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Strange stuff indeed lol! But hey, at least we are all staving off dementia etc due to trying to figure this stuff out!
3DL in studio is loaded from a DLL call and will be constrained by any communications and/or memory sharing between DS and the render process. The Standalone is unencumbered.
Kendall
Yeah, and that can be a big performance hit. For most things dumping to RIB and rendering in the standalone is like hitting the nitrous oxide...
You mean you're not sure what's going on but everything seems to be moving very fast?
(As opposed to when I stupidly decided to find out if I could counteract nitrous oxide with sheer willpower. Yes, I could. Ouch.)
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I suspect that some of the things that can be done in Iray could be done in 3Delight too, but the way to do them isn't as easily accessed as what Iray allows now. Also, Iray can help with believable scenes, rather than realism, at least in my opinion, since as far as I know Dragons and Elves don't really exist.
Well, I beg to differ.
The standalone can do everything you can throw at it (physical sun/sky, proper GI, physically plausible shaders). None of those can be done (easily) with DAZ Studio's 3delight. Not the fault of 3delight though, it's purely the piss poor DAZ Studio's implementation.
Plus DAZ Studio does not properly pass parameters to the renderer to allow ray caching. Makes rendering anything with indirect lighting and bounce lights 5 to 20 times slower.
Ok so use studio to render to rib then do the real render with the standalone or get Batch Render for DS and let it do all the work. You can always manually tweak the rib file if you want.
Whether DS supports specific features is different from "scaled back". I cannot answer the question on whether the DLL provided with DS has all of the features of the standalone as I have not seen the contract. However, in the past we've been told by DAZ staff that the 3DL included in DS is not 'limited'. The context of those previous statements were fairly specific but the implications were that the DLL provided with DS was the same as that provided with Maya or the other supported software.
If you get down to it, *everything* that 3DL does is supported in DS via the RSL editor pane. As one who has pushed the DS 3DL implementation more than most, I can say that there are pieces that can be accessed that are not available in the current DS GUI and IMO are not likely to be now that Iray is the default renderer. But that is just my opinion.
Kendall
As far as I can tell, that's the case, except it isn't EASY....doable, but definitely Advanced User Only type stuff. The more limited parts are really ShaderBuilder, ShaderMixer and the RSL editor (as far as everything needs to be done by hand with it, including all the support scripts).
Yeah, I keep getting excited by cool looking bricks and then wah wah waaaah. Doesn't work.
It's the same in Maya, C4D, and other bigger packages. All of those "easy" features were created by advanced users playing with things like the RSL Editor, then their stuff getting bought by Autodesk, Maxon, etc. LAMH wasn't/isn't easy. Neither is dynamics, nor any of the other things I'm playing with creating. Some of these things will end up in DS as plugins for general use, other things I may just keep for myself since they're likely too complex to turn into single dialog click-click-boom plugins. I had to create a whole new method to add "hair" to Iray that doesn't kill machines. Wanna see machines cry for mercy? Create individual strand hairs on several thousand figures and try to render the scene in a PBR. Just doing *one* in zbrush and trying to render in Iray, vray, and even octane will make machines beg for mercy.
In the end, the functionality is there. Too many folks have forgotten that 3D isn't easy, some argue that it isn't supposed to be.
Kendall
Maya hair is generally supported by all Maya renderers. Never had a problem with it. I forget if that's true with Shave/Haircut and Ornatrix. I know Shave and Haircut is supported by 3delight, Renderman, Arnold and Vray. Ornatrix if i remember correctly is only supported in Renderman, vray, Arnold, Redshift. The one for Max have support for more renderers - Arion, Octane, etc. Not really using Maya at the moment though. Way too much fun working with Houdini.
It is indeed, are you paying Maya prices for DS plugins? Iray has no built in hair facility, the others that you mention do (and some of those also have LAMH support in the wings, Octane support has been in for some time but getting the OcDS plugin developer to cooperate is a challenge). But the thread is about 3DL vs Iray. 3DL features are available, as with Autodesk's offerings it will take 3rd parties to develop the "easy access" part.
Kendall
Nah, I ditched Maya. Took the trial and student version to play with it. Mostly to see what 3delight can actually do. And it does a WHOLE lot more than what's 'exposed' with DAZ Studio. Plus, Autodesk suck. In my part of the world, they're always pushing 3dsmax. Hell, I think the first and foremost reason they went and bought Solid Angle was to have Arnold for 3dsmax a reality.
Been shopping around for a new main app - C4D, Modo even Blender at some point. But Houdini seems the perfect fit for me. Plus it has support for 3delight (along with other renderers). Hair growing/grooming in Houdini is just so simple with the bundled tools that you don't need a plugin or addon (I forgot to add Yeti in my previous post). Renders, really, really fast with Mantra, Renderman and 3delight.
Yeah man, mantra is badass. I was rendering everything in mantra before Iray came along. Was disgusting fast, and I was rendering at absurd sized like 8k and bigger. Only reason I switched to Iray to start was the skin looks amazing out of the box. I always struggled getting skin looking decent in mantra, and I was doing only that for months. Couldn't get it right. Everything else, aven volumetrics, fluids, rendered fast as hell compared to every other engine I tried before that. Complex simulations took forever though, I only have a i5 PCU lol.
