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...if you know your way around the shader mixer. I find it confusing even after watching the tutorials.
No shader mixer
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/92956/iray-items-in-3delight-how
It's a lot easier, unless you already have a large library of 3DL shaders, and unless you are one of those who likes to mess under the surfaces tab a lot, which I don't, (I'm definitely a one-touch- type girl), to go from 3DL to Iray (since the newer Daz versions have the converter included) than it is to go from Iray to 3DL.
If it takes to much fiddling with, it actually costs me too much money to mess with it. I understand that most people do not use Daz to make a living, but alot of people do. Plus, a lot of people are still using older Daz versions, too.
It doesn't bug me so much on little stuff, but big, epic environments or settings, like castles or complex structures, which I LOVE, if they only offer Iray, I just can't justify the cost combined with the added time it would take to re-shade EVERYTHING for it to look good in 3DL.
And if it was only happening once in a while, it wouldn't bug me so much. But it's happening more and more.
How hard can it be to add a script or converter that switches Iray to 3DL like they did for 3DL to Iray?
Thank you to the both of you and all the other PA's that continue to support 3DL. Greatly appreciated. Since I got a new computer just right before Daz went iRay, I won't be getting a newer computer anytime soon.
..from what I gather, seems like a lot of test rendering involved as well as being somewhat hit or miss.
This required little more than 'apply UberSurface2 preset' and switching stuff on for the Iray-only Forge Golem.
Getting the overall scene lighting right took waaaaay longer than converting.
Interestingly, the worst problem I ran into with 3DL is that the lighting blows out easily because of the limited dynamic range, which would require multiple exposure passes or something crazy to fix.
Iray beauty canvas is a great way of handling widely varying lighting, like clouds in the sky, sun in frame, and dark with torches.
Tim,
Are you using uber lights or the Ageofarmour advanced lights? The Advanced spotlight works extremely well as a point light with realistic falloff and you can use multiple advanced ambient lights and set them to light only certain items.
...this used the AoA Ambient, a several AoA spots, an Ubervolume cone parented to the lamp above the Ark, and a couple Point Lights for the candles in the background as well as one just above the book.
I think it came out pretty well.
Well here's my 3DL experiment:
UE2 plus AoA's Advanced Ambient and Advanced Spotlight.
From Left to Right
Goblet 1: Omnifreaker's Ubersurface base, plus adjustments from Subsurface Toolbox. Replaced the gem with Jade from Gemologica.
Goblet 2: Original Iray materials.
Goblet 3: Omnifreaker's Human Surface HDR KHPark
(note that this did not produce the same reflection in Goblet 1.
Goblet 4: Gemological's silver, but lost the ribbing texture.
Well, as a new PA, I didn't know on my first product, and the just released yesterday one, if 3Delight support was mandatory or not, I just added support to it anyway.
At least on my products, at the end of the description, it says:
All my renders though, have been done only with Iray so far, there the Iray watermark on them. Thing is that reading this, maybe I could do one or two promos, showing the 3Delight version.
LOL, I think you have MattyManx mistaken for someone who has not been around awhile. He is a brilliant renderer and probably knows more about Renderman and 3Delight engine than most people out there. I believe he was just trying to let you know how you can get better renders with Iray, rather than relying on 3Delight. If you invest more time going over Iray and applying what you've learned, you may find you can really produce quality renders , timmins.william, if you apply yourself.
I realize it can seem intimidating, at first, but don't let it get you down.
Hope you realize my previous comment was in good fun :) As for this one, I must say I wasn't thinking about speed for 3Delight vs. Iray... in fact, for me Iray renders much faster than 3Delight, and I have only a single 980 card in my machine. I was doing some 3Delight promos today for my next product and they were taking upwards of an hour, and that was with no hair in the scene! Whereas, I rendered a larger Iray scene with hair and emissive lighting and the full render took only about 25 minutes. I did one Iray render at 3000 X 1300 pixels with 11 Genesis 3 Females in full outfits and two emissive light sources, a sun, and 3 spotlights and that render only took 46 minutes. For this reason, I forget that for some people, Iray is painfully slow. I apologize for not realizing what you meant. I do see the value of 3Delight for many users (which is why I still continue to make 3Delight materials for my products, UHT and UHT2 not included, of course)
Slosh, this is what my post was a reply to:
'Tim, if you want crisp images in Iray, use my settings above. Every image is going to be different. Outdoor shots in direct sunlight tend to render quickly for me where was indirect lighting and interior shots with mesh lights take longer. But you have to let it render long enough to look good. Its not going to give you a great looking image in 5min. Quality takes time. And its far worth the time in Iray compared to 3DL. What we have for 3DL in DS cannot do what Iray does in the same amount of time at all. Learn Iray and it will pay off.'
