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That one got me seriously excited when it was released (and I mean wet pants excited) and then I read the promo page :-(
Certainly looks like iRay only and with all those leaves and walls and petals and more leaves and.........
Imagine converting it all.
Oh well, maybe in a year or so I can afford a machine that doesn't collapse in a heap one in four times I try rendering in iRay
Still, an amazing looking thing.
One reason many products end up Iray only is because getting the same results is not going to happen with 3DL. I know quite a few people who have started the 3dl settings and thrown hands up because they just couldn't get results that they thought were acceptable. Many projects get started because the PA can see a way to use emissive light (which is in 3dl but very few people have had good luck with it in general) or because they want glass effects and so on. In other words Iray inspires in ways that 3DL does not. It is not that 3dl can not do those things it is that not many people in this little corner of the world have the the same level of skill as the people who use renderman for major motion pictures.
It's not even that...
It's that the base 3DL shaders in Studio are using functions that were well established about 4 or 5 versions of 3DL ago (maybe even longer than that)...and don't have/take advantage of any of the advances since then. The current 3DL uses what the 3DL team calls 'physically plausible' (Pixar uses that too) shading...the shader models are mostly the same ones used by Iray...
...here is a comparison, the same test scene rendered in 3DL (using AOA's Advanced Lighting System with added lights for "GI bounce") and Iray (with all materials manually converted to Iray and using the proper camera settings for Kodachrome 64). The scene used a photo backdrop on a plane primitive. I had to move the helicopter slightly in the Iray version as it cast a shadow on the backdrop (in 3DL I could simply turn that off).
I feel the 3DL version holds it's own pretty well and the textures just look better. Yes it is not photo real but is pretty high quality.
[First attachment 3DL, second Iray]
...I've used emissive lights in 3DL, yes, can be a bit tricky at first, but they do the job. Oh and glass effects? Look at the first attachment in my previous post.
...hmm refraction? Check the swimmer in the forgreound.
I mean something that's refractive and ALSO has SSS. I might be missing something, but I've yet to find any way to have 'cloudy water' in 3DL. The various shaders seem to be unable to process SSS through a refractive object like water.
None of the current shaders can do both...not the AoA or any of the omnifreaker line...pwSurface maybe. As for it being possible...yeah, but there isn't something in Studio to do it with.
It worked in the AoA shader during testing but was too slow to be of any use. Best way to do it (and the way studios do it with Renderman) is to compile multiple renders in post.
That's what I figured...but with the newer stuff/3DL it may be faster now, but I haven't played with anything that would...and a ShaderMixer network won't be much faster. It will need to be a custom written compiled shader.
I love your images KK, but I think maybe some of your own personal bias toward 3DL may be coming through even in your work. I understand moving the helicopter for the technical reason that you stated, but I don't understand why your Iray image doesn't include some of the secondary elements of interest that your 3DL image does.
For example, in your 3DL image, you've included additional lights and shadows (girl's shadow on trash can, sunlight shining through the tree leaves creating a stippled effect on the back of the white Porsche). But in the Iray image, they are not there. The girl's shadow is faded and much lower, while the back of the Porsche has absolutely no sunlight on it; almost as if it is only getting the bare-minimum of lighting from the dome or whatever. And the color temperature is different between the two images, with more warmth appearing in the 3DL image and more blue appearing in the Iray image. This runs counter to so many Iray images that I've seen, in fact the difference is so pronounced to my eye that at first I got the two images reversed and only realized my mistake when I read your verbiage.
As I said, I love the image and the girls are damned cute in both images, but I wonder if more care was taken in the 3DL image. If so that's fine. Please don't misunderstand my comment as harsh criticism, because it's not intended that way. Our personal biases are okay, they are what make up our personal uniqueness. But they are just that; personal biases. And we never really see our own until somebody points them out.
But the girl jumping, whoohoo! Well done, sir.
...I attempted to get the Iray sun as close as close as I could to the position of the Distant light sun in the 3DL image. It is very difficult to duplicate the same position setting exactly, especially since I had to "guess" at the Iray sun's positioning as you cannot "look through" it like you can a 3DL distant light. There is no way to adjust the hardness/softness of shadows produced by the default Iray sun like can be done with a 3DL light nor any way to change the brightness so what you see is all you get. Hence, the lack of "definition" of the leaf shadows on the car or roadway.
Iray is also more sensitive to gloss, hence the bluish tint to the brick street and other surfaces from the default Iray sky sphere. I used the default tone mapping for the Iray version and made no adjustments to it. If I turned the default Iray dome off, then the reflections in the mirror, chrome of the car, and bus and shelter windows would have been the viewport background colour (dark grey). If I used a conventional skydome with the Iray sun, then entire scene would have been in shadow. At the time I had no HDRI environments available and even if I did, matching the sun angle to that in the 3DL scene would have been even more problematic. For the girls I just applied the default G2F Iray shader without replacing the original skin colour (basically to give me the Iray channels). As Iray was still fairly new, nobody had yet delved into twealing the default shader to mimic SSS and other more realistic skin characteristics.
Indeed, the 3DL one looks richer which is part due to the contrast between shadows and lighted surfaces as well as the fact textures are more pronounced (I used the default bump and diffuse values for all textures and made no adjustments). I also used a standard skydome so that sky details could be seen in the reflections. for environment illumination I used an AoA Ambient light, set to the standard value and colour for a typical sunny day, hence there was no "bluish" tint on other surfaces as in the Iray version. This version also used the AoA SSS skin shader. At the time SSS was not supported by either Luxrender or Iray.
