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What I've found works for faster 3DL renders:
Don't use ubervolumes if you possibly can. They are slooow.
AoA Subsurface looks great, also really flippin slow. Use UberSurface when possible.
Use AoA lights (distant, spot, ambient, the bundle is $25 right now but I've seen it on sale occasionally http://www.daz3d.com/advanced-daz-studio-light-bundle )
If you want godrays, either use Atmospheric camera or add it in post or fake it with cones.
Well I do not need a render that looks like a photography and by the way, the best render engine doesn`t help if you haven`t got an eye for scene building and lighting and I have seen also very good Iray and 3Delight renders and also very bad of both. And sometimes Iray renders at the gallery look a bit overexposed in my opinion
One AoA Distant and one UE. My first render at Fern Lake with Ava on a haze summer day so a bit dense. This is rendered in 3Delight and progressive mode, took around 25 minutes. As written this is the first at Fern Lake so this was just a test to see how the environment looks
made the experience that AoA spot and distant work really well with UE light
I have/use an old Dell laptop with just 6GB ram
To be fair, part of comparing the speed is the ease of getting everything set up and optimised.
The way I look at it Iray is set up and optimised for a higher baseline as it were, (ie pretty unbiased lighting) you can not use those things in 3delight (why a lot of people end up with much quicker renders), or you can but unless you work hard to optimize and set up everything properly it will be slower.
And it's not really a fault with 3DL, either...because it's capabilities and optimizations have improved, while the Shaders for it in Studio haven't changed much over the years. I'm not bringing up any of the new raytrace shaders/physically plausible shaders that are MUCH faster than the omniUber line.
I agree. I have seen a few really realistic looking renders using 3DL, but those are very few and far between.
And I have seen also Iray renders that a far from looking realistic, too
and as written before, the cost of a proper video card for HD Iray renders is to much and it is not just a video card but a new machine, so the result of the renders does not worth the cost for it if one does rendering just as a hobby. If you do it professional it is okay but as a hobbyist I have to say, that for me I do not see a reason why spending a bunch of money just for a bit better render results.
And sometimes it is really a joke, the folks render in Iray because of the HDQ and the less grainy effects and than they ask for grainy effects or add them post work to make their renders look more grainy...LOL
We were in a steak house down at the south, we had 38°C or 100°F, the steak house had a air conditioner that was working but because it was so cold they made fire at the chimney (I have asked why they make a fire). Just reducing the cooling would have been to simple I guess.
One thing I really like about 3DL realistic renders... it takes more skill and experience, but you can get a more easily 'crisp' image than you often get in Iray.
Crisp renders always scream CG to me.
This is exactly the thing when you are looking at anywhere from $150 to $1500 for a Nvidia video card it is not cheap at all.. And if you have two well even more so I suppose it would make sense if they were a professional making a living but for hobbyists which most of us here are then the means does not justify the cost..
So very true the few Iray renders that I have seen so far are well just so so.. Even wheen I dabbled in it, my results were just so so..
Except it has been stated time and time again that you don't need a fancy graphics card for iray. My entire laptop didn't cost $1500, and its more than 3 years old now.
I have an Alienware X51. That's worth about $700 now. I have a GTX 970, worth about $300. Add in another $70 for two 8 gb RAM, and let's call it about, oh, $1300 with peripherals and whatnot.
Around 22 minutes (with a Core i7 4770K), if I remember correctly. UE2 AO mode at 512 samples. Pixel samples at 6x6, shadow samples at 32, raytrace depth at 12. Progressive rendering enabled.
displacement calculations on a raytraced shadow = 3Dlight crippler.
actually that's all rendering engines.
Anyone who thinks 3delight is slow should see this.
And bear in mind, that's from 3 years ago.
3delight in XSI is a different beast from 3delight in DAZ.
Never like the implementation of 3delight in DAZ. No real physical sun and sky, slow renders, no hdri and fake lights. Without some addons, materials don't have all the parameters.
http://www.sharecg.com/v/75671/gallery/3/PDF-Tutorial/Alternative-Image-Based-Lighting-in-DAZ-Studio
https://mustakettu85.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/3delights-physical-sun-into-daz-studio-a-yet-another-shader-builder-mini-tutorial/
That's two of them...
Oh yes, I agree. After all these years, those things are yet to be implemented in DAZ Studio. Even when 3delight Studip Pro introduces new BRDFs and physically plausible shaders, all the shaders or shader bricks available in DS are still stuck in the 90's (Lambert, Blinn, Phong). I've said once and I'll say it again, 3delight implementation in DAZ Studio is second rate, at best. It doesn't even enable ray caching by default, which speeds up UE2 indirect light and bounceGI modes up to a factor of 20x (depending on your settings).
I was just browsing a gallery by probably the best 3D artist I've ever seen and I noticed that whilst they normally render everything in Octane they had thrown an Iray render in there as well on one occasion, for some reason (maybe because they were trialling V7). The difference was night and day. Although the Iray render was well done (about the quality we see in promo images) its was nothing compared to the mastery of the Octane renders. Next to the Octane renders the Iray one looked really flat and like it had been coloured in with crayons. I was very impressed with Iray when I first tried it, but I'm coming to understand now that 3DL and Iray are very much the poor man's option compared to Octane (obviously, as Octane is very expensive).
Next time I upgrade my PC though I'm going to get an Octane license as well because in my opinion it makes a world of difference.
3DL is generally slower on my machine than Iray. Sometimes by a lot, depending on how many transparencies and such it needs to deal with. On the other hand, I can do things in 3DL that just can't be done in Iray (such as have something not cast a shadow, or use pwCatch to have something only cast a shadow. And prety much any effect by pwEffect/pwGhost) and I like the more saturated colors (I really don't care about photoreal.)
The 3DL took a bit over 5 hours, the Iray version a little under 10 minutes. 3DL used 1 AoA ambient, 1 AoA Distant and 3 AoA spotlights. Iray used 1 hdri, 1 distant, 2 Spots, and 1 emmissive pannel. The composite has also been postworked to further adjust colors and brightness and get something more painterly. (which one is which should be really obvious)
I'm wary of this sort of thinking. I'm a firm believer that the artist matters far more than the tools. My favorite human render I've ever seen was rendered in Lightwave, the best nature scene, cycles.
Also comparing someone who usually renders in one render engine to something they rendered in a tool they don't normally use is intrinsically unfair IMO.
Agreed. How about linking the renders you were talking about, tl155180?
- Greg
Personally I think that this is exactly the reason why the only fair way to compare 2 different render engines is through the same artist. If you tried it with two different artists using two different engines then the comparison would be a bit meaningless. Keeping the artist constant rules out any discrepancies in talent or artistic preference. And just because they normally render in Octance it doesn't automatically mean that they aren't also proficient with Iray - perhaps they know how to use both (they certainly seem to) and prefer Octane? I don't think we can make assumptions on that point.
Thought someone might ask this. Unfortunately I can't direct you to their work because it involves nudity and Daz is very strict about that. If you really want to see it and aren't going to be offended by their images then I can pm you with the details if you want?
Here's a nice comparison
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/render-engine-comparison-scott-martin?forceNoSplash=true
Ah Hah! I couldnt figure out why flagging sometimes worked, sometimes didn't work. I never considered SSS on/off state. Interesting. And a bummer it's still broken. :-(