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Thats really impressive, I really need to start on that rendering double sized thing don't I. Also just doing any renders. NHL playoffs are killing my free time
My experience is the same - I found 3dl even using AoA lights was as slow as Iray using only CPU
Now, you can push 3DL requirements down way further than Iray, that's definitely true, and there are certain things Iray just can't do, or can't do well. Like my biggest frustration is a simple 'everything evenly lit' or a completely illuminated image. I have yet to figure out how to do that in Iray right. (I can get close, but...)
That's trivial in 3DL.
And if I don't want bounce lighting or AO at all, 3DL works great. Ambient + point lights can help create fast-running scenes.
It's just the minute you step toward realism and bounce lights... 3DL is back to neck and neck with Iray.
...that is not what I have observed.
The only time a 3DL render took longer than Iray was when I used motion blur and UE. Again going back to the two girls at the bus stop with two versions of the scene (I saved the Iray one with "Iray" in the name as a separate scene file) there is a ten fold increase in the render time (and I'm even giving Iray a bit of advantage as I'm counting the optimisation pass in 3DL) between the two engines. Again in the Iray version all surfaces were manually optimised for Iray before I clicked the render button. Both versions are the exact identical scene with no special effects added.to either one (at the time there was no fog/haze effect camera for Iray so I didn't use the 3DL one and the render camera was locked in position to make the evaluation fair. One of the aspects I couldn't control was the fact Iray didn't accommodate SSS (which again gave Iray a tiny advantage). The bounce light in the 3DL version of the scene is actually created by a low intensity AoA distant light set at a reflective angle to the "sun" below the ground plane with shadow casting turned off.
The only way to create meshlights in 3DL is to use Uber Area Lights and yes, they really slow the process down as well. Over the years I leaned how to fake it with the ambient channel and regular (later Advanced) Daz lights to save on system resources (the other issue with Uber Area lights was you had to mess around with adjusting the sampling rate or the scene would render grainy).
At first I really liked the Iray emissive lights as they made interior scene setup so much simpler (I remember setting up Linear Point Lights in every lamp of Jack's Library set as the included light set was UE based). That was until I saw how they began so slog down render time even more.
I have yet to get a good clean render in a decent amount of time using Stonemason's Urban Future 5. In the scene I was working on, most of the emissive lights off camera were turned off and a good part of the unseen geometry was unparented and deleted. I even went back to the old school method of using photometric spotlights point lights and distant lights for things like street lights and "wash" lighting. leaving only the neon seen in the camera's view as emissive light sources. Still takes forever to render.
...I should clarify "faked" bounce lighting as yes AoA's lights do not produce that effect.
Could you please explain how you faked bounce lighting using AoA's Advanced Lights?
Yes, the Iray render does look more realistic, but it is also grainy - I really hate the graniness.
KK: Have you gotten a decent render from Urban Future 5 in 3DL, though?
Edit: Actually, I'll totally give you that one. Any scene where you want a lot of glowy stuff without it taking a huge time to render, MUCH better off with 3dl.
Although having said that, I wonder if you could make a pseudo ambient Iray shader. Hmmmmmm....
...I use additional low intensity lights behind surfaces and beneath the ground plane with shadows turned off. The beauty of the Advanced lights is you can adjust the falloff rate just as with a linear point light. (the latter which I also use). It is by no means as perfect as having actual GI but if done right can produce a reasonable effect and saves on the render crunch that UE presents. When I first started in this I was on an old 32 bit notebook with 4 GB and UE would usually choke then crash the process (as working in 32 bit I had only 2 GB available memory for the Daz Programme and scene) so I had to get a little more "creative" using more "render friendly" resources.
There is also a utility in the store here (thinking about getting it myself)
https://www.daz3d.com/reflective-radiance-for-3delight
Even though I now have a 64 bit system, I rarely use UE due to the heavy load it puts on resources during rendering. The longest render job I ever dealt with was sixteen and a half hours and that was with 3DL and UE. The longest Iray render job so far finished in just under 12 hours and there are some I simply abandoned on as I could see they'd take nuch longer. I really don't xcare to have my system tied up for a day or so as since Iray is integrated into Daz, you need to keep both the scene and programme open until it is done (one of the positive features of a standalone engine like Reality/Lux is once the scene has been submitted to the render engine, you can clear it from the Daz programme and even close the Daz programme as well which saves memory resources, if it wasn't even more glacially slow than Iray, I'd still work with it).
1. I use absolutely ONLY the 3Delight render engine. Because, frankly, Iray came out two months after buying my laptop and I am NOT going to run out and buy a whole new machine JUST to have a blasted Nvidia card. This machine has built-in ATI video, so I use 3Delight as the CPU-only Iray absolutely COOKS my machine no matter HOW good the cooling and air flow is set up around it.
