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Tradition, and most corporations (and photographers) are conservative and resist change. The existing model works, why take chances? There have been a few models of film cameras that were much more sensible in their design, all of them ultimately failed. Just read any photography forum- anybody who tries to think outside the accepted box will be destroyed.
I still shoot medium format, Mamiya 645, which I think is one of the most comfortable and easiest to use cameras ever made. Rollei marketed a 35mm camera with the same layout and features, and it failed. Miranda was designing a 35mm SLR that would be held like a pair of binoculars, a natural way of holding your hands in front of your face. That might have been a game changer, but they went out of business before they could produce it.
Don't get me started on the status symbol crowd: "Your camera is junk 'cause it's not a Nikon! Hurrr-hurrr".
I see what you mean. The problem with the track ballast is that its basically six or seven long strips, and doesn't have any speakable geometry to work with. 3DL works beautifully under such conditions, but in Iray, it's epic fail.
Maybe getting the track ballast it into Hexagon, increasing the subdivision considerably, and then importing it back into the scene would help?
...yeah I could give that a try. I finally got Hexagon working pretty stable.
In the scene I did with the girls at the bus stop, I had the same issue of many textures looking smooth and flat even though they looked good in 3DL. This is just one of the issues I see with manually translating Iray to 3DL as there is no positive or negative bump channel in Iray.
As to the wet effect on the clothing it would probably require digitally painting it in post, something I do not have a steady hand for. The hair is also very problematic as each hair prop would probably need its own individual wet map, something beyond my expertise as I am not a content creator.
Yeah, it's the small details that cause most of the work and headache. Pareto's priciple - in any given project, 80% of the work can be done with 20% of resources, but to get the 100%, you'll need 80% of the resources.
It's really an ungreatful world.
For folks taking issue with the search engine here (I can't disagree), use Google. This forum seems to be regularly spidered by Googlebot. That's how I look for stuff and find it more often than not.
I think the characters look just as real as the rest. Excellent work.
I've seen images done in many of the different rendering engines that many folks have thought were photographs initially, so it doesn't really matter to some folks.
I have many times posted my work on my facebook art page and many people have commented that it looks like a photograph. Now, I can tell its not a photograph, most of the people here could tell its not a photograph but the average person, apparently, not so much. And I'm not even that good at Iray yet. Sometimes, because we KNOW we are able to see the flaws far more easily than the casual observer.
...yep, reality is often in the eye of the beholder.
...this is again why I am a bad person to take to the cinema. While most people are going *WOW*, I'm sitting there picking apart flaws in the CGI effects.
It's the cars. More than skin, hair, all the rest, it's the shiny cars.
Yeah, and lights at night and indoors the irony of which is glacial render times.
But the cars and metals and glass are the main attractions to iRay.
The rest really doesn't come close.
IMO, of course.
Long and short of it - vendors will make what they like to make. They will sell what they like to sell. They will go with what they enjoy doing, what they know how to do, and what they think will do well for them in the store.
I'm a 3DL artist myself. I'm well accustomed to adjusting Iray materials to suit me. I acknowledge that the current engine is NOT 3delight, but for technical reasons (sorry, can not afford to buy a whole new computer just to use Iray), I am working on the previous render engine, and I adjust my workflow as is needed.
I cannot produce Iray materials with my items. Now, if some lovely soul is willing to and wishes to produce those materials after-market for something I make? I'm all for that. Go right ahead! But I know I can't do it, so I don't.
Personally, I'd much rather see "Iray materials only" than get a supposed 3DL set of mats on an item that is absolutely sub-par. I'd rather see a vendor stick to what they know, than trying to make it "compatible with both engines" if they don't understand or know how to set up the materials for that second engine.
I have no issues converting Iray materials to 3delight. An amazing amount of Iray mats actually render beautifully in 3DL anyway. And those that don't, it's a trip into the Surfaces tab, and I will have them rendering to my satisfaction in very little time.
The reality of it is, PBR is where 3D is going. I will gladly adopt PBR once I have a system that can handle it. I use Superfly when using Poser, I use Cycles when using Blender. Now, if Iray could perform just as well on my machine as Blender's Cycles, and Poser's version of it, I would have adopted Iray long ago. The fact of the matter is, Iray takes for bleeping EVER to render on my machine, and is literally NOT worth my time to wait on it. (24-36 hours for a single figure, plain background. I do not have an Nvidia card so have to do everything CPU. My vidcard cannot be changed; it is an on-board ATI and I do everything on a Toshiba Satellite laptop.)
So... like it or not, the current render engine is Iray. We can't change that. We can adjust the materials and make use of the basic items. Is it nice when a vendor offers 3delight mats? Sure it is! But that does not stop me any longer from purchasing content that I like. And as I said - I'd rather see "Iray only" than a vendor trying to make it work in both engines if they don't understand or have the knowledge to properly set up 3delight materials. If I buy an item that is Iray-only, I'm already well aware of what sort of extra work I might have to do to make it work for me. I go into it knowing that.
