Anyone heard of Reality rendering engine- sold in the Daz Store?
Griffin Avid
Posts: 3,815
https://www.daz3d.com/reality-4-daz-studio-edition
Didn't know what this was. Checked it out and it's a RENDERING ENGINE?!
And it's sold HERE!
It says:
Made for the artist
The best realism possible for DAZ Studio and Poser with the easiest, most enjoyable workflow. Nothing else comes close.
Reality is a rendering solution that extends DAZ Studio and Poser providing the most advanced Physics-Based Rendering system in the market.
Reality has built-in physics-based materials. At any time you know what kind of material your editing.
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It says for Daz 4.9 so it's not legacy-ware...but I don't think I have EVER seen a post mentioning it AND it doesn't show up in forum search either.
Anyone using this? Is this an alternative to iray? Is it faster?
It's promising some crazy things :
Top 10 reasons to use Reality:
- The most accurate Physics Based, unbiased rendering system, based on LuxRender, the benchmark of quality in the field.
- The easiest material editor in the industry.
- Non-blocking rendering: continue working in DAZ Studio or Poser while the render runs.
- Adjust the light’s intensity and color while the render runs.
- Adjust the scene’s exposure while the render runs.
- Use GPU and CPU acceleration at the same time.
- Use GPUs from nVidia, AMD, or other brands, and you can mix them together.
- Apply film emulation to create a new, more filmic look
- Physically-Based Materials make it intuitive to edit your scene. No confusing nodes or endless lists of properties
- Run multiple renders at the same time.
- Procedural textures that can be used to amazing patterns with a few clicks.
- Same interface whether you use DAZ Studio or Poser.
- Automatic presets simplify your workflow.
- Share material presets with other Reality artists.
- Use the same presets in the DAZ Studio and Poser editions of Reality.
- Stop and resume the render at any time.
- Unlimited network rendering, even with mixed OSes (Mac OC, Windows, and Linux machines).
- Fully documented.
Reasons #11 to #18 were bonus ????
Automatic Material Conversions
Reality automatically converts Poser and DAZ Studiomaterials, including the latest shaders. From the moment you call Reality you are ready to go.
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And the results look great too.
Very curious about this....
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Comments
Yes, I'm aware of it. Its been here for a while.I don't like it though. I prefer Iray, and the support I found for this product was pretty bad.
Plus it messed up a lot of my saved files causing hours of work. When I tried to get support for that problem I was having with reality the PA was dismissive.
I removed it and haven't looked back. No way I want the file corruption issue again.
Yep, has been around for quite some time now. It appears to have been overshadowed by iray, which arrived not long after reality 4 was released. Not sure if there's a thread for it here at Daz, though.
...Reality is just the Daz and Poser "friendly" interface for the LuxRender render engine. LuxRender is a free standalone open source render engine.
I have it and stopped working with it myself as version 4x had some serious bug issues (that in some cases became worse with patches) while rendering speed (CPU) was absolutely glacial even compared to CPU rendering in Iray.
What Serene Night mentions is correct as I had the same happen to a number of files. Also, every time even a new patch was issued I found had to rebuild all the materials in the same scene I worked on in the previous release from scratch again. In one of the later updates, it refused to acknowledge the camera I had designated for rendering and would randomly select one of my "work" cameras instead (the primary render camera didn't even appear in the Camera Pane). That was when I gave up and uninstalled it. Granted subsequent releases most likely fixed that as well as the geologic time render speed, but by then, Iray was available as an integrated part of the Daz programme.
As Lux uses OpenCL instead of CUDA, AMD Radeon and FirePro GPU cards tend to be more suitable for GPU based rendering as their OpenCL development is a bit more advanced than Nvidia's.
There are some features that really made sense, such as being able to close not only the main scene down but even the Daz Programme itself once the file was submitted to Lux (which saved on system resources) as well as the ability to make adjustments on the fly while Lux was rendering along with the various "film type" tone map presets.
Reality isn't the render engine - Luxrender is the render engine. Reality is the bridge to Luxrender from Daz Studio. There's also an other Luxrender bridge in the store called Luxus.
Laurie
I used Reality 3.x with Poser2012 for quite a while, and was very happy with the results and PA support. Have not had the time to try out the new V. 4.3 yet. From everything I have seen on the forums, the latest version of Reality+Luxrender renders much faster and most bugs have been fixed. I really like the ability to switch between color and B&W film presets.
Like IRAY, Luxrender is an unbiased (or selectively-biased) render engine, but it is open-source. As Kyoto Kid mentioned above, it uses GPU accleration with OPENCL so you can use AMD graphics cards too. The OPENCL support for NVIDIA cards is said to be better now. Also, you can run LuxRender on multiple computers without buying any licences. I am interested in this myself because some of my renders will take more than the 8- or 11-GB memory of current graphics cards. Luxrender is supposed to be able to run OS-independent, mixing Windows and LINUX (and MAC-OS) instances (home rendering cluster). I did not try this myself yet, but I have run renders on a Ubuntu Linux machine from files created with Poser/Reality and saved on a Windows machine.
