3Delight support stops?
ColemanRugh
Posts: 511
in The Commons
Not everyone can afford a $1,000 video card.
Will DAZ sell anything new for 3Delight or try to advance it anymore or we are now in a state of IRAY worship 100% ??
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Comments
3Delight support is up to the PA who are making the items. DS 4.9 has been updated with a new version of 3DL.
Most items sold are coming with 3Delight support.
And you don't need a pricey graphics card to use Iray. When set up right renders are no more intensive or take any longer than 3Delight renders using UberEnvironment.
And that's good... because you don't need to spend that much on a video card to render with Iray. I didn't.
As for 3Delight advances... the 3Delight renderer was updated in 4.9 just like the Iray renderer.
Thanks Jestmart and ChuckDozer.
I have a NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 2 GB
I make comics and would render at least 20 renders a day.
Can you show me renders you've done with IRAY and tell me how long they took to render?
Thanks!
Will continue to support both as both have their unique style of rendering.
I find a good 3DL render takes me 30-45 minutes. I find a decent Iray render takes me about 60-90 minutes. Broadly overlapping, depending on a bunch of factors.
Both can be slower or faster, depending on various factors. If I need to, I can speed up the Iray render a lot under some circumstances (like shutting off all SSS stuff, particularly on human figures, and using no more than SubD 1). Some 3DL stuff can be a lot slower, like volumetrics. Or some toon stuff can be very fast.
That's for bigger scenes. For close portraits, Iray sometimes takes no more than 10 minutes for very wonderful images.
I have a GTX 970, which costs about $300.
I have a GTX 660 at 2GB which regularly cuts out almost in every scene I render. So you can say, I am a pure CPU-render person. Below, you can see the sample page for my webcomic. The single image is at 3200x2400px, and renders between 2 to 8 hours on my system (I7-4660), using render quality 2. I usually stop when the quality is at a level I find acceptable; this means sometimes 95%, other times 70%.
Note that composing pictures (like, rendering single characters and merge them together in Photoshop) often helps reducing rendering times considerably.
Still, if you are not going for a photorealistic look, 3DL is probably the better choice of renderer if you render a lot of images per day.
That is what I am also thinking. Not everyone has the money for a new machine or a new video card and it is not only a PAs thing it is also a DAZ thing and here is why:
I can buy stuff here at DAZ or I buy me a new expensive machine, I can`t do both so if I buy me a new machine I will not buy anything here at DAZ for a long time.
BTW, I have made the experience that a lot of Iray products are looking good rendered in 3Delight and most of the time these products do not need any editing or huge editing of the surface settings to have good results also in 3Delight. And you can also change the shader to SSS or DS default and reload the normal maps if needed.
A heavy duty 3DL render, with lots of lights, reflections and shadows can take me 8 or 10 hours. The same scene in Iray, even optimised, can take me 8 or 10 days. (Mac, CPU only). I never have 8 or 10 days to spend on a render.
There are one of two things going on there...
Either the Iray render is not as 'optimized' as you are thinking it is...
OR.
The 3Delight render is missing a couple of things that Iray has 'on' by defualt...like global illumination. Iray, while not quite infinite, has a much higher default number of 'bounces' than 3DL for raytracing.
Without GI enabled in 3Delight and something higher than 16 'bounces' (max raytrace depth), it makes comparing the times between the two pointless.
After doing quite a few runs with simple scenes early in the Iray beta, I found that, yes what was being said, by the Daz devs was mostly true. Both 3DL and Iray when set up to be as closely matched (shader, lighting--raytraced shadows on, for everything, GI enabled) as possible there render times, with Iray using CPU only, are pretty darn close to the same. The runs I did pretty much broke even as to which one was faster...and then it was only a few seconds difference....the scenes were such that no render, in either took more than about half an hour. So less than 10 seconds out of 1800 is not significant.
One Iray adjustment (from the default) that Can help shorten time without impacting image quality (at least I haven't seen an impact) is to change Max Path Length (Render Settings> Optimization) to something between 5 and 11, rather than the default -1. -1 lets Iray take an unlimited number of light bounces. Any other number limits the number of bounces and seems to decrease render time for more complex scenes. I have used 9 to 11 and haven't seen adverse impacts on the image quality. I suspect one could even go a bit lower without percptual impact.
That's the setting I couldn't remember...it's the same as the max raytrace depth in 3Delight. 8 to 16 would be a number that would be very difficult to tell it isn't unlimited, unless you are going for an 'infinite sphere' type render.
