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...for those who cannot afford a 500$ -700$ GPU card and don't care to wait 12 or more hours to get a clean noisless image rendering in Iray on the CPU, 3DL is still an option.
As to richer colour as well as glass, below is a 3DL render.
...one nice thing with 3DL I don't have to mess with Bump and Displacement to get good looking surfaces (note the refuse container, brickwork on the shelter, the pavement, and the denim overalls, all are default).
Total render time (including optimisation pass) ≈ 15 min (using the AoA advanced lights, SSS shaders, and no Uber settings and no post) The same scene in Iray, about took 2.5 hours at 900 x 600 and all the surfaces looked flat even after manual conversion.
I may not be able to get completely "photo real", but I can get darn close for my needs.
The few times I have done this, it most decidedly wasn't worth it. Like, the 3DL version sold less than 10% of the amount of the Iray version.
I'm not surprised; I did think about making a comparison like maybe 50% more developers time to get maybe 20% more sales. I guess that 20% would have been very optimistic now....
(Mind you, it would also require - lots - more testing time........)
iray will outsell as DG found just as D|S outsells Poser versions
but for those who need the later its just another reason to reconsider price over the extra work meeded to convert if iray or DAZ studio only and if one even can.
As a Carrara user this is a gamble as more and more becomes incompatible, Poser users have pretty much dropped off as customers, people not using computers with high end Nvidia cards will be next and users of other apps and Octane like me will just weigh up if worth the work or converting or hastle of using iray if needed.
I never could get used to it; I would like to get into it. I haven't the time to spend at the moment.
Tbh; I could see myself rendering the background with 3Delight, and the figures with IRAY.
That's unfortunate, but understandable. Iray gives very good results with little effort. Thats sounds condecending but it's not - its a fact no one has unlimited time to learn how to use tools. I think 3DL still has a major role, but it is a fact it takes time to use effectively. I feel it has a lot more control, and can be significantly faster to render, so its a trade-off; do you put in the time in learning, or in actual renders? And which pays the better reward? There is no actual answer there, but certainly the average user wants an easy to use, good looking render. There is plenty enough other things to learn in this format.
..the other issue though is most new content is coming out with Iray shaders only which even with the script takes more time to get right than going 3DL => Iray as a couple channels that 3DL has, Iray doesn't. It is kind of like back to the old days when for many items we had to adjust Poser shaders so they looked right in 3DL (though at least Poser's Firefly and Daz's 3DL engines both had the same shader channels and it was primarily changing the lighting model, disabling the ambient channel, and/or removing built in reflection maps, much simpler).
I use both and will continue to do so.
For those ratios, 50% more time for 20% more sales, I'd probably still do it. For 95% more time (setting up surfaces from scratch, different lighting for the promos, in some cases completely different/modified/adjusted texture maps too) for 10% more sales, it doesn't make sense.
Don't get me wrong, I still love 3Delight too. It has the best shader packages for toon styles, so I still use it for those types of renders, and I'd really hate to have 3Delight go away.
same here. Iray has been one of my reasons to actually use DAZStudio. I never could get much out of 3Delight. In order to have some natural light set, you have to have uber environment lights, which seam to render much slower, than an Iray scene.
I use both (maybe 50:50 - my Iray renders are mostly CPU-only, so slow) and therefore I appreciate those products with 3Delight mats, but I still buy some Iray-only sets (and indeed some 3Delight-only from the back catalog)
I use both as well and will continue to even after I get a new computer that will support Iray which my current one doesn't. I consider it a big bonus when products include both iray and 3dl settings.
I'm trying to use Iray as that seems to be the direction things are going, but I like the look of both and will use the one that works best for my render. 3Delight materials are not a must have. As long as the product is nice, I'll buy it. At this time, I am finding that I have to convert more materials from 3delight to Iray than the other way around.
I guess it depends on your workflow and what types of renders you are trying to achieve since both renderers are very different, 3DL is a very biased renderer and for me that isn't an option as I would rather rely on the coding and math behind an unbiased renderer to create the environment effects I see in the image and not my editing skills doing it. That is one of the main reasons I wanted to stop using Firefly in poser after trying Vray and Maxwell and finally settled on Luxrender.
If there was still a big enough market for 3DL and PAs could produce 3DL only products and make a profit we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion since 3DL users could shop their section of the store and Iray only users could shop theirs.
Yes, yes . I agree, choices is the best. I prefer 3dl for something. Iray for others. but i like having the choice. iRay is not ready for animtion yet and is not supported by alot of other software yet. so I vote choice.
I so agree with this statement.