2. 3DL materials are not a "MUST HAVE" for me. I am VERY accustomed to setting up my own 3delight materials. The market will advance regardless of whether or not we upgrade our hardware. As long as I have enough texture maps on an item to work with, then I am perfectly content to just set up my own materials from there if I have to. I have started seeing a rise in the number of "includes 3DL mats!" items where the 3DL mats are well... horrible. I actually prefer to get items that say "Iray only" as at least that way, I KNOW before getting the item that I will be setting up my own materials. Items that advertise having 3DL mats and then those mats are that awful... I expect working 3DL materials and get... junk that i have to rebuild from scratch anyway, and THAT annoys me.
3. No, I do not switch back and forth between 3DL and Iray. See my reason #1 above for why. I think Iray produces gorgeous renders, but my hardware can't handle it.
Dont care either way,I render my PBR still in Blender via the teleblend script and render my animations in C4D.
I was wondering that very thing just the other day.
We may talk more off thread regarding this in the near future....he said ominously....
FTR: I don't use 3DL much these days...I do swear by AoA's Advanced lights, though.
I thought the whole point of Iray was that it calculates ambience accurately and you don't have to use fake ambience lights or shaders.
You don't HAVE to.
But it's always nice to have more tools.
Yes, it is nice to have more tools available. And I sometimes get exasperated by Iray's "everything has to be realistic" approach, no you can't switch off shadows, real lights don't do that etc. Ghost lights are a nice example of catching Iray out, and they are very useful.
I would LOVE to have a way to get 'perfect flat' lighting for toon/illustration efforts. I have yet to find a reliable way to do this.
Ambient color or something like ambient light would be immensely helpful for this. (You can sort of do it with emissive channel, except you then have to work out how to keep every surface from affecting every other surface AND render time goes out the window)
YES, and YES! Absolutely I do indeed! Irays do not reach inside this cave.
...not yet as I have other works in the queue.
The only way I can see doing that is to keep the intensity low just so it glows but does not cast light. Not sure if that oule help with render times though.
I do use both,I need 3delight it for the LAMH animals, I a lot of times it is a lot easier for indoor scenes and lighting.But i would not use 3DL for characters.
Yes and yes.
I was about to say 'well, maybe material ID...' but then realized it doesn't take images. Bah.
And yeah, I don't think 'low intensity' would really help.
So when you want glowy color that doesn't actually cast light in a low-impact way, 3DL is superior. Of course, if you DO want it to cast light, Iray is superior; before Iray came out for Daz, I was incredibly frustrated trying to effectively render stuff like 'glowing eyes' where actual light was cast.
...I did this using multiple linear point lights to give the effect the glowing tubes were actually casting light.
I have used Iray, Frankly with my system setup right now I simply don't have the RAM to operate it!
I made several aproaches towards Iray by now but I just don't get along with it.
I prefere 3Delight, we're quite good friends now. I know what I'm doing and it renders well.
So before I buy a product I first check if it comes with 3DL-options. If not I just park it on my wishlist for later, when I learned more Iray. Which is quire unlikely, but not impossible :-D
I will say that CPU rendering using 3Delight is faster than CPU rendering using Iray. AMD video cards don't support Iray. I can't afford to upgrade my computer. I don't even have spare money to rejoin the Platinum Club. That is all.
IRay's generally the better renderer when it comes to quality (well, duh), but is - due to its nature - hard to handle when it comes to figuring out how much time an image will take to finish. Hair and fur rendering don't work natively with it as well so, yes. 3Delight is still a welcome necessarity because it can do some things IRay can't.
I use iray for most images, but sometimes I use 3dl, mainly for toony
stuff.But I would prefer quality materials for both be included in
products, because so many other people use 3dl extensively.
Courtesy for your customers, if nothing else.
Working on my own stuff, one area I find tricky is providing good organic and transparent/translucent support for both.
The behavior of each engine to things like SSS, refraction... and displacement (oy), can make trying to achieve a consistent look prohibitive.
just stumbled on this thread looking for s'thing else... but i have to add my cent since..
YES, i still use 3DL! actually, without 3DL, creating with DS would be over (or rather, i would need to be very careful not to update to an iray-only future version of DS, keeping the oldest version still offering 3DL) - and it's the only 3d program i really use, i never really tried working with my HEX nor my poser Debut. i.e., i need DS (and 3DL) or i'm back to 2D ~
after my previous machine, a netbook (yup!) ditched me, i waited impatiently over 1 year until i could afford a 2nd hand laptop that had nvidia. and then, i realized the machine could render with iray... but extremely slowly, and generating lots of heat - and i don't want it to fry. some nice people wrote posts with links about how to manage some ram issues etc, but i've been too tired to concentrate on tech stuff these past months. so, i don't use iray.
besides, i did invest what is a fortune for me in pre-iray products, and in spite of scripts and other helps 3dl -> iray, i don't really feel like converting everything i want to use.
Did you mean consistent between 3DL and Iray? A product wouldn't necessarily have to be identical in both as long as it was 100% clear from the promos (perhaps a single promo image with both 3DL and iray renders side-by-side labeled in huge letters). Unless you needed to use the shader in both render engines and somehow merge the two resulting renders (possible, but perhaps not common), you would simply be shopping based on whichever render engine you needed and ignoring the other one anyway. Or you could simply split it into two products that just happen to be very similar, one for 3DL and another for Iray to avoid any possible confusion.