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Yeah the new Pascal GPUs are supposedly 10X faster than the current Maxwell GPUs, on another note Stardock has found a way to combine ATI/AMD and Nvidia cards together in one machine http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/13/stardocks-newest-innovation-will-let-you-mix-amd-and-nvidia-video-cards-in-one-pc/ .. So will be interesting to see how it works out, also I use 3DL a lot and can have a pretty decent render done in bout 5 minutes or less it all depends on the lights you use.. :)
I also have an iMac 27". It has an i7 and 24GB RAM. IRay is very slow in CPU mode but Luxrender via Reality 4.2 is pretty quick. I have tried IRay several times - I even bought a GTX970 to put in a spare PC but IRay was still slow, despite lots of helpful advice from the people here on this forum. Maybe that's because I tend to render mostly indoor scenes. I returned the GTX970 to Amazon and went back to Luxrender and use the PC as a Luxrender network node.
I am pretty impatient so an hour is getting towards the limits of my tolerance for render times. Most of my scenes are quite clean after an hour in Luxrender so I'm ok with that. My iMac is 3 years old now and I promised myself that I would keep it for 5 years - I don't have the budget to keep upgrading because I'm on a fixed state pension. However, if I do take the plunge I'll probably go back to PC (maybe Hackintosh) for the very reasons you mention: to be able to use my choice of hardware. The good thing about the iMac is the resale value - I could sell and not have a huge additional outlay for a pretty decent new workstation.
If we're waiting for the latest and greatest from Nvidia which is Pascal I'm curious to see what drivers will be available for anything below Windows 8. Since Pascal is very dependent on DirectX 12 and MS has dropped development support for Windows 7 which may (does?) not support DirectX 12 (either does Win 8 AFAIK) will Pascal CUDA tools work in Win 7 (Or 8?) which from the looks of these forms Win 7 may be the most popular platform for DS right now (and 75% of the worlds computers apparently still use it, mine being one of them.)
I've found Iray in CPU mode is slower than LuxRender on my quad/multi i7 and infinitely slower than uberenviornment. Realistically Iray is very happy with a upper tier nvidia card but if CPU was my only option I'd use the cycles exporter that MJC made in the freebies over it, which is the engine Poser now uses and allows them much more flexiblity not being a proprietary solution.
No 2016 mac lineup can be configured with a 4GB nvidia card from factory, and your RAM and GPU are soldered to the board so upgrades are not possible with the exception of an external TB2 to GPU Chassis and a flashed card so on top of your video card of choice for Iray you are looking at about $300 - $400 for the PSU chassis and the flashed card added to the cost which.
Cycles and LuxRender support CPU AMD and Intel, or GPU through your ATI/AMD or Nvida card. Since many tech sites show that ATI cards outperform Nvidia cards on the same price point I find Iray paints me in a corner that Cycles and LuxRender don't, and not just on my mac.
actually @ RON
if you have PC Mac questions I'll be happy to help. I support both professionally for graphic artists. PM me if you need my $.02
Iray is integrated into DS and is fully supported. Even if Iray runs slower then Lux or Cycles in the CPU, the end user requires little effort to get an image rendering and looking good in it as there are no third party plugins required or additional hoops to jump through. So regardless of Lux Render and Cycles being free, there will be no product support for either comming from DAZ or its PAs in any product. And the vast majority of customers DONT want to spend their time fighting with stuff to make it look good. They want to load and render. So while 3DL support may dwindle down over time, there will still be more support for it then for Lux Render or Cycles.
No support isn't quite accurate. Very little support is closer to the mark. Dunno about Cycles,(though with RDNA vendors making new poser compatible stuff, we might at least get things for SuperFly. Not that I'm likely to notice since I've only got Poser 10 and favor Studio.) But there are a handful of items with extra materials for Reality or Luxus. Not much, but not none either.
...I do because a good percentage of my scenes exceed 6 GB when rendering. Why Nvidia never came out with an 8 GB GTX series GPU still puzzles me. You can get 8 GB in the Quadro line, if you are willing to shell out 2,500$. If you have that kind of spare change burning a hole in your pocket, better to get two Titan-X's then use the remaining 500$ to upgrade your system's PSU, and purchase more content.
Or wait a couple months for the new Pascal GPUs with 16 GB of HBM2 memory and 6400 cores hit the shelves.
...yeah my longest Iray render was around 7 hours. My longest 3DL/UE render was 16 hrs 30 min.
Not into scripting so most of the tweaks they are doing in the scripted 3DL rendering thread go way over my head.
90%+ of that thread has very little to do with scripting...and very little of the scripting that is talked about requires any coding. Most of the thread is about optimizing the current shaders, installing/using new or alternate shaders and getting the most out of what is available.
What scripted rendering is done, for the most part is still a pre-beta package, so it's not ready for prime time, yet...and once it is, it will be 'plug and play'...
So don't let that scare anyone off. There's a lot of info there that can greatly improve renders...both cutting time and over all look.
A small handful is not support. Yes some PAs tried when Reality and Luxus were both new but it stopped not long after. And when was the last time anyone bothered to support Luxus or Reality in a set here versus Iray. Not long after Iray came out, shader sets, light sets started poping up in the store and so did support within products. Why? Cause Iray is well integrated and easy to support. And these products keep comming and the vast majority of products support Iray our of the box. Supporting 3rd party render engines takes time and resources. I dont see any PA wasting time to make a product support Lux or Cycles when the return on their efforts is going to be next to none. 99% of the user base is going to use either Iray or 3DL so supporting those two is where we get maximum return for our efforts.
