about it and maybe wait until the little bug are out of the system ;-)
Here's a test I did, finally. A new scene. I did some post work to bring out the skin more. LuxRender 1.5 renders faster in CPU mode than iRay does for me on my machine. The issue is that fireflies are not making it fun for me.
Cool iray is the winner for me, I am back at it and getting stuff without noise between 12 & 30 minutes. With lux I can render using gpu boost between 90 to 120 minutes but nice renders also. Tomorrow when I get the tower back with the full 980 as opposed to 980M I am currently using, I am curious to see if it lux will be faster.. BTW those are not fireflies just %$$ stubborn noise, I got rid in the past using the refine brush. The other thing I like about iray is I dont need to delete what I don't see combine the lights as one group ect.
I agree , LuxRender fireflies are very annoying . In the past with a single pass image it looked good, two passes for enthusiasts. Waiting for More than ten passes its ridiculous for me. I only have 4 lights and one figure... no have a sense...
In some scenes I test, Iray is faster in cpu mode than luxrender in acceleration mode...
In my opinion, Iray is more effective. But reality 4.1/luxrender is much better in interface and is very friendly. Luxrender materials are better than Iray shaders. Its just this absurd noise.
They both have their weak and strong points. With my tower and new card if I can get lux to render in an hour or less I could work with it more. Either way the days of 6 to 10 hours & sometimes more are a thing of the past..
..Itay is't always fast. Was doing a test render of a scene setup (two figures as statues with Iray metal shaders) last night (900 x 900) and 7 hours later it was only 56% converged. Not sure why it turned glacial on me.
I gave up on Reality 4.0 not long after it was released. It was far too slow and plagued by noisy hotspots (especially with SSS skin). I tried IRay but I have an iMac and upgrading to a powerful enough NVidia card is not an option. In CPU mode, IRay is just as slow as the old Reality so I reverted to 3Delight and made the best I could of that.
Now I've installed Reality 4.1 and have to say that I'm impressed although I wasn't at first. Again, OpenCL is broken on the Mac so I'm limited to CPU accelleration plus "Extra Boost". I'm not seeing any of those nasty hotspots now (even with SSS on) so I'm surprised that some people are - maybe that is with GPU/OpenCL which I don't use? As for speed, I was really disappointed initially but I discovered something that changed all that. I was trying to render old scenes and they were slow. So I rebuilt a scene from scratch using the same content and this time is rendered very quickly - I'm talking 30 minutes as opposed to several hours. Still not as fast as GPU mode but far better than Reality 4.0 or IRay in CPU mode. And the quality is far better than I could achieve in 3Delight.
For me, the best thing about Reality is that my workflow requires a series of pictures - perhaps 20 or 30 to make up a story - so I can start a render and let Luxrender get on with it whie I'm working on the next scene in DAZ Studio. If it take 30 or 40 minutes, that's about the time it takes me to change poses, adjust lighting, etc., etc. for the next scene.
Funny you should mention that. The next thing to try I thought was to strip my for R4 saved scene of Reality Data and redo them to see if that would help. Makes sense since camera and light problems are related to previously saved R4 scenes. Glad somerthing is finally working for you.The reason I get the iray speed due to having the required hardware cause when I rendered using the AMD card was as slow as old lux. I have several "episodes" that surpass 500 renders plus all the commissioned stuff I sold.. I used the crap out of R2
Well we actually on something for once in this thread, LOL. As Bob knows i use lux for most of my rendering. I haven't installed 4.1 because i expected some bugs (like most every software release) and i hate installing updates if i can help it.
Pretty sure Paolo is working on getting this right as he has done in the past, no need to condemn him just yet. I feel a big problem is those that have none to limited use of luxrender saw the hype on 20X speed increase and now expected luxrender to now be closer to Iray rendering speeds, which isn't the case in most instances. As with both luxrender and Iray, if you have the hardware and software to take advantage of both renderers full capabilities, you will see amazing results, but those are the limiting factors that need to be taken into consideration.
I have a fairly strong 64 bit rig, but my GPU is fair from optimal for Iray, so i am stuck with CPU rendering which is ok, but setting up a scene and materials for Iray is a huge learning curve for me compared to the ease of use I have with reality in setting up lights and materials, but I plan to keep learning what I can about Iray as it's always good to have many options. I am used to 6+ hour renders with Luxrender, but based on my sandy bridge system doubt I will see much of a speed increase with the new luxrender, but just the new featurtes alone in 4.1 have me excited and if I can cut my render time in half, I will be thrilled!
I know what noise is. She has noise under her neck because I didn't leave the render longer. Fireflies are happening, they appear all over this image, they are subtle but they are there. Damned if I know where they are coming from as I know how to tone down the glossy materials by now. Fireflies were suppose to be a thing of the past, as far as has been argued when I bring them up. The last time I brought the subject up I was told it was the HDRIs I was using. There are no HDRIs in this render. Only one mesh light. So there goes that theory. I have the FF setting set to 5 in this render.
Apologies I thought you was referring to the noise under the neck. I never had fireflies issues. Milke (FSMC) was very kind with a lot of tips when I started using Reality. Renders used to taker me several days back then. What a long way PBR rendering has come.
Can't resist a 3D Universe morph... Plus the last test of Reality 4.1 before I get to working on real projects.
Took 10 minutes to render, got to 3.16 kS/p at 5.72 MS/s.
