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Given the large number of iRay shader packs sold, in addition to the new buyers that the iRay renderer has bought in, I would say a lot of PAs are very happy that DS was enhanced to use it.
I am really confused by this statement, exactly what sort of conversion do you need that you don't already have, you have a couple of 3dl shaders built in to DS, uber surface and the default these are as easy to apply and alter as the Iray uber is, and 3dl seems to render iray settings as well as Iray renders 3dl settings some render ok others not at well.
Scorpio: If you convert Iray materials to 3DL, almost everything is lost. I mean, yeah, you can keep most texture maps, except for Opacity and Normals (I think). But all glossy settings are lost, and so on.
Which isn't a big deal if you're converting one or two items, but if you have an entire scene?
To touch back on something... yeah, no, I'm not going to work on an Iray -> 3DL converter. Just too far outside my skills and interest.
I hope somebody more code-savvy works on it, though.
Yes, actually, and it happened around week two of the general Iray release.
Unfortunately, the perceived need for some ultra high end $4,000-$5,000 computer to use Iray is a by product of people trying to get the fastest render possible and/or wanting/needing more than 4Gb of GPU memory (and I think it is also a bit of the "mine is bigger than yours" syndrome). You can use Iray quite effectively on a sub $1,000 dollar system. This probably won't work well for rendering animations, but with patience you could still do it.
For example, I just rendered the attached image (1280x1600) on a system that was less than $1,000 (about $850 two months ago), and it took 1min. 23 sec. to render. Please don't look at the render for anything other than a quick sample render, it is not and artistic render at all!! The tech spec for this system: eight core AMD FX8350, Asus M5A78L-M/USB3 motherboard (not the best, but a decent economy board), 32Gb DDR3 RAM, Corsair H75 Liquid CPU Cooler, one internal case fan to cool the VRM (this is required when using a liquid cooler with this motherboard), an EVGA GTX 960 SC Ultra Quiet, and a 500W power supply. I got this computer from a small custom builder on Ebay for a project I was working on because I didn't have the time to build it myself (outstanding ratings - here is a similar unit from the same builder). I added the CPU cooler, video card, and extra fan myself.
Compared to my laptop (I7 2450M and GTX 970M), "loading" the data to Iray is a bit slower, but not at all unusable. No, a system like this wont give you the uber fast nearly instant renders of a pair of TitanX cards, but it is much much faster than CPU rendering, and you can pick up a GTX960 for $185-$250 (or wait for the 1000 series to be Iray compatible and you will be able to get a 1060 with 6Gb probably in the $200-$250 price range). The biggest bottle neck with this economy build is that the PCI bus is only 2.0, but that is only a performance hit when loading the data to the GPU, but has very minor effects while rendering.
I'm quite amazed at the relative impatience of many DAZ and Poser users now. maybe this is just a side effect of our "go to have it now" modern society. Regardless of render engine, I seldom get a "final" render in less than 30 min. With Iray I expect final renders to take 30 min. to 4 hours (or more, depending on the scene). With 3Delight I expect final renders to take 4 to 16+ hours (I prefer ray tracing and true GI). Keep in mind that many of the big studios have per frame render time allocations of approximately 24 hours (that's using huge render farms), so IMHO a 4 hour render is great!
Iray isn't being used for any major cinematic productions, and probably won't be for the foreseeable future. Why? Because it simply doesn't have the feature set required for cinematic production, and it's more af a technology demo product for Nvidia, not their business like Otoy (Octane Render), 3Delight, or Pixar Renderman. It will probably be a while before any major studios adopt GPU rendering (if ever??), it's just too new of a technology, and would require some major changes in hardware and infrastructure. GPU rendering is huge with small studios and especially in architectural rendering (you can have a render farm on the users computer). However, a little research on the web will show that almost all of the major studios have been moving toward a PBR/Ray-Trace workflow, including Pixar who doesn't do "realism" (PBR isn't an acronym Photo Real - but refers to how the render engine handles material/shaders and lighting).
But the same happens with going from 3dl to Iray, settings aren't optimised, displacment works totally differently, ambient becomes Light emittor often maps have to be placed in the correct slots its not done for you, theres no quick one step from 3dl to iray, just as there's no quick one step from iray to 3dl.
