3Delight - The slowest rendering engine.
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I have used 3Delight, iray, and reality for some time now. I've come to the conclusion that 3Delight is the slowest render engine out there. This isnt true if you use the very botton of the line basic settings, but add any sort of quality to 3delight and you go from a 4 minute render, to a 10 hour long render. Add SSS and Uber surface, with uber lighting with enough samples and shading rate to clear all the noise, and your looking at at least 8 hours, for a moderate sized image. Where as iray, and reality, you can get the same image, with higher quailty, in half the time... It's amazing that what was once was the fast engine, is now one of the slowest. I've waited a few time, upwards to 2 and a half hours just for the SSS to calculate in a scene, before it was willing to even render... I love 3Delight, for its diversty, but I can't stand how long it take to make anything with and sort of quality. I hope they update 3delight one of these times, to be more competitive... though... I doubt that will ever happen now that iray is the primary render engine for Daz. Those are my thoughts on 3delight.
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Comments
I find that if you can skip SSS, you can get pretty nice results in 3DL. I also find that SSS is often not necessary. Also, using EZ Fog Atmospheric camera to do fog and godrays works WAY easier and faster than anything similar in Iray.
That said, there are a bunch of SSS related things that DO work way better in Iray.
Yes, but once you add bump maps, normal maps, displacement maps. decent lighting, and uber surfaces... Even the background, before it reaches the SSS surface can take 15 minutes to render a patch the size of the palm of your hand
The version of 3Delight in Studio 4.9 is one of the latest versions there is.
Can you elaborate on what makes it better then the previous version?
Other than it is using a very recent build of 3Delight and that it isn't something that can be 'updated' to 'fix'...there isn't much to elaborate.
Other than it is using a very recent build of 3Delight and that it isn't something that can be 'updated' to 'fix'...there isn't much to elaborate.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/69628/ The current version of 3Delight in Daz Studio is 12.0.27 the current free version from 3Delights own website is 12.0.68.. And as mjc1016 said it is not that easy to add in a new version of 3Delight, I would think that it would require a new version of Daz Studio..
But 3Delight can be fast with a decent output it just requires the right light setup and also depends on the render settings as well.. The other thing a decent Iray / Luxrender render can take a while as well depending on what it is rendering and whether it is CPU only or whether it is using the GPU and when it comes to darkened or night scenes both Iray and Luxrender can take even longer to render..
..the issue with 3DL and SSS is that the AoA advanced lights are broken with regards to flagging SSS surfaces. This happened with the 4.7 update.
Basically, you have to use UE which is a total render hog to get the same effects the AoA lights used to give.
I clearley prefer IRay. IRay has been my reason to go completley into DS. Never liked 3Delight. With basic settings 3Dl renders hardley looked any better than dirty old Poser4 renders. With uber lights and environments applied, you render forever.
Which I find interesting since 3Delight has been used in many projects http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php?page=projects many well known and not so well known movies used 3Delight the thing is that is interesting with 3Delight Studio Pro http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php?page=3DSP_overview the free version will use 8 cores but if you have the cash there is a multicore license.. I would think that the reason 3DL is slow for some people and some of what they do is that most folks do not have multicore machines with the most being Quad Core CPU's and since 3DL works better with a multicore setup this is where it supposedly shines..
And on top of that if 3Delight support ever did stop then that would be the end of 3D rendering for me since it is the main renderer that I use.. Or I more than likely stay at the last version of Studio that did have 3DL or probably go back to Poser..
That seems to be key right there: "some."
I've tried many different renderers on my machine and have found exactly the opposite of the OP. 3DL, even with very high quality settings has never taken more than a couple hours for a render and for most of the kinds of scenes I do, even wih SSS and Uber suface/lights I am still getting renders under two hours; the last couple major revisions of DS it seems to have become even faster. But on my machine (a gaming laptop which is about 5 years old now), even just a simple portrait takes 3-4 hours in Iray and any kind of more complex scene is just out of the question; I can let it run overnight and come back to an unusable scene. With Reality I have never gotten a decent render in any amount of time. Carrara's native renderer is a bit faster than 3DL and weirdly Blender Cycles runs like lightning for even very complex scenes, although in both those casesm obviously I'm using a different program, not just a different renderer, so there are more factors in play. I like all these renderers - they each have their own strengths and weaknesses, but speed seems to be more a matter of what hardware you are using than the renderer itself at this point.
You (generic "you," not anyone specific) just can't say "this renderer is faster and this one is terribly slow" without adding "for me, on my computer."
