Reality 4 (Luxrender) vs. Iray
rnollman
Posts: 310
I just recently upgraded my machine so that I could get faster render times using Iray. Now I am seeing ads for Reality 4 which is somehow related to Luxrender. Could someone explain to me the relationship of Reality 4 to Luxrender and the differences between Iray and Reality 4 and/or Luxrender. The renders examples shown in the promo ads for Reality 4 appear to be higher quality than Iray. Also, if people have used both (or all three -- I am a bit confused), is there a steep learning curve to use Reality 4 and/or Luxrender? If the render quality is better, is it a steep learning curve? Are there issues that I need to address to decide if I want to go down the Reality 4 path? Why is DAZ offering an alternative to Iray. After all, I just moved from 3Delight to Iray in my thinking. Why would anyone choose to use Reality 4 over Iray for rendering?
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Comments
There are a few threads already on the merits of lux vs Iray. Basically Reality is a bridge and interface from DS to the actual renderer, Luxrender where you can tweak all the shaders, materials, textures, lights, cameras, etc before rendering.
Reality/Lux preceded Iray as a DAZ PBR. Reality is a bridge that prepares the Studio scene for Luxrender (a separate program). Iray uses nVidia only cards and falls back to CPU if the card can't handle the scene. Luxrender uses the CPU and each CPU core is running parallel processing. You can setup a render farm with Luxrender - if you have 3 octo-cores in your house, you can run all 3 on the scene, effectively giving you 24 render processes.
Iray has materials already optimized for some of the newer D3D product, Reality/Lux will need some manual shader work.
* A lot of this is based on my experience with Reality 2, some may have changed.
Since iRay is included as part of DS then you are probably best playing around with that first to become accustomed to PBR renderers. After that, if you so wish, you will be in a better position to choose between iRay and Reality/Lux (or decide to use both)
I've used both, LuxRender and iRay, Reality is not a renderer but a bridge for daz uses LuxRender.
All unbiased render engines needs some tweaking skills for succeed, that is not a bad thing, even Vray with no question one of the better engines for rendering it needs the user come in play for achieve great results.
For your perspective if which one creates better quality, the answer is NO, both produces great render images, the render engines are only tools for the digital artists, believe me, I've seen masterpieces created in PovRay!, a great render comes from the skills of the artists, the engine produces a still of your talent and skills.
both engines can manipulate your materials in different way between each one, if some people says X or Y software don't do the same quality is because not using the software with plenty of knowledge or is learning in the process, adaptability is another factor, for dudes using Reality in first place because iRay came later is pretty obvious that Reality is much easier than iRay, but I can say the same when use Maxwell Render regardless looks like a Nasa interface but it was my first render engine outside studio.
my 2 pesos.
I just started with Reality, so here's what you'll see from a newbie perspective- after you install Reality, the link to it is right there in Studio when you go up to "Render." click, and you're in Reality. In that, you put checkmarks by which lights you want to use which are already setup in the Studio. (You don't set up the lights in Reality.) You can change materials by clicking on the materials of an item (let's say a shirt- if you want to change it from cloth to metal, you click on the shirt to get the dropdown showing "cloth" and right click, then in the dropdown "Change to metal." Done. That easy. (You can always tweak the channels, I'm just showing you how it works.)
When you click the render button, LuxRender opens up in a separate window. You do further tweaks there (like Tone Mapping, like in Iray, you have ISO, Shutter Speed, etc) and while it is rendering, you can actually change those and NOT have to pause like you do in Iray in the Studio when rendering. (Of course, in Iray you can tweak while in the viewport if you have Nvidia Iray selected as your view) But it's nice to tweak DURING THE RENDER.
I'm playing with it and really like it. We'll be chatting with Paolo live tomorrow night at 8pm Eastern time and he will be answering questions, feel free to join us over in the Art Studio thread. That thread is in the Art Studio so any artists with Reality who need assistance and experienced users can post them all in one place. (In addition to their galleries) Paolo has already been on the thread a couple days.
iRay can tweak ISO, Exposure, vignetting and more settings during the render, yep, the render not the viewport.
but is hidden on the left of the render window in a form of a little white triangle.
Interesting. I will have to try that in Iray. Not sure why they would hide that feature.
Well, otherwise it takes up a lot of screen real estate.
its hidden because takes more space with parameters than the average user does not use or does not usually needs to tweak when considering the final render output like a "final production and is perfect". and you have the viewport iRay before the main final render for make changes.
I'm not very experienced with IRay but I seem to remember that tweaking the exposure, etc., during the render cause the render to restart from scratch - is that not the case? Luxrender tweaks are made real-time without starting over.
Good News!, I did a test rendering and...
ONLY Firefly Filter ON/Off break iRay iterations
the rest of settings can be modified on the fly without breaking iterations.
Thats cool so one can adjust the tone mapper without the render starting from scratch like the preview. I use both but more iray since Lux is still slower and there are still tons of issues with Reality in accelerated mode wich still take 4 to 8 hours on average using 1 mesh light. Having said that some iray renders can take almost as long (I set it to run without a time limit) since I HATE seeing any noise left in my renders...
For a good comparison, you can check out the DA gallery of Elianeck, a very skilled artist with a distinctive style. If you look through her works you will see that she is using Reality/Lux before iRay came along, then switched to iRay when it arrived (I don't know if she still uses Reality). This is not a demonstration of how iRay is better, but an interesting exercise in seeing how she was able to recreate the same style with iRay as with Reality/Lux, and you would not be able to tell which is which if she had not told us on each image. It goes to show that PBR's in skilled hands should produce very similar results, where as producing the same results in different biased renderers (eg: 3DL and Poser Firefly) would be much more difficult.
Eline is a killer artist big fan. Makes sense. Hance why I can use both for my stories.. Tested it and render starts from scratch when adjusting tone mapper
Heck, I've moved from Iray to 3DL (somewhat).
It's possible to get photorealistic images, with a bit of work.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with 3DL. I have made several decent renders with UE and Latinos lights 2 http://fav.me/d4gnllh I just forgot how to use it. Nice thing about having both options if something frustrates me with Reality just use iray which is what I am using 80% of the time. I am surprised that they are so slow at resolving issues with Reality or Lux.
What's really helped is finally clueing into Bounce light (which makes images MUCH more realistically-lit), and getting a few other items that help renders process well (UberSurface2 and AoA lights. Bounce light doesn't work well with SSS EXCEPT for UberSurface2, in my tests)
So more manual work but once one knows what they are doing it's NP..
Yeah, the first 80% of the trip toward 'good stuff' is vastly easier in Iray. But the next 10%... starts getting pretty even, given wrangling with good lighting and the cost of render time and so on with Iray, and all the fiddly details and experience to get things to work on 3DL's part.
That last 10%? Pretty subjective. ;) I love Iray, but I'm also loving some of the stuff that's actually easier in 3DL.
That may change, particularly if people start making funky new shaders for Iray. But in 3DL I can do some interesting effects that would require loads of postwork in Iray.
Kind of like what Lux is for me. Spent over 2 years with it. The mesh light pretty well does it all but with iray the light used will at times have different results so I am still learning / experimenting. Took me FOREVER to figure out how to let it run indefinitely but finally got it.. Re doing some of my story renders that I felt had ended too early leaving it a bit too grainy...