I know :) I was just mirroring your advice to Matty (who is very skilled already) back to you. But, that was before I realized you were talking about the speed hit you take with Iray. That puts a whole different spin on things, and makes your concerns even more valid.
My original point was simply that 3DL makes crisp images with very little time and effort, compared to Iray. Also, that in many cases when you are doing a lot of filters and artistic stuff in Photoshop (or whatever), having a 60+ minute render is unnecessary because the fine details and qualities you are getting are lost anyway.
I happily use both 3DL and Iray because they lend themselves to different situations and demands. It reminds me of the interminable computer language arguments, where people try to come up with the one best language. Which is dumb, because languages, again, suit different purposes. The demands of an embedded chip on an airplane is different than what you want in a desktop computer.
I mean, one of my comments in defense of Iray has been 'have you tried realistic images in 3DL??' Because when it comes to complete photorealism, 3DL can do better than most people think, but only at a cost of taking just about the same time as Iray (depending widely on computer, of course).
I think you think I'm arguing with you or trying to say you are wrong in some way. Not at all. I'm saying I understand what your issues are and that I get what you are saying. No need to keep defending yourself, you've nothing to defend :) I think I only jumped in to defend Matty when I thought you were talking down to him, which I quickly realized was not the case, so I tried to let you know that I get where you are coming from. I'm not going to comment again... this is silly
Oh, I don't think you are arguing. I'm just explaining my original point with more clarity and summing it all up for anyone who might be curious, that's all.
Those of us who use 3DL would definitely love seeing promos for both render engines rather than having to take their output look on faith. That would be awesome. :D
..3DL vs. IRay render times in CPU mode. The pic of the girls at the bus stop: 14 Min in 3DL (I found the original post where I recorded the render time), over 2 hours in Iray (after a lot of shader manipulation).
This kind of makes me sad :( I love my Iray so much, and I really grumble when it comes time to do the 3Delight materials and promos (but I do them anyway). I really wish everyone had the same experience with Iray as I do. But, I get it, I really do.
...yeah, can't afford a Titan-X which has the memory I need to deal with the "epic" type scenes I create and no into counting the time in days rendering with a 1st generaion i7. .
What size are your scenes?
...they can reach upwards of 10GB during rendering. I've even had some spill over into virtual memory.
You know, I never may much attention to that, lol. I just know some of my renders take all night to render and others I have to render in layers.
...not good at figuring out how to deal with shadows when layering especially when I have items on many different "planes" (again I do some fairly elaborate scenes). As I don't have a very steady hand, detailed digital painting is out of the question. I don't mind overnight renders (I usually do my bigger jobs that way), it's having them take a day or three is what I'd like to avoid.
In 3DL I use the AoA lights almost exclusively as UE with GI tends to be fairly glacial especially when the scene deals with a lot of transparency like hair and plants.
I've avoided reading this thread for some time because I was afraid of what I would see... and it lived down to my expectations.
Let's try to set something straight: DS and Poser really DON'T use shaders for most things, they use Texturing/Papering/UV Mapping. And for quite some time at the beginning that mindset was following into Iray, much to my chagrin. Some may be wondering what the difference is. Texturing/Papering/UV Mapping is simply applying a bitmap onto a mesh and then lighting it. Some will try to use Normal Maps, Displacement Maps, Transparency Maps, etc but the basic limitations are still there. You are effectively "wallpapering" your mesh. Even "materials" (asphalt, concrete, marble, etc) are mostly just bitmaps, with few people using actual procedural shaders. One upside to this is that it is "easy" to create simple things or smaller items. One downside is that larger or more complex items become obviously tiled or stretch the bitmap. Another downside is that the bitmap used for the texture will have a "bias" (color differential/lighting distortion) that can cause the bitmap/texture to look badly in environments contrary to the one they were initially captured from. This can really be seen in "brick wall" textures where shadows on the mortar are almost impossible to remove in natural lighting, so the image may be taken with artificial lights that (in turn) cause the color of the brick to distort because of the composition of the light source. When one tries to use these textures in an image with lighting opposite to the capture lighting, the texture looks "washed out", "plastic", or "fake". Another thing lost with this type of texturing is that material properties inherent in the material are completely lost. An example is the subtle bioluminescence that exists in materials such as opal and mother-of-pearl.
