iRay only I'm tired of it.
Spit
Posts: 2,342
Today's offerings are iRay only. Like the products but fuggetaboutit. I've purchased some already here and there (most in the beginning) but now I mostly put on wishlist for a pretend near future but mainly now I just ignore them.
--yes I know there's 'auto-conversion' which renders slowly
-yes I know how to convert myself
-yes I know both the advantages and disadvantages of using iRay vs 3Delight
I've found it's just as easy if not easier (lots of experience) to convert from Poser as from iRay so if I find something similar elsewhere that's what I buy.
And that 3Delight will eventually go away as DIM will (oh there are 'ifs' which are meaningless) is a devastating outlook for me.
Studio was almost a perfect program and DAZ has great programmers but they've been tasked with stupid things and Studio is becoming bloated with crud that has nothing to do with actual scene setting and rendering. There is still work to do with 3Delight but it ain't being done.
Give us both iRay and 3Delight materials (I know there are iRay specific things, of course, like lights, shaders, cams, etc, but basic content like figures and props and even hair should give us a CHOICE.
I could say more but that's enough.
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Comments
I wouldn't call 3delight a past standart. It is pretty much replaced by Iray for DS but there is still the stand alone renderer and it is used in Maya and some other Programs. So there is still development in there.
There are multiple problems here, none of which Daz is really to blame for directly.
The push for photo realistic rendering has been brewing for a long time. Daz was reacting to market pressure when they implemented Iray. And they have put as much into its development as they had with 3Delight in the past: they made sure you could render with it and provided a default shader and some material presets. That's about it.
The majority of the advancements for 3Delight within the Studio environment were done by 3rd party vendors: omnifreaker made the most used lights and shaders with Age of Armor coming a close second.
Daz has been very good, of late, in keep 3Delight up to date. But no 3rd party vendor has taken on the challenge of implementing the latest 3Delight changes into new shaders or lights. How is that Daz's fault?
And as far as the products that vendors produce, they are going to make what sells. Who can blame them for not wanting to support two extremely different engines that require seperate bases of knowledge?
Please don't patronize. I've been around this 'field' for twenty years now. I'm well aware that using the graphics processor for rendering has become quite popular but it comes at a price. Besides hardware, at the time we have to watch our poly's and image sizes, the products are getting more poly heavy with more and bigger material files.
And there's a reason it's "particularly for still images". It's slow. The hybrid renderer took over from pure raytracing because of speed. EVERYONE cares about speed. But not everybody cares about PBR.
But my complaint was not that we have iRay, it's that there are way too many products with iRay only shaders. (and the DB heavy program Studio has become).
I think a good Iray to 3DL converter would be gold.
It didn't really sink in until lately how hard it is; I'm finding I have to pretty much set everything over. Doable for a figure or two, but a large scene? Ugh.
Spit: Yeah, a lot of people around here talk down to one another. Very annoying.
My understanding is DS never fully implemented the 3Delight RI API. DS uses 3Delight but it's a throttled back version to keep it simple for users. As a result you can not get the results that the developers offer outside of DS.
I had never heard that. Interesting. Not questioning the veracity of your statement, but have you evidence of some sort? I should like to read. I do not recall ever hearing this over in the 3Delight wizards thread, which I used to frequent before Iray.
Unfortunately a lot of the discussion I remember seeing was in the old no-longer-available DAZ forum archives. It used to come up every now and then, though, that many render functions in e.g. Reality or LuxRender (this was many years before Iray) were available in the full version of 3Delight as well. I'm not sure about the "keep it simple for users" bit, though, there might have been an element of "keep the render times down" as well — the speed advantage of Iray rendering on CUDA-aware NVidia hardware wasn't an issue here, all rendering had to be on the CPU.
Aside from networking I believe the DS version of 3delight is pretty comprehensive - if you are willing to write the shaders, as the currently available crop do nott ake full advantage of recent developments. You might want to look at the 3Delight Laboratory thread. However, any access to the GPU in the stand-alone 3Delight is not directly available in DS as far as I am aware.