I only use 3Delight these days and don't buy Iray-only items unless they're exactly what I need and there are few enough pieces that converting shaders isn't an ordeal. I have no background in photography/cinematography/stage lighting so for me 3Delight is more intuitive than Iray. Whenever I try to do something which I think Iray would be much better at, I find it doesn't come out the way I expect and I have no clue how to adjust settings. I fumble around until I give up and do it in 3Delight.
Fixmypcmike: that's so funny, I have the same issue in reverse. I get weird random strange results in 3dl sometimes, and it's so unintuitive I have no idea what's going on.
What you say is true,Its the same for when working with iray for animation. 3dl works way better in animation. it renders much faster and less grainy way more control over lighting & lighting effects. . I just believe most people do not get good results with 3dl because they don't really know how to set up a spot light or a Linear point of light. not to mention Atmosphere & fog panes can be used and set- up easier. with out lines or fragments showing during motions sequences . . you can also sort of give the appearance of a illuminate 3dl textures by changing & making the the ambient color lighter or white. and add a point of light to it. with much better effects & control than iray. .. Iray does not work with transparency maps so anything that needs to be converted that uses them is lost. Also to add that Iray has issues with firefly with motion files or aniblocks being used even if you are rendering 1 png at time. I can make motion blurs without any additional tools required with in 3dl... in Iray the best you can do is use a flat pane to simulate motions blur which still does not really look right IMO .. etc etc . . I can go on and on about the difference but then it will just seem like I am complaining about iray instead of showing comparisons between the 2 render engines. But for me 3dl has many many more options. and yes I have passed over some products I like because they were iray only again mostly because of the trans map thing.
Yes... It's most to get a feel for how "necessary" is 3DL materials to consumers of new products, given current market trends.
Something I'm wondering, I'm sure, for no actual purpose like market research or anything like that.
I've never even tried 3DL since the iRay was available because 3DL takes longer than iRay, even when you don't have a discrete GPU as with my computer. However, when I build/buy my a Ryzen PC with 16 threads I will try 3DL as I really want to try to get that Norman Rockwell effect I see others doing in the forums and galleries from time to time.
i been using daz default shader mostly lately.
no tif conversions, no canvas passes,
hit render, voomp there it is
No and nope for me.
As a big fan of realistic lighting, to get similar quality in 3delight (proper bounce lighting and raytraced reflections, for example) tends to take longer. Even than Iray in cpu mode. In point of fact, pre-iray I had switched over to Cycles, because exporting to blender and pretty much manually setting up all my materials was still faster to get something I was satisfied with from 3delight.
Mind you, stuff coming with 3delight mats is no skin off my nose either,
I prefer iray now mostly, but like 3dl for some things, and like to use a render of both to merge later in photoshop sometimes, especially if the iray scene is dark.
Iray has some limitations, I find dark scenes can be grainy or lighter scenes can have a colorized photo look which I don't like. Iray also doesn't excell at interior scenes, which a lot of my renders involve, and it renders dark scenes slower than I would prefer.
I really loathe iray's grainy qualities, and yes, I know it can be tweaked, but that is something I don't have a problem with in 3dl.
I'm mostly using Iray now, but for toon-renders it just doesn't work well. Maybe there's a shader out there that can make it work for a certain kind of toon (any suggestions?), but I'm happy that Studio still has the 3DL engine as an option.
Yes I still uses it. My current laptop is an old Samsung 14" AMD A10-4600M APU with Radeon HD at 2.30GHz and 16GB RAM.
I'm on the road 1/3 of the month. Besides not everything I render is aimed at photo-realism.
I have tons of shaders/materials for it and AoA lighting. When you have the add-ons for 3Delight you can do alot with it.
I would not want to see it cast aside for Iray or anything else.
Have a lot of 3Delight-specific characters, environments and shaders, but was never able to find a laymen's guide to the whole 'Uber' series of things and it seemed like you need to get a proper understanding of that to get lighting right. To this day, I still have yet to find an intuitive guide to the 'Uber' stuff.
Iray required some video tutorials before I understood at least enough of the basics to gain desirable effects, but the realism it affords made it my go-to render engine ever since that time.
No and no, but I still make 3DL mats for ya'll and I don't charge extra for them... as far as I'm concerned it's only 1/4 of the work to make 3DL mats than it was to make sure figures worked in Poser and make Poser mats. I've been using DS since version 1.3, so 3DL mats are really no sweat for me.
I sometimes use 3Delight, but mostly use Iray (I also use Octane more than 3Delight). I also find Iray much more intuitive than 3Delight, and not because I'm a photographer (or artist), simply because I prefer bounced light like real light (I understand true light physics, mathematics/statistics/sampling based lighting gets "weird"). But I'm glad to have the option of 3Delight, and hope it available for a long time.