Thanks for responding. Good for the PAs then. That's great. When iRay first came out I purchased everything iRay, I mean everything including lights, shaders, cameras besides the regular stuff with iRay shaders applied. It actually took me weeks of playing around before I slowed down and almost stopped.
This has been an ... interesting topic.
Personally, I prefer 3DL, or a 3DL/Iray composite. So do I feel for those who aren't interested in 3DL.
That said... We do have the AoA subsurface, and dsDefault, and HSS as part of Daz Studio at this point, so we can apply those and see which one converts the most relevant settings over the best for what we're doing, and then yes, we have to manually adjust the rest. This actually isn't anything new.
Some of the newer DS users may not remember, but there was a time when almost nothing came with DS materials. Because almost everything was optimized for Poser. And those of us using DS had to adjust all the materials manually, including displacements and bumps, which didn't always load in correctly or at all, and opacity. Heck, there are still products available that aren't DS optimized and require work to get them looking good in DS 3DL. I really don't see how - other than a step or two to figure out which of DS Default, AoA Subsurface, or omniSurface translates the best for our intended result - this is any different than using products that only have Poser optimized materials. I mean, my system slows to a crawl, but it will render stuff that only has Iray materials when I render in 3DL (that's usually how I know I missed something. A 20 mintue render hits the 1 hour mark)
So... to the Vendors who have moved on to Iray - I understand, and I will deal with it, though your products may end up a bit lower on the priority list. :) To the Vendors who continue to offer both, even if one set is a for-pay add on, thank you. I do apreciate it.
Scorpio: I've converted between the two in different directions a lot.
Other than specialty 3DL shaders, 3DL -> Iray conserves a LOT more than the reverse. Though, admittedly, it's nowhere near perfect.
Honestly, the thing that most annoys me going Iray -> 3DL is that it doesn't recognize Cutout Opacity is the same as Opacity. Most of the rest you can work with, but if you have rocks, streams, trees, windows, leaves, and a dozen different opacity maps, that's a royal pain and it's way harder to fake proper opacity maps for leaves than just giving everything tolerable glossy.
.....Andrew tried advancing that several years ago at the Blender conference and ended up getting a tonne of criticism which included some pretty base and tasteless feedback from members of the Blender community. Seems they prefer it the way it is.and are adverse to change.
I've been away for a year or so from rendering inside DS. Now that I've more or less reacquianted with the older shader/lights as well as iray...I appreciate DS render system more today than yesterday.
It's a very healthy thing that DS has more than one "official" lighting/ render engine solutions. I recently bought 3DL toon shader and also "specialist" iray shaders for differen5t applications. To me they are not just "products" but shader "lessons", like, educational investments (my shopping excuses anyway lol)
There are more and more diversed type of DS users/ customers. I expect to see more and more animators who places great premium over speed/interactivity.
The NEXT GEN challenge for DS vendors is not providing both iray+3DL shader sets (that's a given) - but becoming more EFFICIENT at shading in both engines.
Animation-friendly yet good-looking shader/ material/ texture sets are actually way harder to create than massive 4K map kind of products. Same with mesh size. I currently steer clear of suspiciously inefficient GIANT/TOO-MANY texture map products.
There's still not enough procedurals or DYNAMICISM, iray or 3DL, IMO still underused Daz Studio mat system resources. We need more EFFICIENT particle effects in DS, for example!
It's way more fun to pose your sexy dolls like real life models in a living, breathing, water-splashing, dynamic sun glare or god rays through breezy flappy leafy tree-lined kind of photo stage. No? It's already happening in more game engines - where today's architects go pose their buildings, is where tomorrow's hobby CG photographers would go pose their SSS models. Dynamicism or interactive process is not just for animators or movie makers. Photographers will take very kindly to it too! That's my point...
Back to iray vs 3DL...
As much as I love DS's iray implementation I continue to marvel at AoA's (very advanced indeed) Advanced light system for 3delight, esp Ambient light, how it continues to matter and provide fast yet impressive render solution for those with a beefier CPU but lesser GPU rig. There's never enough of EFFICIENT, OPTIMIZED shaders and rendering system. Good optimization can also prolong the usage lifespan of our hardware.