God, no, not me! I'll leave that to people better at coding than I am. I thought about it, before the advent of Iray, even bought the book (and read it too!). I just wanted to know if there was any truth to the statement that it was crippled in some way. I didn't think it was. I've seen what some of those people who write their own shaders and lights can do in Studio.
Thank you Sir/Maam
In the interest of full disclosure I am not here to sing the praises of Iray as I am not an Iray user for two very good reasons:
A) I am an animator
B) My hardwares (One Mac one win7 PC) are not Iray GPU capable thus I have not even bothered to upgrade past DS 4.7 .
I have the 4.8 beta installed but in the few Iray renders Ive tried on my PC , Iray pointed a taunting finger in my face and laughed derisively
Call it "patronizing" if you wish but the historical evidence clearly indicates that once any new program specific trend takes hold in the hearts& minds of content vendors . and that trend is heavily supported by the official software pubilsher (DAZ). no amount of forum threads decrying the change has ever reveresed it.
Just ask the Die hard poser users about continued V4/M4 content support vs Genesis 1,2,3
Hi I wont pretend to know the technical diference but its something to do with "Renderman Compliance"
http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php?page=3DSP_overview
I have none other than a handful of conversations here and over at 3Delight's forums, so I can't back that statement up with anything that references documentation, and I don't know 3Delight well enough to make the argument for or against, I brought it up because it had been brought up to me on occasion but not with conclusion, but I don't even use it any longer, nor do I use Iray. What I can say is 3Delight is still used by the motion picture industry and it's very capable in the right hands.
http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php/projects
Right? Its an impressive engine; but like any impressive engine, you need dedicated people designing unique shaders and lights. We're not getting them for Studio anymore, haven't for a long time. Maybe, when Ketu releases hers, there will be a resurgence in popularity.
...and some of those 3DL utilities have been crippled by recent updates to the Daz programme. For one, I can no longer use flagging with the AoA lights on SSS surfaces (the workaround is extremely tedious). Second the Vignette, Colour and Graphic Art cameras were broken with the release of 4.7 (though there are a couple third party scripts which were released recently that finally fixed this). While 3DL with the default lights and surfaces renders faster, UE with GI is still glacial on my machine.
Also a lot of very useful shaders like AoA's Rock & Grass shaders, DraagonStorm's Let it Snow and Gathering Moss, as well as Garabaldi Express do not work in Iray (the latter requiring conversion to .obj format which can add a huge amount of polys to the scene).
When I ran a test between 3DL (with the AoA lights) and Iray on the same scene (with materials optimised for each engine) the 3DL version took 14 minutes, the Iray one over two hours forty minutes (CPU mode as I don't have a beefy GPU). Comparing the two, I prefer the 3DL one as the surfaces and lighting look better even though it is not totally photographic in quality (and I forgot to adjust the shadow softness for the AoA distant light).
..I've been asking for this as well only to get replies that I have to now do it myself.
Meanwhile Iray users have a "quick fix" to convert from 3DL and Poser materials.
..and back then, rendering speed in Lux was borderline "geologic" while UE with GI was "glacial". (the AoA Advanced Lights were a total godsend that were immediately crippled with the 4.7 release of the Daz application).
..same here. I actually was interested in CG back in the 80s after seeing some of the Siggraph videos, until I saw all the programming involved just to create something like a reflective or transparent sphere on a checkerboard floor.
Those were most likely done since there wasn't much available initially in the way of shaders for Iray to use, and people wanted to be able to use existing content in the new engine, plus folks wanted to use content that wasn't likely to get Iray specific shaders, like older Poser/DAZ Studio content like V4/M4. It might be possible to write a script to bring the newer Iray only content to 3Delight, and I can look into doing one of those in the middle of doing my other projects; not going to give a timetable on it, though.
While I understand the frustration folks are feeling with the influx of Iray only stuff, I'm not sure forcing vendors to do two to three times the work to create the product they want is going to make folks that can't, or don't want to, use Iray any friends.
The lack of Iray to 3DL is really just stupid, and I realize I'm doing the usual 'I'm no coder but coding this should be easy!', but 99% of it would be solved by a REALLY simple conversion.
