Nividia IRAY vs Chaos Group Vray
wolf359
Posts: 3,931
Hi I am at a brief pause in my animation work and decided to have a play at some still renders.
Both of these renders were done on very low specced machines however the results were very telling
The IRAY render was rendered on a1.3GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core SU4100 CPU along with Intel’s GMA4500MHD graphics, 4GB DDR2 RAM. ..NO nividia graphic card
so CPU only . I let it run overnight and as you can see it is still grainy after stopping at a little past 6 hours.
The Vray Ray Version was rendered on a 2.16GHZ intel core 2 Duo with 2 GB 667 MHZ DDR SDRAM integrated GMA 950. 64 MEGS VRAM
Render time: 22 minutes
..yes you read this correctly , a ten year old Apple Macbook!!.
The figure is the Daz Genesis2 male with custom sculpt to look somewhat like Myself (pictured in the middle inset).
Both renders use HDR lighting only.
VRAY has the option to render "unbiased" but I did not implement it for this test
I plan on getting more into GI animation renders in the future.
Based on the render times Vray is the obvious choice.
LINK TO HI RES VERSION OF RENDER
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2TYEp536iB8ejlaOTExaWdwamM/view?usp=sharing
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Comments
That's two different machines - which one is it?
Edit: looks like you have repeated the specs for the first machine under the specs for the second.
Yes, Vray is a fantastic renderer and considered by many as the industry standard, and while much cheaper than it once was the cost keeps most hobbyists away from it. I had access to it when I worked for a studio and would use it to this day if I could afford it. Not to mention the lack of an user interface from DS to it kinda like Reality for luxrender. It's funny that sketchup has a Vray plugin and Blender will soon also, but DS doesn't.
If someone came out with a plugin for DS, I would spend the $265 for it in a heartbeat.
@TAOZEN post edited sorry for the confusion
@FSMCDesigns Yes I already have a viable pipeline to get Daz content meshes and textures into C4D Via Daz studios Excellent obj exporter and a powerful third party .obj handler for C4D called "Riptide"
Vray has a Material converter as part of the plugin
but one still needs to do quite a bit of tweaking after conversion.
For me it will be worth the extra time however when I look at the minutes per frame I can get for GI animations in the future.
There was a similar thread like this on rendo, but it really came down to the experience of the user needing to know how to use both renderers before a real valid comparison could be made. However, this doesn't sway the fact that DS has iray for the default renderer and they have an agreement with Nvidia for which you're getting that renderer for free. I seriously doubt DAZ3D would break that agreement to include another renderer, so I'm not thinking this will change many minds or get any movement behind another plugin being made.
side note:-------------- Iray is an 'unbiased' render engine, afaik. so the comparison in quality/rendertime doesn't really say anything.( you did note that you used Vray's 'biased' render engine option)
Quite true sir.
But for animations a "biased" GI preset in Vray will get me
an acceptable minutes per frame rate with quality Close to that of my single IRay unbiased stills.
You can however set a the number of seconds to allocate to a render frame to help with rendering animations. I did a quickie animation when iray released and setting the values in the render options helps with rendering animations. A similar thing can be done in other unbiased render engines.
Vray for Carrara plugin!!!!
last time i checked, the standalone vray renderer for blender was over 500$
Hi Misty
the current plugin for Blender is $350 USD
https://www.chaosgroup.com/vray/blender#pricing
But honestly where Vray really prevails is with GI fast animation without "flickering" issues due to its "frame averaging" algorithim.
Although I have NOT seen such flickering issues with Stonemasons or MEC4D Iray animations either
so for me it is the matter of the actual frames per minute rate I get from Vray for Gi animation.
Is it? That wound depend on what you were rendering, and what the intended purpose was. For anything where I'd be using "real people" figures and realistic lighting (HDRI or a complex set of well placed lighs and reflector), I'd consider the right hand render to have been a wasted effort. Part of the reason I'm not running on a ten-year-old macbook. ;)
There's a lot of inequality in your two setups.
I'm not sure how much can be done to IRAY to make it run faster by reducing quality. Then again, I'm not sure why you're comparing an unbiased renderer with a biased one in the first place. If I were out to use DS for animation (because rigging) and I wanted cartoonish renders at high speed, I'd be more concerned with 3Delight. At least there would be a lot of good materials setups.
@Wiz All good points sir indeed GI renders will be a whole new learing curve for me as I have only renderd animation with the standard lighting and C4D AR3.
One should nothave to reduce the quality of IRAY for animation just have the means to get viable hardware for the task.
MEC4D (Cath) has built herself quite a powerful beast!!
The basic differemce between the two is that iray is a path tracer and vray is a ray tracer.