...@ Dustrider. Yes but the only geometry and texture files in the test scene are the character so of course it will render fast. Now put that same character in Stonemason's Urban Sprawl 3 with some added trees, a couple additional figures, vehicles, a haze effect, etc and it will take a lot longer. I rarely use HDRI environments myself partly due to the fact I cannot work in Iray view mode for long as the refresh rate is excruciatingly slow on my system and eventually ti takes up all the available memory causing the programme to crash.
I'm not concerned with rendering in 1 - 2 minutes, I just don't care to have a render job tie my system up for a several days. I felt I was doing pretty darn good with 3DL and AoA's lights. As many here know I tend to do fairly involved and busy scenes (I have a difficulty with city streets that look all nice and orderly as well as clean enough to eat off of). The file sizes can get pretty huge, more than a 980 TI or 1060 can hold in memory. As I mentioned in a post earlier here, I am fine with 4 to 5 hours (which I usually run overnight). Other than the one motion blur scene with I did with UE (never make that mistake again) most 3DL renders go pretty quick, especially since the 4.8 update.
...@ Scorpio. The many shaders for Iray in the store are presets You select the surface, click to apply the shader and there it is. What William and I are mentioning there isn't a similar procedure in most cases for going the other way. If a new prop or set only has Iray shaders, there are no older 3DL ones that match it to use in their place. Yeah some may look OK but it is still pretty much hit or miss as you don't have the same channels to work with between the two engines.
...+1
This subject gives me a headache. IRay excites me. I like the thrill of "something new," etc. But I'm stuck. I've been a happy Macintosh user for 9 years. I do my best to keep up with computer hardware and software. My efforts are limited because I'm retired, living on a fixed, limited income.
I waited 5 years to get a newer Macintosh computer. It was a birthday present. The new iMac handles most of my needs just fine. But it's not really great at handling iRay. Apple has pretty much abandoned nVidia video cards. Apple doesn't think we want the ability to upgrade our computers, etc. Now, in order to easily handle iRay, I need to think about buying an older-model, used Mac Pro (maybe $2,000) or building a PC. It's a real risk buying the older Mac Pros. And I really hate Windows and PCs.
I know the computer world keeps advancing, and that is great. But I may soon be left behind. I want to produce some comics for my own amusement, and self-expression. But I can't anticipate such a project if it will take hours to render just one image.
Mythmakers: I'm really happy people here suggested I get AOA lights. REALLY made a difference.
I also got a lot further once I decided to just not use UE2 and just combine distant/spot with ambient and call it a day -- if I really really REALLY want that extra step of realism, I may as well go with Iray. And most of the time if I want a more realistic image I can probably use some creative filter to get a realistic looking 'photo.'
(I also got even further once I broke down and got Photoshop and started embracing post work more)
Have you seen this yet - https://bizon-tech.com/us/bizonbox2-egpu.html/
Doing a custom setup with a 980TI it looks like it would cost about $1400 USD.
Thanks for the link. I'm not sure if I saw this exact item. I did see one external video card box. I read mixed reviews on the item. The main criticisms left me thinking the external solution to such devices is somewhat inefficient. A box like that, and a video card might bring me up to $1,000. Compare that to a custom build like the one you mentioned. It would be better to go for the custom build.
Then again, I have no idea when I'd be able to gather $1,400!
What channels do you think are missing?
Well, an easy example is opacity.
3DL -> Iray, the converter understands that 'Opacity' -> 'Cutout Opacity.'
Going the other way, nope. Cutout opacity?? What nonsense is that! DUMP
Other examples include:
3DL:
Velvet
Subsurface (it's not missing so much as works a bit differently and hard to translate)
Reflection (weirdly related to metallicity/specular)
Fresnel (like subsurface, there is a form of fresnel in both 3DL and Iray but they, I believe, work rather differently)
Iray:
Top surface
Thin film
Subsurface (ditto above)
Normal is a little different, in that 3dl lacks a weight slider. But 'properly' Normals shouldn't have weight sliders anyway, sooo.
That would be how I'd use AoA Ambient too... UE2 still has its place, like, a hint of moody tint. But generally I'd go 3DL only now when I want things to look fake-ish.
IRay is just too easy to be correct, almost impossible to making things look like they're "not in the same scene" (well except the HAIR it's always the non-fibermesh hair that ruins it!!!).
I laugh at myself, when in iClone I strive for as much physical correctness as possible, faking SSS etc.. Here, with all the PBR power and fun, I start to wonder, hm, why don't I make iRay do NPR stuff! Is that masochistic?