Base color -> Diffiuse color, including copying over map (this can mostly be done with UberSurface. Not sure why it doesn't work with Daz base shader, possibly named differently internally)
Glossy Weight -> Specular Strength
Glossy Roughness -> 1-Glossiness
Glossy Color -> Specular Color
Refraction Weight -> Refraction Strength x100 (0-1 to 0-100%)
Refraction Index -> Index of Refraction
and so on. There's some stuff that won't translate, sure, but it's almost entirely just 'put X-named value into Y-named value.'
And maybe some decisions about metallicity/gloss reflectivity and reflection (if it were me, I'd make each of those translate to Reflection values)
I have some basic scripting experience and have no idea what the syntax is here, maybe I should poke at it.
Well, IDK about everyone else, but Im still going to include both. To me, 3delight is your basic, and iray is the extra. As not everyone can render with iray, I dont think itd be fair to do iray only. But thats just me.... and vendors have to consider whats best for them, for whatever those reasons are. I can understand that pov too, coz I have resisted doing the iray thing til recently (having to do two sets of mats is daunting... esp trying to make it look similar and on a massive sized pack besides)
That said, IDK that 3delight will go the way of the dodo.... it would require pretty much everyone having decent gfx and machines to render it without waiting 20 days lol and well, there's too much to lose on that gamble.
I hope that some updated shaders are made for 3delight to utilize some of it is full capabilities. It is actually my preferred render engine, but I prefer the way skin looks in iray. I like some of the effects I can achieve with 3delight.
This type of conversion is one part of what my scripts to run my analysis passes do (only it's converting from the initial 3dl mats to my own custom shaders). This is definitely doable. What would be slick is a mapping interface - something similar to the way that a figure's joint rotations are exported as BVH.
- Greg
Honestly, given that Daz bothered to have 3DL -> Iray conversion, I'm a bit puzzled why they didn't do the reverse.
Even a really basic converter would do most of the job in most situations.
The version of 3DL shipped with Studio is the real McCoy. However, like ANY RiSpec engine, it relies on the interfaces to access its features. Much like a C++ compiler relies on the IDE to help the coder make a good application. Daz Studio provides a "decent" interface to create scenes. It is up to the PAs to create the "impressive" stuff. The RiSpec programmers aren't likely to be here... the money they get paid to do their real work is HUGE and the amount of effort to do things in Renderman (any version) is also huge. As one who has written RiSpec, "getting it right" for a one-off is a real PITA, "getting it right" for a generic case is worse. Take into account that Renderman also requires quite a bit of technical knowledge from the users in order to not "blow things up." How many times have people here "tweaked" a Renderman light "just a little" and ended up with everything washed out and white from too much of it? Or everything going completely black? How about Pumpkin Orange from changing a color ever-so-slightly on a slider you wouldn't think would make a difference? That's not just a DS thing, it happens in Maya with 3DL and Pixar's stuff as well.
What is generally available in DS is really about what "amateurs" can handle. The Shader Mixer, Shader Builder, and RSL Editor are all there for those of us who really want to "get the most from 3DL." Those tools aren't blocked, nor do they require extra licenses (like in other packages). Go dive in, the water's fine (shiver). Really (teeth chatter), come on in!
Kendall
Perhaps if vendors sold a '3DL addon' pack for their IRAY product... that would be a compromise? Just like a vendor makes a clothing set and then sell a texture addon set ( or another sells a texture addon set )
the RSL function book?
i bought it off amazon, delivered one week prior to vicki7.
not sure if it's irony, paradox, or bad luck lol
i'se never done an iray render,
and haven't used DS4.9 (coming from DS4.6), so i'm not even sure if these aren't already available
there's a few things would want in DS before embracing the iray,
cheers!
You forgot the part about needing a warp core (render farm) to run it instead of the 3 cylinder engines (desk top computers) we all tend to have.
That's the "two to three times the work" I mentioned in my previous post. I would think that if a vendor intended to support both render engines, they would provide such support at the product's initial release rather than wait to do so, and potentially "loose their shirt" on a product release.