Reality for DAZ Studio
3Diva
Posts: 11,973
Is this product worth getting? I use Iray and am getting great results with it, however if this product gives better results I'd love to know. How does it compare to regular Iray renders through Daz Studio? Is it better? Worse? The same?
I'm considering getting it but don't want to get it if it can't give me a marked improvement in rendering realism results. I'd love some feedback from those who have used both it and regular Iray rendering through Daz Studio and your opinion on which is better.
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I just looked at the Read Me and it looks like it came out two years ago? So I'm guessing it's probably not better than Iray today. Probably. lol Let me know if that's wrong. :)
I would say Reality gives a slighty nicer result on skin ,but you have to set all the material and mesh lights up,so Iray is quicker and easier ,I am lazy so I hardly ever use Reality any longer.I think this is Reality 2 on sale which is better in my opinion than Reality 4 ,but you will have to spend more time to learn it the renders might also take longer with Reality.
Ah, I see. :) Thank you for the info, SPACECHIMP. It's much appreciated.
I'll probably pass on it then if it's not a decent improvement over Iray. Taking the time to learn a new program that doesn't give a marked improvement in the renders probably isn't worth it. :)
Reality is an interface for LuxRender, which also gives you Photoreal images. I'd recommend Reality 4.0, which is the current version (actually, I think 4.2 is the current version, but that is a free upgrade from 4.0).
Materials have to be converted to work in LuxRender, regardless if they are 3DL or Iray. Lights also need conversion. Reality helps with these conversions, and has become a pretty powerful tool. Also, LuxRender doesn't depend on nVidea graphic cards, though I don't know if it currently works with GPU or runs mostly on CPU, as I abandoned that road in favour for Iray (mostly for lazyness rasons, not for quality reason.
There's a lengthy thread featuring LuxRender images and Reality somewhere in the bowls of the forum, but I don't remember where.
EDIT: the actual version on sale is 4.3: http://www.daz3d.com/reality-4-daz-studio-edition
I played with Reality not long before Iray came out and abandoned it in favor of Iray as well. Mostly because Iray is natively supportred by DAZ but Reality/Lux really are not (they are 3rd party add-ons, kind of).
However Reality does have one *major* advantage over Iray, at least as currently implemented... With Reality, if I remember correctly, you can stop a render and save its current progress, and the come back tomorrow, or next week, or next month, and pick the render up and continue it. With Iray, as far as I know, you cannot do that. That alone is not enough to make me want to deal with Reality, but I definitely misss the convenience factor.
Luxrender uses OpenCL, so if you do not have an nVidia video card -- e.g. you have an ATI video card -- then Reality + Luxrender could be worth the hassle of dealing with materials (and sometimes they come out fine without much work and their are some predfined materials to help with e.g. V7). Luxrender also has network rendering support, and you can close out DAZ Studio to free up memory for Luxrender.
I stopped using reality after I tried iray. It had some serious issues with geographs for some reason.
Reality/Luxrender can render using your GPU (from Nvidia and/or AMD, even mixed), your CPU, or both GPU and CPU, in classic, accelerated, or accelerated extra boost modes.
Yes you can pause/stop and unpause or reload renders to continue later.
And yes it requires you learning a new materials interface (reality) to set up your scenes. I started with reality before iray came out but have no intention of swithcing to iray as I am quite happy with reality/lux. Plus I like the materials interface, its far simpler than iray or even 3delight once you grok it. But its not nearly as plug n play as iray or 3delight. However I will say I spend the least amount of time in the reality interface when setting up my scenes than everything else (setting the scene in daz -- posing, lighting, cameras, etc), once you get it its really quite simple/logical.
There's a reality gallery over on deviantart you might want to check out to get a sense of what reality users are creating: http://reality-plug-in.deviantart.com/gallery/
But in the end, as Im sure you are aware, its up to what you want to do regarding upping your rendering game, and how much time you are willing to invest learning. I have seen gorgeous renders from people using plain ol' 3delight because they took the time to learn the ins and outs of that materials/lighting/rendering paradigm. Just because you use an unbiased render like iray/reality/octane does not mean instant realism -- they are all just tools, its how well you swing them that matters.
My 2¢.
Reality caused problems on my computer for some reason creating tons of temp files and making my studio unstable and bogging down my scene with thousands of temp files. I didn't find support to be helpful as they insisted I must have an old version installed and only told me to install the new version. I wanted to remove It entirely. I did not ever find a solution to this as there was no way to correct this issue beyond opening each file and saving as a scene subset. Just a few months ago the temp issue flared up again messing up my files with reality nodes. I still don't know how that happens. I won't ever install it again.