The main Reality forum is now on Facebook (it was on RDNA).
I have not tried LUXUS yet, but there are versions for both DS and Carrrara, and another Luxrender bridge for Carrara in the works.
Anyway, my two cents worth. I hope to get back to this in a few months and try out the new versions.
...CPU rendering is still agonisingly slow. Using the CPU speed boost you also sacrifice final render quality. For my system, the best I can get is about a 3x boost which for an average render time of around 92 - 96 hours is still too bloody long.
If Lux didn't abandon their hybrid CPU/GPU render mode development I might have given it another try as I have two Radeon 3 GB HD 7950s each with 1,792 stream processors now sitting in storage.
I used Reality for a long time before I saved enough to buy a decent NVidia GPU. The results can be excellent but things are not so rosy as the blurb might suggest. I would spend hours tweaking the supposedly "automatic" material conversions. I also found that, while some content would render quite quickly for a CPU, there were more and more items that would take excessively long render times.
On the other hand, Luxrender will carry on rendering in a separate window while you work on your next scene in DAZ Studio. So that could be a time saver. And it is simple to set up a render slave if you happen to have a second computer with enough RAM.
...that is part of the plan behind the dual Xeon 128 GB memory render system I'd like to build (primarily for Iray and Carrara, but I'll most likely give Reality/Lux another chance particularly since I'll have 32 CPU cores and all that memory to throw at it). If the latest version of Lux does the same as Iray (drops into CPU mode if GPU memory is exceeded), I might inven install the dual 7950s in it for a little more speed boost. That way the CPU and memory on my current system doesn't have to split processing loads when I work on a new project while another scene is rendering.
Wow, how did you guys know so much about this, but never talk about it? lol
All I ever hear is 3Delight verse iray...I thought it was ONLY down to those two choices....
Well, I won't be diving in, then. I thought I found a sweet alternative- since the speak about the materials sounded so promising.
Anyhow...using iray- what are the settings everyone is using between......
GPU (Nvidia card) vs. CPU vs. CPU + GPU
I did read a long thread when I first joined that had a bunch of pros and cons...so I've been GPU only eversince I read that.
What's the verdict now about how your renders are set up?
Here you go. :)
If you have an IRay capable GPU there is little point in switching to Reality. The end results are similar once you have the materials set up but everthing you buy here is already set up for IRay.
If I were still using CPU only, I would probably still be using Reality/Luxrender though.
Use it, love it. Been using it since version 1. My renders usually take about 5-12 hours on average, so I just set my scene up and let it run overnight while I sleep. Never had any issues with version 4, and I'm using a simple acer laptop.
...I haven't used Reality4/Lux since patch ver .104 (which is where the camera issues occurred). There was one more patch followed by two general updates, 4.3 being the latest, so many of the issues I and others mentioned might have been fixed. However, shortly after the .105 patch, Daz released the 4.8 Iray Beta which others and I adopted. At the time Reality/Lux was still CPU based and still incredibly slow in comparison to Iray CPU mode (reliable GPU rendering in Lux was not available until Ver 4.2 and the CPU speed boost did not come until Ver 4.3, I believe).
Reality's good.. I've had 0 issues with support..you just go to the official forums..Paolo's always been helpful to me at least.
I don't use it much currently...as others have said, there's a lot of tweaking materials to get em right and that tends to be a bit beyond my abilites/patience right now. But there are plenty who swear by it.
Same here, still use it occasionally and support has been stellar for me. IRAY is just an easier workflow for me since it is built into DS and with the interactive preview, it saves me a ton of time.
I bought Reality early on but had several problems.
-the automatic conversions all seemed to look the same.
-it loved to invent new cameras and/or ignore mine.
-support was abysmal. While the author is a nice guy and tries hard, he's just one guy and can't compete with the programming power of Nvidia. When discussing the removal of the program he insisted that it only required deleting one directory, despite my screenshots showing Reality's detritus all over my computer.
Yep, this happened to me as well. Something about Reality lingers long after it is installed. The lack of a professional uninstall/reinstall option, as well as the dificulties in getting it removed was a real issue for me.
Reality is a bridge from your modeling program to LuxRender.
the PA for Reality never dismissive of any question I had, just the opposite he was incredibly accommodating and responsible. Bugs I reported got fixed overnight whereas I had Daz wipe my bug reports out after a year and ask me to resubmit if they were still a problem.
I was able to render far larger scenes and far more complex scenes with Reality into LuxRender than I ever could without Iray blowing up on me and dying on simple tasks. Iray may be great if you have a Nvidia GPU and you work on small projects but other than that it's restrictive and in CPU only mode not much faster than Lux and not as good IMHO. I have projects that exceed 16GB so there is no financial way of a GPU solution and If you are a Mac user Iray GPU is not an option, Apple has not made a Mac with an Nvidia card since 2013. Even Poser is using Cycles which is cross platform and developed by the team who made Blender. Remember Blender? It's the software that updates monthly with state of the art features, gets bugs coded out in hours after reports and runs circles around every Daz product ever. It's also free.
