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I may be in the minority, but I don't want my 3DL renders looking like Iray renders. If I want something to look like Iray, I'll use Iray.
I have (and sometimes still do) done the render once in each and composite, and as long as the shadows are all going in the same direction(s), and the tiling is all at the same scale, I'm fine. I neither require nor desire the same level of realistic detail from 3DL that is typical for Iray.
I suppose. :)
Will experiment with my current project; at least for magma dude and iron it's not hard to do a proper 3dl treatment.
I wonder of Scene Optimizer will make a difference.
If people who don't have NVIDIA cards can use it and render in a decent amount of time, will they opt for 3Delight then?
...I looked at that. On the wishlist for now until I actually hear about how well it does. My thinking is it is similar toi the old Render Throttle which, as I discovered at the time, compromised render quality.
No difference for me, I'd still use 3Delight.
Prefered Carrara exclusively over Daz Studio for all of Legacy Generation 3 through 4 since Carrara 6.x , until Genesis came out and Carrara still is hit and miss with no upgrades to further support Genesis.
I chose Carrara over Daz Studio / 3Delight due to it was easier and more intuitive to setup scenes and render options, and the fact Carrara had Full Global Illumination and Indirect Lighting were simply 2 check-marks to enable in the render engine settings at render time. I didn't like having to mess around extra in Daz Studio with the various plugins to get the same result, or setup additional light systems to fake Global Illumination / Full Indirect Lighing. Let alone all the plugins one had to buy for Daz Studio that Carrara already had buiilt in natively, including real sky and landscape generation for making your own exterior scene renders Opposed to needing using premade images for skydomes or background imagery or TerraDome type props that everyone else uses for their scenes too).
Now things have come full circle, I rarely use Carrara any more, and have been using Daz Studio almost exclusively, and mostly Reality / Luxrender engine, and to some degree IRay , both in CPU render modes. For the simple fact that the Global Illumination and Indirect lighting is already part of the automatic render process. When I want / need full landscape outdoor renders i setup Genesis 1/2/3 and props in Daz Studio and export to Vue. Unfortunately, this also means buying alot of those types of plugins to add features and effects to render in Daz Studio that Carrara has. Yeah, I bought TerraDome3 too, just incase I need it and don't want to export to Vue.(exporting to obj to import into vue has it's own pros and cons, since collada and fbx while retains functional bone rigging, does not retain the morphs shapes information).
Yet, and however in a wierd twist of things, sometimes I have used Daz Studio / 3Delight to crank out a few images - for use of the Genesis series of figures, and specifically wanting an old school 3Delight based render and Poser style reflection maps. here's the 2 renders:
Sonja: http://jadeonar.deviantart.com/art/Sonja-8x11-673595942 ;
Sheena: http://jadeonar.deviantart.com/art/Sheena-438895006
These pinup-style classic old-school air-brush styled renders are amazingly fun to do, with the velvety liquid fake chrome poser-type reflection maps and plug in any background image of choice, and add a few colored lights for highlight. I'd imagine itd be tough to do those in an iray or lux render engine. And these only take a few minutes to render at best quality. And so very light on system resources you could still do on a 32bit operating system and an older lower end spec cpu.
So, to lose 3Delight would be a real shame, and considering the variety of shader plugins for 3Delight for even more render options, 3Delight should still remain a valuable tool in your render toolbox. Much like I still keep Carrara onhand, and still do the occasional render with it.
It really comes down to the render style and effect you want, and with all these render engines to choose from, each with their respective features, effects, pros and cons; right now we all benefit from having this very wide and extensive artists pallete to render our images onto our digital canvases.
No and no
Since I experienced more and more degradations with the newer releases (see: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/161031/daz-4-9-3-166-degradation-of-iray), I really think to come back to 3Delight.
With some knowledge accumulated during the iRay experiments, I think it is possible to increase the 3Delight outcome.
Yes and yes.
...with the right coaxing, 3DL can turn out some pretty nice images like this one by Linwelly
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2349461/#Comment_2349461
I own every one of those hair products you've published here, I think they are some of, if not THE, best hair out there. Don't they all have 3DL mats?