I have been using Reality since it was released, both the DS and poser versions and have not had any issues with it. If anything it helped me understand IRAY lighting better since they share similar properties (Unbiased rendering) and I found it easier to setup materials in the Reality interface than with IRAY. I personally like the outdoor results I get better with Reality/Lux, but I like indoor lighting better in IRAY. Plus the ease of use with the interactive preview for IRAY has me using IRAY more and more.
I also no longer use Reality sick of all the glicthes. Iray suits my needs just fine. Like Mike I have to credit Reality for learning to work with unbiased rendering.
Sometimes, it's not the quality of the software, but the quality of the support that is important... case in point:
I bought Reality 3, used it and reallly liked the renders. When v.4 was released (about a year ago) I upgraded it for both DS and Poser. It worked well and I never had any issue that I couldn't fix or find a solution for by myself (and some searching on the Internet). Then I got busy a few months ago. I missed some updates and just this past week, I had enough free time to install the updates. I felt good about installing them, I had just upgraded my OS to MacOS 10.12 and had experienced no bumps in that upgrade.
Then I got error message after error message trying to run the updates. Thought it was just that maybe the disk images I had were corrupted. No biggie, I can go to the website and download them again. Well, every time I entered in the Order number and serial/licence number to get the update, I would get a denial of update due to a time-out. This happened on both Safari and Firefox (and I won't use chrome for reasons) even after a reboot.
I then tried to contact Preta3D Customer Support, because it seemed logical, I wanted the update(s) and THEIR website was mucking up and denying me them. Oh, I was mistaken. After explaining my situation and diligently writing down error messages and such, I hit submit and got the lovely message that my "free" 90 day window of Free Support had ended. Which sucked bigtime as this was the first time in over 3 years of usage that I even had reason to contact their support and I was not aware/never told that the "Free Support" timer started the moment I bought v.4.
The message said that I could use their forums to ask for help. So I copied and pasted the orginal message and made a new post in the support forum... and that was almost 3 days ago. Not. A. Peep. Not even a fellow user on the forum.
My lesson is that Preta3d is pretty petty and quick to deny support and slow, so very slow, to help even on issues that are their responsibility.
Right now the only thing that Reality has done for me is to introduce me to Lux Renderer which I am enjoying using with Blender.
So my opinion is to read things carefully and know what kind of practices Preta3d has and how they treat customers. And do what you will. As for me, well ... with Reality 4, I'm out the door.
[edit with updated info]
Seems that the lack of communication was becasue of Mathew (hurricane) that left Preta3D without power for a few days. So I was quick to make stupid assumptions. And the problem I was having with the installer is because of something Apple did in Sierra and not with anything wrong with Reality. So when Apple fixes what they broke, I'll be able to use Reality.
I bought Reality 4 when it came out, and it's never worked for me. After installing it, DAZ Studio wouldn't run; I had to uninstall it to get Studio working again. When I mentioned the issue, I was directed to send the log to Paolo. He looked it over and said the problem was with Studio. After several updates, the same issue persists. I haven't heard of anyone else having this specific problem, so I suspect it could be an issue with my computer, not with Reality ot Studio. I'm planning to build a new computer in the (hopefully) near future, so maybe that will solve the problem. It is frustrating, though.
You need to post your problem in the Reality DAZ Studio Edition or Reality Poser Edition troubleshooting section of their forum.
Also, read the sticky post IMPORTANT: read this before posting in this forum so you know to provide all the information needed in your post when you ask for help.
Thanks for the info, nDelphi, I'll try to do what you suggested, when I have some spare time right now I need to draw some comics.
LuxRender is a perfectly acceptable render engine. If you want a "don't worry your pretty little head with this math stuff" interface, Reality does it for you. If you like to dink around in the surfaces tab, consider Luxus. http://www.daz3d.com/luxus
If you don't like long render times* and you like the results your are getting from either 3Delight or Iray, then don't bother.