The biggest difference is, that vray can split rays. That means vray casts primary rays . When primary rays intersect with geometry they split into multiple secondary rays, to calculate lighting, reflection, refraction and so on. Iray cannot split rays, and that means it requires many more raycasts to copver an entire scene.
Thanks which is why VRAY is better suited for Lower spec hardware GI animation renders
Times are $tough$$ for alot of us ATM
But we use what we have and keep moving along.
after much trial and error, i settled on 60fps. (in carrara)
what video edit s/w do you use?
I've been using SONY platinum suite, cheaper version of vegas.
i render to pngs then import them in.
Sony is giving me motion blur and dof where i don't want it.
I haven't found how to render to mp4 crisp and clear. >.<
if i had a mac i'd try final cut pro.
thanks
Adobe After Effects for color grading, gamma correction and post visual effects and Apple Imove HD on the Mac side
I have the older Final cut pro 5 but honestly I hate the workflow
as it is designed more for multiple editors working on the same project
I make my animations in a Linear fashion and only need a simple cutting and sound editing station for my finished footageso Imove HD is usually sufficient.
I actually create ALL of my animations on my windows PC where I have Iclone, DS 4.9 and Endorphin for Character physics simulations
But I render on my Old Mac where I have C4D and After effects CS
Realflow Adobe CS. etc.
iMove for MAC only?
Go to the timeline, right click the video,
Go to the switches, turn off "resample".
Well I am doing a iRay CPU render on a 5 year old Windows laptop and your render suffers visibly from the same sort of noise patterns in the skin that my current render is suffering from. I really like the render of the window in the background as the lighting and environment is more friendly.
As far as DAZ included renderers go I hope they add the ATI Pro Renderer along side of the nVidia iRay renderer but it they don't (I'm not privy to there legal agreements) the upcoming version of Unity 3D will have the OToy Octane Renderer integrated into it for free for everybody. That is a major offline still & animation rendering (as opposed to the rendering techniques used in real-time when a game is actually running) coupe.
ty
...and for some of us therin lies the rub.
While my system is more powerful than either of your test systems (i7 930 with 12 GB physical memory, GPU inconsequential, as it only has 1 GB), it is no where near optimal for rendering in Iray. It took me over a year saving up and purchasing components when I could while I was still steadily employed to build it. Maxwell Titan-X cards (which Cath uses) are now hard to find, their successors are 1,200$ and only available from Nvidia (single fan air cooled, aftermarket liquid cooling is extra). and you can only purchase a maximum of two (I believe Cath has 3).
Just alone those two cards would be 2,400$ (plus cooling blocks and back plates). That is 1,000$ more than it cost me to build by entire system sans display (which I already had).
The issue with GPU rendering is the limitation of available VRAM. Even 12 GB can be taxed by a "heavy" large format scene (I have one scene that takes up almost 9 GB along with many others in excess of 6 - 7, and that isn't the limit of some of the scene ideas I have). That's Titan-X, if not Quadro P5000 (16 GB) country. The other option is to get as many fast CPU threads along with as much physical memory as possible and not bother with GPU rendering until the software gets better and GPU based rendering becomes more cost effective, for now, it isn't (at least for my needs). All the CUDA cores in the world mean nothing once a scene you are rendering dumps to the CPU.
Yes Misty Imove comes bundled with the Mac OS.
Hi For the VRAY render I took the lazy approach and used a free "SmartIBL" plugin
For C4D that loads HDR preset environments and even sets up your VRAY GI render settings with one click
so that background is just a jpeg that loads with the preset hence the blurriness mention earlier.
Manually settin up lighting with the Vray Physical Camera
will yield much better results when I start doing more GI animations eventually.
Indeed
I like that IRay is bundled with DS but it comes at a cost
Sure I have tinkered around with it since upgrading the DS 4.8 but its not practical for any serious final or commercial renders on my. hardware obviously.
I dont Fault DAZ for this or the PA's for favoring IRAYwith thier products.
I am and have always been Primarily a Maxon C4D& After Effects guy who uses daz for the decent quality easily animated humanoids and Prop sets
Thankfully Daz gives me well though out options for exporting genesis figure content ,even with animation, to my other applications via the .obj ,animated mdd exporter.
Between Blender cycles and Vray& C4D native I will be able to create the types of GI renders without having to raise thousands of dollars just to be viable with ONE Hardware specific render engine.
...however, for some of us, thousands of dollars in pro grade software on top of the hardware cost isn't a reality either. We need to use what works best and is most cost effective for us. If it means rendering in Daz 3DL or Poser Firefly, we have to get the most we can out of it.
Blender is a whole 'nother story, for me it's like being at the controls of a 747 with two engines out that is in an inverted flat spin and a supercell thunderstorm.