With advanced shaders, 3delight is pretty fast on my old Phenom II 955 and even on my notebook
If wanting more realism in 3delight equivalent to Iray you must use the pathtracing engine and correctely write shaders for that. For what I know, all DAZ 3DL product rely on old techs based on AO and IDL and point cloud
I made a test scene with 3delight Pathtracer and reflection/refraction and one IBL for lightning. At raydepth 4 and 64 samples I get a good preview in 3"30. To get rid of noise I crank the samples up to 1024 and the render took 9"30
I'll rebuild the scene later with Iray but I'm pretty sure I wont get a noiseless render in less than 10 min with just the CPU
You can do a lot in 3Delight. More than with Iray
And you can also get the same fireflies and noise like in Iray too
IMHO, the big advantage of Iray integretion within DS is that you have a tonemapper and bloom filter and other little things that you don't have with 3delight integration in DS
It's a bit late in the thread to ask a new question, but I was concidering preset lights in 3DL...
There are so many different lighting technologies for 3DL, and folks have what they like...do you care if a 3DL set has lights or not?
(Iray sets will often not have photometerics, but will have emissive surfaces).
I only use pre-existing light sets if they are for actual lights in the scene (candles, fireplaces, lamps, etc.) Otherwise, I prefer to set up my own lighting. When I was newer to all of this, I'd look at other light sets to see how things work, so even though I don't use them, I see them as having value. Just not for me any more.
preset lights are nice where there are actual lights involved in a scene ( street lamp or something of that sort) otherwise I do my own light setup. I tresd useind some presets from a scene at a time but ususlly I tinker around with it till I get annoyed, then remove all the light and do it myself
Thanks for mentioning my render here Kyoto kid!
So which image looks more life-like ... http://orig03.deviantart.net/73c5/f/2017/111/8/d/which_version_is_more_realistic_looking_by_dim357-db6owex.png ... 3Delight (left) or IRAY (right)?
Exactly, if you had not said it I would have.
The real world is mundane, as the root of the word mundane (world) implies. That means commonplace, boring. The real world does not typically "pop." If you are inserting extra lights to mimic a photography studio, using composition to focus attention on particular objects, and manipulating blur/brightness/contrast in specific parts of an image to attract the eye, then you are probably not just trying to reach maximum realism.
Iray can be great. 3DL can be great. Embrace these (and other) approaches if they are cost effective. Typically, the uses I see for Iray are not closer to reality. So misleading, in my opinion.
Pot has now been stirred. Blast away.
Personally I like haveing access to 3DL, because I have yet to get a decent IRAY render.
I use both and I can fix material settings myself for those items that need it. If it is going to raise the price of the item to have both, just Iray is fine.
IRAY
That's more true of 3Delight than it is of Iray, believe it or not.
Bad Deviant Bad.
Wanted to see the pictures but my Norton slapped my wrist. 
While I agree that the Iray image is more life-like, there's a lot that could be done to make the 3DL one look better. A different specular setting on the skin, for example (if not a completely different shader). And the belt could use a better leather shader too.
Thank you for the bigger images.
Right-Twix looks more real, but I prefer the Left-Twix.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtWavRpVzDQ
There are a bunch of things you could do to make that Iray image pop more -- side lighting, surface gloss, etc.
As many folks have noted, one problem with comparisons is that it's only a fair comparison if you are equally skilled in using both renderers.
Yes, and yes.
I do want to use IRAY, but so far all I get is:
Another reason I prefer 3DL...
Just did an image in 3DL, then started the conversion to Iray, with the intention of compositing... but those freakn' 4K textures crashed my machine because I forgot to reduce them first. (and I have an Nvidea GeoForce 960)
I was using the exact same texture maps, just the 3DL vs Iray settings. 3DL (with non-realistic lighting) took me about an hour to render. Don't have render times on Iray yet, because I just restarted my machine... sigh.
Note that only the G3F character and her clothing/hair has the higher texture maps. The starship cockpit is actually an old Poser item, with considerably smaller textures.
Edit to add - Iray time ended up being comparable. ;) Added raw Iray and mildly postworked composit