*Standard disclaimer-Individual milage may vary
I've been playing with the program today. It seems pretty unstable to me. It generates some great results when I can get it to work, and seems more flexible, a little like Carrara, in the rendering choices available, than IRAY. That is... if you're doing a big scene and you have a ton of RAM, you can do a CPU render - if you have an ATI or NVIDIA or even Intel GPU, you can use any of those options. The render engine has a lot of flexibility. But this thread concerns me - considering the problems I am having. I'll be upset if Reality is crash-prone *and* it makes DAZ Studio unstable too. I
I had a LOT of technical problems with Reality for Daz. Paulo tried to help me with them, but he's just one person. He is Reality and does all the programming and troubleshooting...but he's just one person. Iray has the technical power of NVidia behind it. While I dislike paying for shaders, I get fast results without wasting time screwing with shaders in Reality. I use Daz for work and can't afford to play all day.
I absolutely loved the ability to adjust lights and exposure during the render AND the comprehensive user manual, but that's not enough to keep me using it.
I've had and used, sporadically, Reality almost from the get-go. Definite pro: you can (should) be able to go straight from DS scene to Luxrender to get the render going with but a few clicks, and in most cases you can. As Reality has developed this has become noth simper and more complex! It automatically handles a lot of 'stuff' for you, and places a simple interface over a lot of the complexities of the render engine so that you never see them. If you really need, or want, to, you can export just to .lxs (I think) files (the Luxrender equivalent of 3Delight's RIB files) and not do the render there and then, giving you the ability to edit teh text config/definition files..
I am trying to think of a definite con, but am having some difficulty - yes, I have had issues, but nothing insurmontable. The worst, I think, was what looked liek a clash between OcDS and Reality, whereby Reality would just 'shut down' - this has long been fixed (not sure where the issue lay as all 3 thinsg, DS, OcDS and REality have been upgraded since!). I find Paolo (Pret-a-3D) can seem to not be the best at explaining things for dummies - I had the devil's own job trying to get him to explain what the two colour options for the Reality fog prop (back in Reality 2 or 3?) actually did. What I wanted was a simple 'this makes the fog thinner, this thicker, etc., but all I got was techinal talk about colour of fog and best to keep the RGB values in step. Frustrating, and I still don't have a clue! Part of this may be down to the 'one-man show'. AGain, that said, the support is generally very good.
I am also not a huge fan of the ACSEL system, it's way to binary for me; I'd much prefer the ability to pick any preset to apply (I am sure there is a way, but ...!)
On the whole, however, it is a utility/plug-in that I am glad to have - it makes for a very useful tool to have to hand.
Fossil, your post kind of confirms my experience. Immediately once I got a render going, with just a few lights, I could tell it was rendering *faster* and I was, overall, impressed with how the lighting increased the photorealism of the scene I was rendering.
After multiple installs to try and correct issues and spending an entire day doing renders in both OpenCL and CPU acceleration - I've come to the conclusion that Iray is simply going to be more productive and reliable overall. Which is a shame, because when Reality was working as it should - it was giving very good results. I can't honestly say if it is better or worse or if there are cases where one is superior to the other, because it didn't get that far.
One example I realized was a problem was that there is no *preview* of a render... it seems you just have to fire the render off and hope you've got the settings right. If you don't, you start over. This makes things like Depth of Focus seem very difficult to attempt in Reality. That isn't so much instability, as it is a workflow challenge. But Reality seems to have a host of both instability issues and workflow challenges.
I'm going to play with it some more today doing a few test renders. Maybe my opinion will change.
If I paid full price for it, I'd be fuming.
I love using Reality and I think the end result is fabulous, however it is such a tedious task having to apply the correct material settings to everything in your scene. It's a lot (for me) of going back and forth so I almost always just end up using Iray, which is great too, but I really just prefer Reality if it wasn't so time consuming.
The video start killed the radio star...
Being able to multiedit now speeds things up significantly, can tweak for ex the skin on multiple surface on multiple figures at the same time, and being able to copy and paste textures, also very handy.
LOL those days im afraid have passed. You wont see me building any PASCAL driven monster machine anytime soon. I can't complain this hobby has gone way past anything expected...
That would matter to me if Reality didn't render about 50x slower on my system than IRAY does on the 980ti. It is literally hours to minutes, minutes to seconds. A 12 hour Reality render is a 12 minute IRAY.
And Reality's alleged OpenCL support didn't help matters much. I kept getting renders with the weirdest artifacts. That was before a Reality 4 update that basically broke everything and I've never been able to get it going again. Bye bye Reality, I miss you not.