Another setting that can greatly impact Iray times...caustics 'off'. If you don't need them, like window glass, don't have them on.
I forget what the 'quick preview' process is... eg., how does a person decide which features to turn on/off, without spending an hour and a half waiting for the render to finish. In the attached, which I've posted separately, caustics are "On" and so there is amazingly subtle window glass on the bookshelf wall in 'The Library'. Other renders with Distant Lights off -- lights that I put in at random, myself to supplement the mesh lighting in the set -- got rid of the hard shadows on the floor and let Iray put in some wonderful soft shadows on the bookshelf.
I'm amazed that I can actually follow many of the concepts mentioned in this thread. Any comments about Notepad ++ vs. Textpad?
UltraEdit!
Not true. Absolutely false.
Spit, my experience is that you can get comparable times in 3Delight and Iray, particularly if you opt for more realistic 3Delight lighting. (Like uberenvironment)
given that I run cpu-only Iray renders all the time in a laptop with no GPU other than the Intel processor one, I'm gonna have to say that for the most part it is true that you don't need a pricey graphics card. And depending on materials, lights, and settings a 3delight render can exceed an Iray in length of time taken to finish. (especially when reflective surfaces are involved...)
I have a $700 video card, now. Can vouch that Iray isn't for any card worth less than that.
HippoEdit...
I run Iray on a 3 year old $1200 laptop with a video card that would cost about $150 today and I'm doing just fine.
My Iray renders run faster than their equivalent 3delight setups would for me, Setup a render with meshlights and bounce light in 3delight and get back to me on how much faster 3delight is. The folks in the 3delight thread have some more optimized stuff, but using uberarea lights and uber environment? and then adding in sss and transmapped hair? Hello 12 hour renders.
In recent years I've gone to all Macintosh computers. The biggest weakness with Macs is that Apple doesn't think we want "power" setups and we don't want the ability to upgrade components etc. My new 27" iMac is good for everything but my 3D hobby. I'm thinking of getting an up-to-date PC just for my artwork. But I've been out of the PC world for so long, and get confused.
Heck, I run on either a $400 desktop (price includes GPU) or a $250 laptop with no Nvidia components and Iray tends to do far better than 3delight on both.
Pity to hear that Macs are going that way. I'd always envied their graphics abilities.
There has got to be something off with the set up. I've done thousands of renders on a 7 year old computer with 4GB memory, an I think an i4 processor, and a pre cuda GPU. In other words it is ancient and was slow just surfing the net. I think the longest any render took on it was 7 hours and that was because I was trying to light the whole scene with candle light and nothing else. I had a 5 hour promo that was 75% reflective surfaces. But I can't imagine how huge and how much reflection and lack of light I would need to make even that old computer take even 2 days. On the other hand I have had promos in 3dl take 2 days because I was using the uber enviroment and transparency. Neither of which drags down an Iray render. If you like I am sure people can help you with optimizations which will pull that render time down to something far more reasonable no matter what sort of computer you have.
FWIW, Nvidia (and their competitor ATI, now part of AMD), have done a fantastic job pushing GPU price performance, and this trend shows no sign of slowing. What costs $1K today is likely to cost $250 next year . . . particularly as Nvidia has a new chipset introduction any day now (Maxwell), expect to see current generation cards drop precipitously in cost.
My two cents: DAZ & Nvidia have played this just right. I've been experimenting with hardware based rendering solutions for years, and the IRay solution is terrific. Its the right idea, and given the relative curves of GPU performance improvement (steep) compared with CPU performance improvement (pretty much flat), I'd bet on IRAY vs 3DL, longer term.
If there's not a card at your price today . . . wait til tomorrow.
Thanks everyone for the feedback and tips!
I think the new chipset we are awaiting from Nvidia is called Pascal. Maxwell is the present incarnation. Pascal is rumored to be many times faster and more power efficient than Maxwell so it is probably worth waiting for. Having said that, I think it goes along with new architecture (NVlink) for motherboards so a complete PC upgrade might be the way forward if the budget allows.
EDIT: a bit more reading reveals that NVLink will not be essential as Pascal will run on consumer PCs with PCIe.
Just an additional comment to go with the concern expressed in the OP: those of us who prefer Reality/Luxrender to IRay (and that would probably include a lot of Mac users) would be keen to see 3DL materials included with products. Reality, by default, converts 3DL to Luxrender materials. It does a fair job with some IRay materilas but the results are not consistent in my experience. Losing the 3Delight option would be a major negative for us.
Hey RonKnights, happy to see you here!