Turn on OpenCL in the solver. The fluid and gas solvers all have OpenCL acceleration. I noticed something around 2 to 5x faster sim times (depending on your particle separation settings) between a i7 4770K and a Radeon 260. Didn't work with the Intel GPU integrated on the 4770 though.
As for skin, I've gotten pretty good results with both the Mantra surface shader and the Principled shader. Actually I prefer the Mantra surface shader though, since it has a similar structure to omnifreaker's UberSurface2 shader. On that note, it is a shame that most 3delight shaders available now in DAZ Studio are still using precomputed SSS. Raytraced SSS in 3delight for Maya material is so fast, it is actually faster than the precompute one. Makes setting up materials so easy since you can change SSS settings on the fly with IPR. Just one of many stuff you couldn't do in DS Studio easily, along with specular GGX and a working Oren Nayar diffuse (both defaults in the new 3delight for Maya materials).
I've been struggling with render times lately. It feels like over the last few months all my renders have been taking MUCH longer than before. Using 3Delight, looking through this tread and getting some ideas.
A big question (as I am still a newer user that struggles with the tehnical aspects): What is SSS? You all seem to be saying reomoving it speeds things up, how would I go about doing that?
SubSurfaceScattering.
It's what makes, say, gummy worms look like gummy worms rather than ice. (very very very very roughly speaking)
It looks really cool, it's insanely render-intensive.
First step, IMO, is avoid using AoA SSS shaders. Just... they are slow. Very slow. Try to use UberSurface/UberSurface2 or Daz studio shader whenever possible.
Second, there will be Subsurface On/Off. Set it to, er, off.
Okay, first question: what is "AoA" mean?
Second: how do you tell a shader has SSS? Where in Daz do I look for that. I've got posing and camera angles and getting the figures all dressed pretty good but I still struggle with the technical stuff like this.
Third:Where would the Subsurface on/off be? On lighting? On each figure/prop/clothing?
SSS is subsurface scattering. As suggested above, it makes gummy worms look like gummy worms. You'll find a lot of human skin has SSS. The on/off switch is in the surfaces pane. Not sure which menu in there it's under but not hard to find.
AoA is AgeofArmour. If you haven't come across AoA Advanced Lights for Daz Studio I recommend you check them out (store here at daz). They made a difference for me straight away. They come with a manual which I would advise you to read even if you don't have the lights. There's some technical stuff in there that might teach you some handy stuff about how lights work in 3delight. AoA also has a Subsurface Shader. Sorry I can't give more info. Too much of a newbie myself.
Each object has shaders applied to it, which are found under Surfaces tab to the lower right (I think in most set ups).
An object often has multiple surfaces/materials. So, human figures have a Face zone, neck, torso, etc. Different shaders or shader settings can be set per surface. On a human that would probably look weird, but if you have, say, a table where the legs and the main surface are different surfaces, you could easily make a wooden table with painted or metal legs.
One of the cool things is that you have a variety of shaders and shader presets (if you are on the surfaces, if you look just above you will see a 'Presets' category, which will list many of these).
This way you can, say, rapidly apply metal or wood or whatever shader presets you have to new stuff. This can be handy if you are unhappy with the materials you have, or if the object you have doesn't even have shaders set.
For those who have not, I highly recommend using Progressive rendering as a part of your work flow. Its extremely handy for test renders to quickly show you what your going to get without wasting all the time in non progressive rendering just to see.
3Delight is as fast as you want it to be. The more quality you want, the slower it is.
Just try to render using UE2 in GI (Global Illumination mode). The results are great, so is the render time.... ;-)
Yeah, when people complained about Iray speeds, I was looking at doing stuff with atmosphere cameras and bounce and regular daz lights and going ... weeeell, not really!
Hey Totte. If you don't mind my asking, what/where is global illumination mode?
To the OP, man do I feel your pain. Been there a lot (a lot lot)!
You know, generally I read posts like this with great interest, but rarely post myself unless I feel I have something to add (and this thread being particularly hard to add to, when so many insightful things have already been said). Sadly, I am once again coming in when the discussion has long since died down. But since I'm bring totally new information and good news, maybe it will still be of use to someone.
The thing is, our notions about 3delight inside Daz Studio and speed when rendering with Image Based Light are about to be flipped on it's head. True, when all the bells and whistles are present, it will slow down renders for 3delight and most, if not all render engines to some degree. More computations take more time. But historically, probably the biggest hit occurs with transmapped hair and IBL. The general conclusion I believe has been that this was a limitation for 3delight, but perhaps it never was. This year I got the opportunity to work with the 3delight team on this issue, and the remedy reveals that it was not about the 3delight render engine itself, but rather about a conflict between the Image Based Light shaders and the surface shaders we commonly use. This fact was a complete unknown, so nobody's fault. And the very good news is that render speed increases are significant.
For myself, the high quality IBL renders I do now at wallpaper size (24 inch screen) usually complete in under 10 minutes. It's important to recognize here that IBL is a fast form of Global Illumination, so plays a significant role in achieving realism. Just as important: Turn gamma correction on and set Gamma to 2.2. Iray does this by default for good reason.
When are those fixes due to be implemented?
And, will they be adopted formally as the new "DAZ default 3DL" shader?
- Greg
And is it only the default shader what about Uber surface 2 layered shader AoA shaders etc.
I'm going to presume that its any transmapped item leaves etc were another problem trees always slowed down 3dl renders then add hair and you could be waiting forever.