...I found 4 to be both unstable and not backwards compatible. Every time I tried to render a scene from an older version (or even older update after a patch) I had to re-submit the scene and reapply all the Lux shaders again. I ended up keeping a base version of all my scenes optimised for 3DL just so I didn't have to rebuild them from scratch ()I'd simple delete the bad Reality one, open the master, and save it with an "R" at the end of the name to use with Reality). Next there was an issue with the render camera after one of the patches. I would specify one camera, start the render and it would render from one of my alternate "work cameras" instead. When I looked at the camera tab, the primary render camera I specified was not even listed.
The other issue of course were the geologic render times in CPU mode. Lux abandoned their CPU/GPU hybrid mode and focused on developing just the pure CPU and and pure GPU modes. I had dual Radeon HD 7950s (3 GB per card) but if the scene exceeded GPU memory, the process crashed (with Iray it dumps to the CPU). The CPU speed boost introduced in 4.2 is unusable on my system because I have an older CPU which doesn't support a function it needs (can't remember what it is called). Also from what I understand, rendering with the speed boost does not produce as high a quality as without.
Finally unsinstalled it and haven't even considered the most recent updates.
It is disappointing as I actually don't mind the Reality UI and like the fact I can close down the scene as well as even the Daz application after submitting the job to Lux (which saves on system processor and memory resources). I also like the fact I could pause, close Lux come back later and resume rendering in background while working on another project, a process that is impossible with Iray being fully integrated into Daz. Often time with Iray I find my system goes into swap mode as just the Daz programme with the open scene file alone will take up 2/3 or more of my available memory in addition to that used by the render process.
...unfortunately I'm getting long render times in Iray, not as bad as Reality/Lux, but still frustrating nonetheless. As I mentioned in my post above, because Iray is integrated into the Das programme (like 3DL) it requires the Daz and scenefile to remain open during rendering taking up extra processor and memory resources. Opening my railway station scene for example takes 8.9 GB total out of 10.7 I have available (after Windows and system utilities) in "idle mode". That doesn't leave much for rendering before the process dumps to even slower swap mode (which is set to twice my system's total physical memory). Just for Iray to perform the primary calculations takes about 40 minutes before anything shows up in the render window. I've had fairly complex scenes in 3DL take less time than that to complete (including the shader optimisation pass).
With the curent situation concerning the10xx series GPUs and Iray I have no choice but to continue in the ultra slow lane with Iray as I am not going to dump money into what I feel will (or already has) become "legacy" tech (the Maxwell Titan X is no longer available at the usual outlets and even a 980 TI is hard to find unless you buy "refurbished", meaning "used")
This is the second time I've seen someone mention this. I'm on an i5 with a 2GB 750ti card and 32GB of RAM, and I'm looking to upgrade... and I was figuring a 10xx GPU or two with my current setup would give me plenty of kick... but it sounds like there is some sort of problem with the 10xx series and Iray? Is there a discussion somewhere in the forums I can read to get me up to speed?
My understanding is that IRAY rendering is going to be limtied by your GPU RAM, not your system RAM - and that even with a DLSI setup, the total RAM on a single card is the limiting factor - that if you have two 8GB cards in a DLSI config, you don't have 16GB of GPU memory for renders... you've got 8...
Which seems to be one of the potential advantages of using something like Reality in CPU mode - all of your system RAM is available for renders. At least, that was my assumption.
Am I wrong?
...you are totally correct. SLI does nothing to aid in rendering and GPU VRAM does not stack for rendering purposes, only the CUDA cores do.
The dowsnide of Lux CPU rendering is it is excruciatingly slow, slower than Iray CPU mode if you want good quality. I ran several tests of the same scene in 3DL, Iray, (In Daz 4.8) and Reality/Lux in (in Daz 4.7). The 3DL version took just over 14 minutes. The Iray version about two hours. With Reality/Lux after 13 hours there was still a tonne of noise which would be about on par with maybe 30% of conversion in Iray.
This is on a system with a first generation 2.8 GHz i7 930 and 12 GB of DDR3 1333 memory in tri channel configuration.
ETA: here ar links to two threads on the subject of the Pascal cards and Iray
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/89996/gtx-1080-iray-support/p1
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/120211/pascal-iray-news-of-the-day#latest
Kyoto Kid... thanks for the links.
Do you have a Nvidia GPU in that i7... or is that why you were comparing CPU rendering in IRAY to Lux?
I *feel* like Lux has been giving IRAY quality results in 3Delight comparable times on my Surface Pro 4 which is i7 with IRIS Intel HD GPU.
But maybe that is just wishful thinking... I haven't had enough stability with Lux/Reality to really be certain or to be able to compare renders apples-to-apples between the 3 render engines.