The sudden wide availability of physcially correct renderers
has shown us how badly transmapped hair can look
Not just Iray most of the longer hairs render as complete rubbish in Cycles as well.
3DL:
Velvet = Backscatter
Subsurface (it's not missing so much as works a bit differently and hard to translate) = So it is there and needs adjustment. Most surfaces need adjustment so that is null
Reflection (weirdly related to metallicity/specular)= Specularity is and always has been a type of reflection setting. In 3dl it is just broken up into multiple settings that are often used to fake real reflections.
Fresnel (like subsurface, there is a form of fresnel in both 3DL and Iray but they, I believe, work rather differently) = Top coat has a fresnel option
Iray:
Top surface = spec 2 (assuming you mean top coat)
Thin film = thin film is arguably a PBR setting that so not at this time useful in 3dl. Like many settings it is something people have been faking for years by coloring specularity settings.
Subsurface (ditto above) = ditto above
Normal is a little different, in that 3dl lacks a weight slider. But 'properly' Normals shouldn't have weight sliders anyway, sooo. = Normals really should be created so that they look right without adjustment anyway and to be perfectly blunt way too many people don't adjust them anyway.
Seems to be that way in ALLOT of these little on line communities. Don't change this, don't change that or I'm leaving.... blah blah blah blah... Change is inevitable but we like to hold on and hold out for as long as we can. Some are more mutable and others are steadfast to the tried and true older ways. It's the human condition!
...in the same boat here unless I win the Megabucks Lotto.
...also Positive and Negative Bump as well as Lighting Model.
...exactly transmap hair is a real issue. Unfortunately that makes up most of the hair content I have. The other is strand based which only works in 3DL. True you can save and import as a .obj, but then you need to rig it if you want to pose it layer it if you want a sense of depth, and then texture it. Importing as a .obj also seriously increases the polycount.
I don't look at 3DL as being "fake", instead I just see it as different, like oil painting is different from pen and ink drawing.
...bloody Cloudflare crashed twice while writing this.
On faking - yes I agree re 'difference usage'. Also arguably PBR is not completely physical real or 100% correct. Fake-ability has its pluses in creativity and allows for effects and greater scope for manilpulation. Guess my point is 3delight and its related products will continue to be relevant in spite of fast & easy iRay.
As an animation creator I do wish for a better openGL or 3Delight main viewport Draw setting: particularly the highly optimized AoA ambient occlusion showing in realtime to help anchoring objects and actors when animating. Some textured draw mode occlusion - or even low res shadow - will help guide where things are spatially when the ground is procedurally shaded/ non-textured.
Like, Textured: AO or Smooth Shaded: AO or Toon: OpenGL Intermediate Shadow kind of viewport draw style with some Draw: tweak settings.
On rendering Transmapped Hair/ Fibermesh obj in either engine:
Overall hair quality already suffers from lack of dynamics and last gen morph workarounds. All the iRay anisotropic glory is wasted if Daz spline hair looks as stiff and thick as undercooked spaghetti!
DS hair fidelity is a few years behind skin quality. Almost every hottest SSS skin + superb normal displacement pores + pro quality texturing is compromised by skin-hair visual DISCONNECT.
(when aiming for realism (photoreal or kinda-real), the biggest giveaway of "not from a pro" or "definitely prefab products" creation is Hair and Skin Quality Mismatch)
Not saying dynamic, iRay-friendly LAMH hair will suddenly advanced DS fiber hair to DS skin level, that is still subject to craft and artistry. But it would help reduce mismatch/disconnect eye sore!
Anyway... after playing with iRay for a few weeks now, I've decided animating LONG Photoreal fibermesh MESH hair in Daz, though can be done, is still not worth the time. Back to toon style lumpy hair mesh like the recent Daz Original one on Aiko 7... or perhaps other game style hacks.
...again Fibremesh hair is very memory intensive. It would pretty much require the memory resources of a Titan-X or even Quadro M6000 to hold a complete scene. especially with multiple characters.
It is too bad Iray didn't have a similar system to Octane where it split the Geometry and Texture load. It wouldn't be as lightning quick as pure GPU rendering but much faster than pure CPU rendering and wouldn't require a GPU with tonnes of memory at a heavyweight price..