No post processing.
Characters by themselves usually does not take too long. Anyhoo experimenting with the new GTX980 in the tower. Iray times are more or less the same as the ROG laptop with 980M. Considering the tower is over 2 1/2 yrs old with an older i7 processor im pretty pleased will have to see what it does with Lux..
I've seen this comment about how easy it is to set up materials in Lux compared to iRay but - sorry - I just don't see it. What can be easier than setting the material properties in the surface tab right within DS? With the supplied Uber shaders you can already do a lot, plus there have been some very good shader packs released for iRay.
With Reality you have to use a different UI and you cannot render an existing scene "Out of the Box" as you can with DS/iRay. Sorry, but the idea that that's easier doesn't fly with me.
Now, if you are saying that the materials hander in Reality is better because it is more featured, then OK. Better, but absolutely not easier. Actually, that's at the crux of why I don't like this release of Reality - despite what was mentioned in the pre-release hype, it does NOT convert iRay shaders to Lux. Only some of them. Sometimes. Maybe.
I think Reality does have its place and I can see why people are fans but, for me, iRay killed the Reality Star. Stone dead.
It is still bug ridden and one can not use SSS with gpu modes (funny how this was not mentioned until after the fact) and it is NOT as fast as promised. For the heck of it I took a saved R4 scene stripped the Reality data removed cam and lights redid all it still renders slow as mellases on CPU boost. Some GPU boost are going into it's 3rd hour.
Rendered for about 5 hours to 6k samples. Probably could have stopped in the 1-2 hour range (2-3k Samples) but I was sleeping while it went.
PNG are lossless so larger than JPG but without the JPG lossy compression. PNG are similar to TIFF, TGA and PSD because of that, but tend to be smaller than those formats. So the format itself is a good one, whether something is having issues writing it, is another question.
I really have no idea. I do not remember having any issues when rendering with Reality 4 and Im certain at least some textures in my scenes were always .png.
So I presume that most people here are rendering with AMD cards under OpenCL to get such high S/s rates? The max I ever got with my 4790k/960 was 700-ish kS/s.
Also, does anyone know the reason why LuxRender allocates 2x the memory when two OpenCL devices are used?
No, I use PNG and TGA all the time
what are the file and folder names? Do they contain non-latin (western) characters?
Depends who you talk to. Iray is next useless on my rig in either CPU or GPU mode (older but cuda enabled nvidia card), but Reality took the mystery out of lighting and surfacing for my models very quickly and since I tend to go object heavy in my scenes a 12GB GPU and PSU to power it is not in the budget when I can already get faster and cleaner CPU renders in Reality on the same rig. That's my experience with it, others will differ.
I tried to do a comparative test and apparently the parameters are not similar. Unless I was mistaken about something.
-cpu amd fx6300 12 ram ddr 3 1333
-One hdri image as light
-15 min of rendering.
-Film Iso: 100. Shutter: .125. F-stop: 5.6. gammma: 2.2 in both.
-(headlamp off in iray).
And the result are:
Lighting is also physically more accurate in Reality, IMO. Of course, it *also* means that underexposed areas will be harder to render than iray.
The directory contains the ' character.
I also tried collecting the textures but the issue persists.
I might wanna try copy them to a directory with a very simple name and no non letter characters and see if that works.
if it cant get the textures to begin with it wont collect them. Try the name change and keep it simple. No spaces or special characters, just numbers, letters and an underscore if you cant resist. If the picture is named "picture.png" that fine but if it's in a folder "Documents//¢∞§¶•ª/Images/picture.ping" the s/¢∞§¶•ª/ (or whatever) could possibly be the problem.
@ MTL1: Lighting is also physically more accurate in Reality, IMO. Of course, it *also* means that underexposed areas will be harder to render than iray.
Yes, but you can group lights, and set intensity during the render which I don't think Iray can do. The objects in the underexposed areas are being calculated (albeit in low light conditions), they will react in real time to the light adjustments. The preferred speed workflow is to do the test render with the groups, set them as you need then take those values back to Reality for fine tuning and make one light group. Personally I keep them separate.
Here's where I really disagree, imho the surface tab in DS is the worst thing on the face of the earth. I hate having to scroll up and down and being barely able to read anything because there's barely any room because of the dozen other tabs. In Reality, on the other hand, there's a large area to work on the settings and you can arrange your 150 or so surfaces in many different ways (by name, by parent object, edited/unedited etc.) to make them easier to handle. Copying settings is also somewhat better. Well, this is the argument I would have made back in the days of Reality 2. Since then DAZ I have discovered the many uses of DS' search field which is the one saving grace for the surface tab. And also Reality 4 came out and completey ruined the Reality interface. But I think I would still take it over the damn surface tab :D
It is true that there are barely any 'render-ready' scenes for Reality, but lack of support, while a valid argument against the product, is not really the products fault. I would say Paolo has been doing his best to mitigate that problem, though.
If you don't like where the Surface tab is, you can move it. You can also use the search box at the top to find different paramaters. You can also use Shader Mixer if you prefer.
I am running on a laptop currently:
i7-4720HQ @ 2.6 GHz, 16 GB RAM, Intel HD 4600 and GeForce GTX 980M
My guess on the memory is that the texture files need to be loaded into both GPUs. But that is just a WAG on my part.
Yeah, I would've assumed that it would load just one since both devices are working on the same 'stuff'. Oh well.