This image took me 10 minutes on Iray on CPU mode. I'd probably get the same quality in 3-5 minutes with GPU ($300 card).
I have a decent computer, but not top of the line:
16 GB RAM, Intel Core i7-2600 CPU @ 3.4 GHz (8 CPUs).
No SSD, even.
It's an Alienware X51, which goes for... let's see... $700 now?
(And I was playing something on youtube for part of the render and had a browser open, even)
A couple of things to take issue with here: I don't expect vendors to support Luxrender or Cycles. It is the job of Reality to convert materials for Luxrender. The point I made was that we who do struggle with IRay - despite the inferece that it is click-and-render - would hope that support for 3Delight continues. Reality is better at converting 3DL materials - IRay material conversion is somewhat hit and miss. Many people bought Reality from this store and it is still being sold here so we should expect it to continue being a useful tool.
As for fighting to make something look good, that actually describes my experience with IRay.
Totally off-topic, but your comic has me intruiged. Is this part of a series?
I've said it before...
My personal preference is that there are NO preset materials. Just provide the base maps, in a format that can be used in any renderer and let presets be made by the end user.
The nice thing about 3DL is that you can actually get pretty photorealistic, but you can also choose a wild variety of styles, easily. Also it tends to render, by default, more 'crisp' than Iray.
Consider this render, with no postwork:
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Art-jumble-woman-589082799
I found Iray difficult at first too but I have been using 3DL primarly for 10+ years so it was a bit of a twist to convert. But I just kept asking questions and learned where i was going wrong in certain areas. As for continued 3DL support, it will be on an individual basis for PAs but Daz still requires all buyouts to have both.
That's because 3DL is going to be here for at least a while...
It was said in one of the Iray threads that 3DL was recently 're-upped' and that is usually a multi-year deal, so at least as long as this current round lasts.
The thing about Iray is that it's very easy to do a bunch of things that slow it waaaaaay down.
I know, mostly, what to do for fast renders. But I always dump in a bunch of crud and soon it's a 2 hour render...
How can you vouch? Even a GTX 960 will significantly improve an Iray render over a cpu only.GTX-960's in the US are around $200. 3GB Vram will still allow some decent scenes. All of the renders in my gallery (or on Deviant Art) are with a 3GB GTX780.
I like both engines, but I can see 3dl being outpaced and left behind pretty quickly.
Skin surfaces look better by default in iray, which is something 3dl needs to improve.
I would really like to see some skin surface improvements for 3dl. It has been a while since anything new really has been released.
There are a lot of 3DL improvements that haven't made it into Studio...yet.
I'll continue to support both 3Delight and Iray for the foreseeable future.
I'm hoping to see these changes. I've enjoyed using 3delight and would prefer to stick with it.
To give you an idea this link http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php/projects from the 3Delight website gives an idea of how good the 3Delight engine can be when used properly and professionally..
And well the other thing when it comes to buying content, if the product does not have a 3DL option then I don't buy it as simple as that since the work I do does not need Iray..
Thanks for this example, Will !!
Not wanting to labour the point but it has been made before - many times - what about interior scenes? Most of the examples of relatively quick IRay renders look like they have been done with open scenes and HDR lighting. I hardly ever use such scenes. Can someone post an image of an interior scene with walls, glasss, mesh lights or emmisive surfaces with perhaps two clothed people? Then tell us how long it took in CPU mode? That would be my typical scene and when I tried using IRay - even when I had the GTX970 GPU for a while - it was ponderously slow.
As I said, that's a typical scene for me and I generally render them in about an hour in Luxrender. Maybe 15 minutes in 3Delight with AoA Lights.
Thanks for your interest!
It's part of a universe my co-author and I developed, an (unpublished) series named "Demon Division". The universe involves magic (which is what the wings part is about for that particular character) and the setting is a modern day AU. The page is from the prequel "Dwellers" and describes the events that set the story in Demon Division into action (literally a "universe changing event" for that AU). The prequel is still in the first draft level, and I'm doing the webcomic to keep me from running into writer's block. I have four pages done so far, but progress is slow due to this just being a hobby.
NO - I'm comparing Iray with Luxrender when it comes to emissive or Mesh lights. I'm just saying that the same scene in 3Delight with AoA lights (not emissive) will render in aboit 15 minutes.
The challenge remains - post an image made with IRay in CPU mode using indoor lights (not HDR Dome) in an enclosed room (as described in my post above). If that renders to a decent quality in an hour you will have impressed me.
3 or 4 GB card are probably great for portraits, but I don't make portraits. I'm topping out over 12GB RAM with scenes and thats' with Studio closed and externally rendering and streamlining my details so for me is not a $300.00 card or a $700.00 card, it's a $1000.00 card with 12GB GPU DDR or I can choose to go $150 to double my RAM and not have to constrain my projects (yes, I know about postwork layering, I'm a bloody Viking when it comes to postwork layering) Until then Iray to me is a option, but it's the last one I would choose. Without the proper HW to utilize it to it's "marketed" capacity the dreaded "hoops of fire" needed to use an external solution turns out couldn't be simpler for me use to keep in my pipeline and get better results with my initial $20 investment. beyond that it's the solution I now use for my all my 3d endeavors because it's so much more flexible. I'm a proud member of DS 1%'ers and if that number is based on an actual data i'd like to see it, otherwise I don't think it's accurate in the least.