Also, almost no texture details seem to be apparent in the Iray piece even though I preserved all the bump and diffuse values, thus many surfaces appear to be "flatter", creating a.more "dull" quality..
Now granted this was one of my early Iray scenes (I originally was rendering it in Reality/Lux, but the times were absolutely glacial and I kept running into bugs with the R4 plugin) so I pretty much used the default render settings out of the box which were supposed to give realistic results. As Iray basically functions like a camera (same with LuxRender), I used the Kodak recommended settings for the render ISO speed I used.(64) for a bright daylight shot. I should have saved one of the Luxrender attempts, however even after nearly 20 hours they were still very "noisy" (though the tone mapping, light, shadow and texture values were closer to the quality of the 3DL pic).
BTW, the car is the Sports Car Emexon by Petipet with a little kitbashing for the tail light.
So true.
3delight in DAZ Studio is stuck back in time.
I think even if you managed to get someone who can write RSL modern shaders like the guys from Lollipop shaders, they'll probably think so too.
...but again a PBR render engine does not support a number of "in render" environmental effects, lighting effects, and style effects like 3DL does.
It is sad that further development of 3DL textures will most likely never occur for Daz now that it appears Iray has pretty much taken over. The fact there are also no texture conversion "Uber Shaders" from Iray to 3DL does seem to spell out that 3DL is becoming something of a relic here.
BTW, for the scene with the girls at the bus stop, the 3DL version took only 14 minutes (Daz 4.8), the Iray one, about two hours forty,
One problem you face making shaders for 3DL is what to base it on.
With Iray, there's mostly just Iray Uber, so you can jump from there and people can easily copy stuff to your shader. 3dl? Sheesh. There's Daz standard, then there's UberSurface, UberSurface2, AoA SS, the tiling one, grass, rocks... all sorts of stuff.
And with Shader Mixer...completely custom.
Nah, I only use one.
Iray don't have support for curves based hair (which is the physically correct model, not strips of polygons with opacity maps) if I remember correctly. And not just in DAZ Studio, but in other apps as well. 
Procedural hair needs a whole different BSDF approach.
Not really. A renderer just renders what it's told. You can render physically based materials and non PBR stuff within the same frame in 3delight for Maya, Max and Softimage (or other renderers for that matter). Again, the problem lies in DAZ Studio. Always have been.
I didn't try Iray in 4.8, but I just checked a bit ago in 4.9.1, and there are adjustments for the Sun-Sky stuff in the renders settings tab that do include light intensity and ground shadows.
These things can all be done with the sun-sky in Iray, although I'm not sure if there are any prominently placed tutorials on them. To place the sun precisely where you want it: add a spot light and in the render settings panel > environment "SS Sun Node" and select the spotlight (I mean you can technically set any object to control the location of the sun, but a spotlight is by far the easiest to position) the you can then look through the spot light to position it precisely, and the location of the sun in the sun-sky will follow it precisely.
The softness of the sun's shadow is mostly controlled by "SS Sun disk scale" which makes logical sense, as with all lights the bigger the light source, the softer the shadows, obviously you can also reverse this If you feel the shadows are too soft. Another factor in the environment panel that effects the strength of the shadows is "SS Haze" which doesn't change the sharpness of the shadows but instead the overall contrast (it also makes things yellower) again this all makes pretty logical sense: on hazy days shadows are much less strong after all.
The one thing I will also say, is that Studio does a much better job going from 3DL>Iray than Iray>3DL Which does make converting Iray stuff to 3delight an absolute pain if you want to use it there.
Maybe if we all ask really nicely, next update Daz will improve the Iray>3DL conversion, at least so the opacity maps stick around.
...which for a dyslexic like myself is akin to trying to untangle the FSM's noodly tentacles. I find Carrara's shader system to be much more intuitive.
...without being able to actually see the sun's effect in OpenGL mode it meant having to run multiple render tests to position it. I did use the Sun Chain rather than try and deal with out all those latitude, longitude, month, day, and time of day settings. The Iray sun and sun chain also use a different coordinate system (a "real world" one) than Daz default lights do, so the positioning scale for one does not relate to the other. I also don't see how a Daz spotlight and Iray sun could interact together for positioning the sun at the exact same angle as the distant light I used in the 3DL version.
As my GPU is old it doesn't support Iray view mode very well I have to work perform al setup in OpenGL especially on a scene with a lot of elements like this one has.
As to the sun's "size" I took it that the "default" was how the Iray sun would actually appear and affect the scene were it in the "real world" which is why I made no adjustments to it.
On the other hand I had little trouble with positioning the Reality/Lux sun as it was a separate light that actually was loaded into the scene just like a distant light.
...but that would darken the overall ambient effect of the scene. If the default setting is supposed to be representative of a brightly sunlit day without haze or clouds, then for such a scene (like the one I posted), I should not need to make any environment or disk size changes.
Like I said, "SSS Sun Node" locks the location of the sun in the sun-sky to any object thus working exactly in the way you would position it if you were using reality.
Another heartbreaking, Iray-only product :(
Ancient Arena
Please tell me the current freebie looks ok in 3DL ...
Royal Accessories
...bugger, The Server Farm is also Iray only. It really looks as if 3DL (as well as other apps like Poser and Carrara) are being pushed more and more to the back of the bus.
To whomever creates shader conversion tools for 3DL, Poser and Carrara:
Glad I came across someone else who still uses G1 like me. I hear what you are saying it makes total sense. I have the same frustration too.
Glad I came across someone else who still uses G1 like me. I hear what you are saying it makes total sense. I have the same frustration too.