Yeah I have no real problem with 3DL infact I love it as results are fast, and do what I want which is renders for comics..
Iray is definitely slower for me. I like both render engines but a quality render in iray takes more time than the same thing for me in 3delight. Like most things it depends on how you use it, and what you are trying to render. Your mileage may vary.
You have to remember that 3DL when it is used in Hollywood productions is using Render Farms and NOT a single computer. It is a VERY powerful render engine and as a result, demands a great deal of resources to get the job done in a reasonable amount of time.
I don't know, I've gotten some pretty realistic results with 3DL. I use AoA lights and UberSurface.
Here are two examples that, not to toot my own horn (toot), I think look pretty spiffy:
(This second image isn't perfect, I made a number of minor mistakes with lighting, but still)
I don't remember how long they took to render, but I doubt more than 2 hours.
The following took 1 hour, 41 minutes. Probably would have been a lot faster without the fog, but hey.
I have an Alienware X51 with 16 GB RAM. It isn't cutting edge at all (doesn't have a SSD, even).
There are 2 AoA distant lights, 1 AoA ambient light, and UE (bounce).
No question that 3DL renders faster than iRay on my rig. None. I'm CPU only with a 4 1/2 yo i5 quadcore which has something to do with it. But scene setup in iRay is much faster than scene setup in 3DL but not enough to make up the difference. One can speed up the setup in 3DL with experience (lighting especially) and speed up renders in iRay with an expensive nVidia (or two).
If you're into photorealism it's much much much easier to get in iRay at the expense of time and for some it's definitely worth it. I'm not and it's not so 3DL it is.
Could you tell me more about the "EZ Fog Atmospheric camera," please?
The following took 1 hour, 41 minutes. Probably would have been a lot faster without the fog, but hey.
Very nice! I remember when I used to render in Bryce daily, I'd turn up haze to make the renders go faster. Yeah, it was that final anti-aliasing pass that was killer.
Excuse please. Something messed up in the Will quote.
http://www.daz3d.com/atmospheric-effects-cameras-for-daz-studio
I only ever use the EZ volume camera and sometimes the depth camera.
Now, the set is slightly broken -- there's supposed to be a way to flag lights by things like light strength and whatnot, which no longer works. HOWEVER, you can still use 'category' to flag lights as foglights.
What am I talking about?
You can set the camera to add in the effect of fog but to only take into account certain lights. So, I can type in 'foglight' into the category field of, say, a distant light, and when the camera fills in fog effects, it ONLY pays attention to where the distant light is coming from, and ignores ambient light, bounce lights, or whatever else I might be using.
One trick I like is to have two distant lights -- one with Shadow softness set to 0% and category 'foglight,' the other with shadow softness 100% or 200%. The first light makes for sharper, more obvious godray effect, the second has a softer lighting that works better on figures.
Haven`t made such experience yet but okay, I do not use SSS because there is no need to use it, it is overrated
That is just your opinion...the render below is 3Delight wihout SSS or anything else just lights and an effect camera, took less than 1 hour to render and I do not think that this looks like a dirty render.
BTW the price-performance to get a good Iray render is bad. Much to expensive those video cards.
All my renders in my gallery are 3Delight and since progressive mode is possible most of them are also just progressive mode and most of the renders took less than 1 hour to render a lot of them took around 30 minutes.
Well, on my machine, the iray render took 3 hours, and the Daz render took about 7 hours. The daz one is larger but not by much. You'd figure the iray render, because of the realism and quality Would be the one to take 7 hours, and the Daz render, take 3 hours, but on my machine the opposite is true.
and which one is what?
Left is iray - Right is 3Delight
to different scenes with maybe different lighting are not good to compare, the same scene with a nearly equal render result is good to compare if you want to make a statement on rendertimes
ok. I'l set up one scene, and try that out then.
Remove the DoF and the godrays from the 3DL one, make it the same size and see how long it takes...DoF, by itself can double render times.
Make it the same aspect ratio. And if you really want to get into, adjust the bucket size of the 3DL render so it is doing full buckets in the last row (column) depending on which bucket order you are using. By adjusting the bucket size to fit exactly you aren't wasting the time making a row/column of partial buckets...that basically shaves as much time as it takes to render a row (difference between rendering 9 row or 8 rows...because it's still going to render 9 rows even if only 8.5 'fit' the image, unless adjusted to fit). Also enable progressive rendering in 3DL to enable the much faster raytrace hider (rendering mode).
Comparing render speeds needs to be done using the same effects and settings (or as close as you can get) in order to be a valid comparrison.