Iray started with PA's taking their texturing workflows from 3DL and "adjusting" them to the new environment. While this initially lead to an easy job of creating "the same" textures for items, the deficiencies of the method quickly came to the fore with Iray. Since Iray deliberately was designed to use "standard" MDL files it became much easier to use real procedural materials. Unfortunately for 3DL users, the infrastructure for similar functionality is not easily available for 3DL/Renderman. This is not to say that it doesn't exist; it does. In fact, Pixar's Renderman Suite has a very similar feature available. Newer 3DL version also have MDL facilities/utilities, however the utilities are not free and the facilities have not been made available to the DS userbase (simply because no PA has taken the gamble to write the plugin to expose the facility to the end user). So, just as Octane or Lux materials are not usable in 3DL, neither are Iray.
What this boils down to is:
Currently, most either use 1 or 4. Customers in the DS/Poser Worlds have become overly used to finished content creation, and content creators making customer lives "easy" by pre-texturing and pre-rigging items. The customers have forgotten (or never experienced) what it took not loo long ago to do anything in 3D, and still takes in other environments where premade content is not widely used/available.
I apologize for the terseness of this post, it was originally much, much longer and I was advised that the "tl;dr" syndrome would kick in and I should cut back.
Basically, if you're wanting to operate outside of the "popular methods" you must be prepared to do the extra work necessary to support your decision.
Kendall
...the issue with the "popular method" is that a lot of us are not pros and therefore do not have the resources to purchase a new system every time there is a new innovation or breakthrough in the software. For example my current workstation will not even support a Maxwell GPU (let alone Pascal) as it has a first generation i7 and older DDR3 memory (with a maxiumum limit of 1333GHz and 24 GB), and PCi 2.0 slots. Crikey it will not evne support the speed boost that Reality 4.x/Lux 1.5 claims to offer. The best I can get from Nvida is 4 GB with about as many CUDA threads as my current 1 GB card has, which is woefully inadequate for the detailed scenes I create. As Iray is "all or nothing" (unlike Octane which splits the load) I'd still find myself rendering on the CPU for the most part. I don't have 3,000$ to build a state of the art system around a Titan X let alone a 1080 when the Iray drivers are available, so I can render most of my scenes in GPU memory.
This is why I, like others, have considered just staying with 3DL. If I can render the same scene in about 1/8th the time it takes in Iray and it looks really good (OK not photo real, but real enough for the purpose), I'm a happy camper.
If scripts and routines can be developed to convert 3DL to Iray, why can't the same be done to convert Iray to 3DL? I would gladly pay for that to avoid having to perform texture adjustments and test renders after texture adjustments and test renders in what is pretty much a "hit or miss" routine.
Keeping in mind that each texture has a Diffuse, Bump, Specular, Displacement, Reflection, Transparency, and ocasionally Normal map, that is a lot to deal with especially if working with a big set like one by Stonemason. Skin in particular is a particularly troublesome, especially when you throw SSS in the mix, and there are entire threads devoted just to that topic for both render engines.
In spite of what I keep reading and hearing, I still cannot hemp but feel like 3DL's days here are numbered as Option #4 seems it is becoming more and more common.
Sad, as 3DL has a lot of good features and, at least from my viewpoint, I believe allows for a lot more variety in style and quality in the final rendered image.
...my two zł worth.
Kendall, I agree with 85% of your post. I think you are selling texture maps short though. There are some things it is not physically possible to do with procedurals, like patterned fabric for example, or convincing skin really. It is not possible to get a knuckle texture on hands using procedurals. A good texturer can and should take steps to eliminate the "brick mortar" syndrome, and the overall reapetedness of tiled textures. The "mortar shadow" you refer to only happens with photographic resources. Digitally created resources should not have this problem. Even with photos though, a good texturer will correct that. Repetitve tiling can absolutely be seen in procedural materials as well. We are working with the tools we have on hand.
There is no reason why "customers" should ever have to experience the non-easy way to do anything in 3D, unless they want to. We do not all use 3D for the same reasons or end use, and it is unfair to group a diverse user base with such a blanket statement. The ease of use of pre-made 3D assests is what draws cutomers to this store in the first place.