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That would be great, though I've seen other people post links to their DA page where they posted nudes or something, so maybe it's ok to post the links?
- Greg
Where the images are hosted matters...if there is some sort of nudity filtering/log in required, then links are usually fine. dA does have that
There are too many variables to make any blanket statement. Machine setup, CPU cores, Physical CPUs, GPU involvement, transmaps, number and types of lights, volume, render sizes, brightness, and on and on.
Use the right tool for the job. 3DL can make fantastic renders quickly and it can make horrid renders and take an eternity doing so. Iray can be blazing fast and not give you the desired output or get stuck on details and take forever. LuxRender is just plain slow either way -- that's how it was designed.
If you're doing toon "type" renders then you're stuck with 3DL regardless.
Kendall
Yep. By default, 3Delight in DAZ Studio is not setup to use gamma correction and proper gamma settings. Shaders for 3delight in DAZ Studio don't use modern BSDFs like Oren Nayar diffuse and GGX specular. SSS is still using a precompute pass. No such problems with 3delight in other packages though.
Oops, didn't realise this thread was still going, sorry! Actually I think wowie has provided a much, much better example than what I had with that link (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/render-engine-comparison-scott-martin?forceNoSplash=true) because its not only the same professional artist but also the exact same image compared, which is a much fairer comparison (and it doesn't get me in trouble with the forum police!). Thank you for that wowie!
It might just be my eye and personal taste, but I think this shows up perfectly how dull and flat Iray lighting is compared with other engines like Octane, MODO and even Lightwave. Not to mention the graininess. Its almost like Iray lighting is missing a kind of spectrum that other render engines have.
I'd like to stress that, despite the wording in my previous post, this is just my personal opinion. Obviously I'm not qualified to state that one renderer is definitely better than another, but to my own taste I much prefer the look that Octane produces.
Thanks for taking the time to post & the link.
- Greg
Yeah, of the pictures he posted, it does look like Octane Render is the hands down winner with iRay in easy last.
I'd like to see tha material and light setups for each with that. In the Iray one the shadows are much softer. Which, to me indicates that the main light source was set up differently. The Iray materials setup also look completely different, just look at the comparative bump on the wood, perhaps the specular is also much rougher.
He did say...
So what was different in each setup?
I've found that more often than not Iray is rather picky when it comes to HDRis...good, high dynamic range ones are great; low to mid-range ones just don't quite cut it.
The thing we have to think of here depends on the implementation of Iray since the one the reviewer is using is for 3DMax 2016 it might do things completely different than what we have in Daz Studio.. Just like how 3delight for Daz Studio seems to be completely different than what is available for 3DMax, Maya and Softimage, since 3Delight has been used in many well known movies for CGI..
On other topics Iray has been used for animation
this one was done in 3D Max back in 2012 so it seems that Iray has been around for at least 4 or more years.. What will be interesting is to see someone do a decent Iray animation in Studio as so far what I have seen on youtube for Daz Studio Iray animations is only so so at the moment..
3Delight, itself isn't really different...it's just how much of it is actually being used by Studio (just a fraction really). The 'missing' features can, with varying degrees of difficulty be accessed through Studio. It' just that the interface betwen 3DL and Studio really hasn't been keeping current with all the features of 3DL. It's more of an 'ease of access' (and for most Studio users, that probably means no access) than they are really missing type thing. Yeah, some of the things I like to complain about...like not having the ability to use RSL2 shaders in Shader Builder would be nice, but you can compile them in Studio...you just have to write the support scripts manually. You can expand the render options by going the scripted render route...and really that's why that was put in, in the first place. The problem is there isn't a large pool of render scripts available...and the feature isn't documented well or knowledge of it commonplace.
The way I look at it...Studio now comes with 2 world class renderers built in...neither one really is 'better' than the other. Both have strengths/weaknesses. And there are available plugins for a couple more...
Really, the probelm is too many choices!
Whoops totally missed the hdr mention, I stand by the bump and roughness though
particularly comparing the relative bump of the wood
No argument there...the bump especially. As it stands...it's nothing that a few sheets of sandpaper can't fix.
I suppose the fastest and highest quality, still is Octane?
Not a supprise, considering its price, and the machine you need to run it.
the highest quality is the knowledge of the artist, and the understanding of the tools at their disposal, to a lesser degree speed can be factored in. If your workflow is just throw a scene together and let the rendering engine deal with it that's half @$$ing a project, if you design and plan with the engine in mind it can cut an incredible amount of time from the needs of the render and the final quality which is the principal goal of the artist not the speed in which it could be turned out.