This is not going to change. Iray is here, it's not going to go away. 3delight artists either learn how to kitbash and make stuff work for them, or they take their toys and go home. I prefer to kitbash.
LOL - You and me both. :) I can't even watch a documentary with 3D demonstrations involved without having a twitch-fit in my seat, and my daughter looking at me and going "I know, I KNOW, Mom, they didn't do good on the 3D, don't pick it apart!"
Thank you!!!
well said
I Personally think one can get Still renders from Blender that are Equal to Iray and Blender Cycles is way more forgiving to those rendering on CPU only hardware.
here is a quick test render I did yesterday on my travel laptop
a gateway notebook with 4 gigs of RAM and a puny little GMA4500MHD graphics card (intergrated of course)
I stopped it after 28 minutes in progressive refine mode
Still grainy??.. sure
but Iray would taken several hours to get even this resolved on the same machine.
Exactly. That's my point. Cycles works beautifully even on CPU-only. So, until Iray can function as well as Cycles... I'll stick to Blender Cycles when I need PBR. I do not understand what the differences are between Cycles and Iray, and why Cycles works fine on a non-Nvidia machine (and fast!), and yet Iray on the same machine is incapable of any kind of realistic time expenditure for a render.
I like the way PBR can look... but I can't have my laptop tied up for one or two days on a single render. I literally don't have the time for that. LOL
Cycles is probably a CPU/GPU neutral design, whereas Iray is designed to support only nVidia cards.
Use the engine that your equipment can handle. Just don't expect the same results as the more capable equipment in similar amounts of time. Iray works well for those who have nVidia GPUs and/or decent equipment. Just for yuks I decided to pull the GPU from one of my machines, and Iray on CPU only it did fine -- granted the machine is running multiple XEONs and not little 'i' series CPUs. Octane is faster that Iray, so is MentalRay, so is Vray; but they cost significantly more and require more base hardware than does Iray. Cycles can either be slower or faster depending on the environment and scene, same with 3DL and the Pixer Renderman Suite.
Complaining that "my computer can't handle xyz" is about as useful as "my automobile can't compete in the Indianapolis 500". You do what is necessary to do what you want/need to do.
Kendall
...the trouble is to get Iray render times down to something "manageable" (a couple hours instead of a couple days), that computer pretty much has to be able to compete the Indy 500.
Cycles is out because of the struggle involved just finding my way around Blender's clunky UI and setup.
Octane, even given its price, seems to be the most efficient option as I can get by with an older 4 GB GPU that doesn't require building an entirely new system to support it. As there is also a plugin for Carrara, that is a bonus.
Oh and those little "i" series CPUs tend to have faster clock rates out of the box than comparable Xeons (and cost far less). Yeah I was considering dual Xeons for a while, but the best I could budget for were only 2.3 GHz which is slower than my old 930 Nehalem i7.
KK, I know this is frustrating, but my machine costs maybe $1500, monitor included, and it can render moderate scenes in a few hours at most (assuming you aren't doing crazy refraction/fog/sss stuff).
http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/what-is-in-your-workstation-why-xeon-vs-core.pdf
Clock speed ISN'T what you're looking for when comparing performance. See first page, second column, paragraph 7: "Processor frequency represents only one small part of delivering the best possible user experience. Possessing fast clocks with an inadequate infrastructure leads to stalls." There are reasons that serious computing happens on Xeons and not on 'i' series. First is that one *cannot* run an 'i' series in multiple cpu setups. Second is that the Xeons are capable of significantly more RAM and can use ECC. The 'i' series can be less expensive than a Xeon of similar specs, but isn't necessarily so. The 'i' series do lower the clock speeds proportional to the number of cores in use, the Xeons do not. This is a critical factor when running lots of computations over a long period of time.
Budgets do matter though. Most of the machines I have here probably cost 2 to 3 times more than most gamer machines. The Windows OS alone to run past 2 physical processors (and only to 32GB of RAM) costs about double the cost of most gamer's whole setup. So, yes, to get into the serious side can be a bit expensive -- on Windows anyway (Linux will support all 4 processors AND all 256GB of RAM for free). Using Linux can lower the costs by $3000 or more per machine.
And this leads into WHY the push for GPU processing: See that OS cost there? To get Windows above 2 physical processors you will need a "Server" license above "Essentials". Even then, you're limited to 32GB of RAM until you enter the "Enterprise" or "Datacenter" levels. Moving to GPUs gets around this major cost.
Kendall
This took me an hour to render on my $1500 (or so) machine. 1 figure with stuff, 49 extra node instances.
Most of the stuff is Subd1 (except the hair and beard, which are base) and I switched off SSS, but that's just part of reasonable tweaking for scene; there are a lot of things that are unnecessary in a lot of scenes.