I could use other computers in my house to assist with the render in LuxRender, the ability to render farm with Lux is built in, it's a simple one word command from the terminal and I now have multiple computers rendering where as the Photo-real and IrayServer needed to do this for Iray are not included with the versions DS offers as far as I know. I could change lighting and exposure while I rendered with Lux. Iray to me, still reeks of a gimmick decision from Daz to sell Nvidia cards for Nvidia in return for a feature excluded license agreement.
Sadly not everyone had a great support experience. I still have old files rendered unusable by reality scene nodes.
At least I know how to fix them but I learned that from the forums not from the pa.
everyones mileage is going to vary. I still use it Realty, I still talk to the developers on the LuxRender site, it's a non-corporate juggernaut of a rendering engine from people who dedicate themselves to it's versatility and keeping it entirely free. Last time I checked at Nvidia it seems like they put their marbles in the gaming hat before any of the Iray stuff gets traction, they sell cards for gamers; 3d artists are a minority. ATI was offering 6GB cards for less and before Nvidia was, and cost vs cost the ATI vs Nvidia cards tend to rate ATI's better. I don't think Nvidia has dropped the price on last gen cards in over a year, there is no incentive for me for Iray at this time.
http://www.luxrender.net/forum/gallery2.php
I used Reality 3 and 4 for Poser, and I loved it over Poser's Firefly. It has a lot of advantages such as changing tone mapping and film settings on the fly, and I felt it does/did skin better than Iray (not sure if that's true anymore). It takes time to set up the materials, but that's true of using any external rendering program. Heck, it's even true when using Iray with older content. My only problem was that the big 4.2(?) speed upgrade killed my ability for my first-gen i7 to run it. And then Iray was released, my old warhorse could run it and get much faster CPU-only speeds over Lux, and the rest is history. I haven't even tried to use it since upgrading my computer, and I don't have the Studio version anyway.
Reality 4 is often on sale for a good price, so it's not a bad thing if you want to try a different external renderer (compared to the cost of say Octane).
I love being able to change lighting sources as I rendered in Lux but I think that can be done in Iray as well.
I can also render outdoor scenes with one light and it looks exactly like outdoors, but I would think Iray can do this too the same way.
I also use reality 4.x and love it. As statdragon mentioned, being able to change camera exposure settings and lighting while the render is running is awesome, as is the ablity to keep using my computer while a render is running, make another scene, play a game, whatever. Yes reality is not without issues but I have encountered no showstoppers, and once I grasped the materials interface found it quite simple and logical. But YMMV. Automatic presets are just a starting point, you are still supposed to go in and tweak the surfaces to your needs. If you are looking for plug and play solutions best not to go with reality, it is simply an interface to give you access to luxrender materialsm, lighting, etc, with some presets to give you a starting point, but thats it, the rest is up to you.
This is the reality gallery over at deviantart, worth a look to see what reality/luxrender is capable of: http://reality-plug-in.deviantart.com/
Speaking of blender's great coders. The only thing I'm going to say about OpenCL is that Blender has much better CUDA integration. Yes, even "isn't opensource great" Blender prefers CUDA.
(also you can also change exposure while rendering with Iray, and, if you set it up with canvases, change lighting strengths after rendering, to much the same effect as lux)
I did try Reality way back in the day, but found it nail-pullingly painful tweaking materials. Having to reëxport all the meshes for each test render + no ability to spotrender meant, for me at least, hours spent just waiting for test renders to even get to a few samples (before viewprt rendering I would do about 50 test renders minimum before final rendering, exporting the objects and textures to reality alone 50 times was probably more than an hour)
I never used Reality, but I used to use Pose2Lux a bit when I was still using Poser. Most of the time, I wrote my own Luxrender shaders. Was just easier for me that way ;).
Laurie
Thats crazy, even my most complex, heavy scenes take only a few minutes to get a render where I can see if I need to change things. And exporting an entire scene to lux takes seconds. You can also multi edit now so pretty simple to adjust for example all the skin surfaces at once. But hours for a few samples? If that were the case currently I wouldnt use it either.
Not hours for a few samples, just that even relatively brief times, but again and again it builds up. Exporting and Lux loading the meshes and textures may only take a minute or so, but when you have to do it 50 times boom that's a lot of time spent waiting for things to load.
Meanwhile in Iray (or blender's Cycles for that matter) I can set my viewport to rendering and it only needs to load textures and meshes once, and from there I can tweak everything as much as I want, I can also easily just focus on a small part of the canvass, move my camera around etc, without having to export out reload everything.
Oh, I forgot the other Reality FB page: https://www.facebook.com/RealityPlugIn/
Lots of works in progress and the like.
There used to be a lot of info in the RDNA forums, now gone.
...in the same boat here, have an old first generation Nehalem i7 as well. so I'm still pretty much stuck with rendering that works on a geologic time scale. I actually became fairly quick at setting up materials for Lux as I had to do it repetitively in every scene I created each time a new patch was released.