I would be very curious how well Octane compares to other stuff, if they are all using the same level machine...
My purchasing at DAZ has absolutely dumped since everything's gone IRAY. 3Delight is so much more versatile and easy to use getting great renders very fast. I'm so disappointed all the vendors have jumped the IRAY bandwagon.
Another complaint: They've gotten pretty good at letting you know if something is iray only on the product page, but once it's sitting in DIM you have no idea because there's no indication in the filename. If you load up a scene and use the wrong renderer the render time increases and can sometimes be painful. I peek in the surface tab to randomly check but sometimes forget and even then I"ve found scenes with a mix of 3delight and iray in the same load. The first thing I concentrate on when doing a scene is composition---surfaces come later and I may do several test renders before I reach that point.
As for which is more important, the artist or the renderer, it's really obvious that both are.It's the same with music for which there are parallels of talent and the techniques you must master to use your chosen instrument. I'll leave it at that since I could go on and on about this subject and what I've experienced over the years in both 'fields'.
I did three renders in Iray tonight, on an 8+ year old Core2Duo PC; each completed in less than a half hour. I would probably still be trying to do the first one if I was trying to use an add-on environment sphere and the exact same HDRI image in 3Delight, with the exact same character, except for doing a material swap.
I will say this though. Regardless of the speed, I still love 3Delight and think it's undervalued... I mean, not everything has to be photoreal to be enjoyable, and in many cases, it looks better as 3Delight... When I say better I don't mean realistic, I mean better. I had to point that out because a lot of people don't seem to grasp the diffrence between quality and realism and struggle to decern the two. Realism is exactly as it sounds, and quality, is about making your art visualy appealing to the eyes. When it comes to overall quality control, 3Delight spanks iray 3 ways to sunday...
I think Daz made a decision to implement a small portion the capabilities of 3Delight to make the engine easier to use with their software. It's undervalued to be sure, but it's throttled back where enough users here have no idea of the capabilities of this thing and that they've seen it used in major motion picture productions and probably didn't even know
http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php?page=projects
While doing realism is sluggish (mutter bounce light mutter), MAN, it's great for stuff like cartoon style or other stylized renders.
Click for full size
I'm going to assume you set up a scene like that normally, but what do you do to get that (comic book) style of render? Is it a filter of some kind, or post work?
PWToon shaders.
You can get CLOSE to this with the DzToon shaders, just not quite as good (IMO).
If I did any postwork, it was only for brightness curve.
Checking out the web site for the full 3Delight engine. I didn't know it was free (to a point): 3Delight Studio Pro - Eight-core license - LIMIT ONE PER CUSTOMER OR SITE - Free
You can also export from Daz into the full 3Delight: "3Delight is already integrated into DAZ Studio for rendering. It is also possible to export RIBs and use the 3Delight Standalone application to render outside of DAZ Studio."
You can also distribute a render to multiple machines: "3Delight can render one single frame on several computers without any additional package(s) using special options to the renderdl command. For sequence rendering one can use Sun's Grid Engine, a powerful, well documented (and open source) distributed computing solution. DrQueue is also a good open source distributed rendering manager that readily supports 3Delight, it is probably easier to setup and use than Sun's Grid Engine."
So it would seem to me that one would be able to cerate your scene in Daz, export it, and then use the full Pro version of 3Delight (8-core limit) to actually render your scene. It would be interesting to see how many features would be available that have been scaled back in Daz's built-in version. Hmmmm... interesting....
None...because none are 'scaled back'...they just are not accessed by the default shaders in Studio. To 'access' the 'missing' feature you need to use shaders with the functions you want and/or scripted rendering.
Basically there is NO DIFFERNCE in 3DL in Studio and the standalone...(network rendering is disabled in Studio and it's hard to import shaders into Studio)...most are UI/shader differences.
I have found that which one renders faster is comptetely dependent on what I am doing. Some scenes go very fast in 3Delight and take much longer in Iray (I frequently do both just to see which i like better for any given scene). Sometimes they take hours in 3Delight and 5 minutes or less in Iray. This is true on both my 5 year old laptop and on my new pc.
Ice Dragon: Yeah, I keep bouncing back and forth, trying to figure out some magic way to know which is going to be faster.
I'll let you know if I ever do. ;)
You really want some fun?
Throw the standalone 3DL into the mix...some things that take forever in Studio to render, will in the standalone, just fly.
lol I will do the same!