Meanwhile, IF you want anything like realism, good luck rendering a similar-sized 3DL image with UE under an hour.
A lot of people just look at clock speed and not RAM type and amount of cache, etc. when designing a computer for this kind of thing. Of course, I know of gamers that have gone with XEON processors in their gaming systems for the same reasons you listed.
Easy for you to say. Some of us have spent a LOT of money on content. Content to use with the renderers we have. DAZ gives us the renderers for free SO THAT WE SPEND MONEY ON CONTENT. That 'compact', though unwritten, was the consensus years ago and it was so strong that when DAZ decided to put a price on Studio it failed.
I've never ever said DAZ shouldn't have given us PBR, nor have I said I never use it but that I use 3Delight more because of time and machine constraints. And those who basically say 'shut up, it's the wave of the future' don't understand the nuances of the situation. This particular PBR renderer is expensive to use which takes away $$$ from the sale of content. This should concern the PAs.
..for one, Xeons are more expensive. The dual Xeon concept I originally worked up would have cost almost 1,500$ for the two 8 core 2.3 GHz CPUs. alone. That is about what it cost me to build the current system I am working on.
Next Win 7 pro only supports up to 192 GB of Physical memory, therefore because of the configuration (6 x 16 GB) I would only be able to have a dual rather than quad channel setup. For my needs, 128 GB is more than sufficient, so I do not need the Win 2008 server edition.
Next, Linux does not play well with Daz, or for that fact most 3D software except Maya (which costs an arm an a leg) and Blender which for many has an incomprehensible UI.
Not all of us can afford a server grade system (the original build with the dual Xeons I was working on was around 8,200$ sans displays, and that was just for the box).
The bottom line is not all of us can afford a high end system like you have. By the same token we do not want to deal with render times that take days to complete. All we want is some type of conversion from Iray to 3DL, Is that too much to ask?
Both ot you missed the point of my posts:
1) Use the equipment you have to the best of what it can do. If you don't have the GPU, you can still use the CPU and/or 3DL. The content is what it is and the PAs have made it clear why they have done what they have done. We have to make the best of the situation.
2) The 'i' series isn't faster (contrary to the statement responded to), but even when one DOES have the hardware there are STILL artificial limitations imposed. Yes Win7 Pro can go to more than 32GB, but it cannot do more than 2 physical processors (and it doesn't schedule jobs on the separate processors worth a damn). To go more than 2 physical procesors you have to pay lots of money for server software and STILL be limited to 32GB unless you want to pay EVEN MORE money to get licensed for what you have.
3) Linux allows renders to happen using all of the resources available and one needs to use workarounds to get there from DS. No, the DS GUI doesn't run well on Linux but it can be made to operate sufficiently.
We all can do only what we can do with what we have. Even when one has the "bigger" hardware it isn't all wine and roses. I am primarily a 3DL user because it does what I need for the majority of what I render. I acquired machines with lots of processors because many RiSpec engines are not GPU friendly and (like you) I don't want to wait for thousands of frames to finish on smaller machines. When I run into content that doesn't have Iray materials, I simply take the effort to convert/create the necessary materials. It is normally a "one time thing" since I save the materials for later use.
I use Iray when I need to, but to be honest, I am not set up here for the latest Iray. Most of my CUDA hardware (many thousands of CUDA cores with lots of VRAM) is no longer supported under DS's version of Iray. I could complain about it... all of that very expensive equipment that just went useless in DS because of a version update one night... but I won't because I realize that things move ahead and won't wait for me. So, I use Iray on the machines that have compatible GPUs and rely on the CPUs to make up the difference.
Kendall
I really don't understand why a simple request (yes a bit of complaining) should lead to so much dismissiveness. It's not as if I demanded iRay go away or something as severe, for Pete's sake.
I can understand for new PA's who have never used Studio before, but for those who have been around for years? Has iRay been around long enough yet for the time saved from not including 3DL mats to make up for the lost sales from previous customers?
Would be nice to see this become a reality soon
A lot of negativity creeps in once there is an implicit personal judgement. It's one thing to say 'this state of affairs is annoying.' But when someone goes further to suggest PAs are making bad decisions or being mean to customers or whatever, well, they are going to feel compelled to point out why they made the decisions they did. And if someone doesn't address and incorporate those into their complaints, they are going to be dismissed as having unrealistic and unaware views.
Me, my main beef is confusion as to why Daz never worked on a Iray -> 3DL converter.
Let's keep this on the topic, not each other, please.
"This particular PBR renderer is expensive to use which takes away $$$ from the sale of content. This should concern the PAs."
Another blanket statement. It is true for some people, but not for all. This PBR renderer didn't cost me any extra to use.
Every choice we make has consequences. Many/most of those consequences are unknown when the decision is made. Kendall's point is simply that we need to make the best of those choices going forward, OR make new choices.