Anyone else sad so many items are now only iRay?
holden_attradies
Posts: 121
iRay stuff looks more photoreal, I won't deny that. But iray also takes signifigantly longer to render, even on a recetnly updated computer. I do a ton of renders for comic style products and I need to be able to be pulling lots to get those projects done. I just can't get the number of projects done in the time i have with iRay and mostly I stick to 3Delight. Am I the only one like this? Am I the only one that looks at new releases, gets super excited, and then gets depressed when I see that almost all the cool new sets/props/backgrounds are optimized for iRay only?
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It can be frustrating, but this is a big help:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/139326/irayto3delight-conversion-script
(a pretty robust converter. And it's free)
Nope, and I don't blame PAs for doing only 1 shader, it's extra work. I image those that prefer 3DL over Iray is pretty small (niche use like comics, as you are doing).
I still make an extra set of Material presets for 3dl....but I tell ya, it is hard.
Not because of the work, but because when you make something look so cool in iray, it gets painful to look at a 3dl version that cannot get close to as cool. The 3dl settings are so limited compared to iray. (and i find 3dl takes longer to render than iray does...I pull my hair out waiting on my test renders to check and tweak my 3dl material settings)
No I fully have embraced the dark side which is Iray now.
Not sad that most products are iRay only, not interested in most products, happy as Larry if that suits most users.
Sad as a whipped puppy when some large, complex environment set that I absolutely "need" is iRay only.
Like today. Soon as the rain stops, gonna' go out to the yard and eat some worms :(
Am I wrong or, as the PA's get better and better at iRay, is it getting harder and harder to get good results converting to 3DL?
Man !!!! it's a miracle
Nothing is Iray only, you can put whatever shader you like on the mesh.
Sure, but just changing the shader doesn't guarantee a good result. And OK, often just a little bit of fiddling will give something worthwhile but not always.
I'd love to see more support for 3Delight too, as it's still my favorite render engine.
I can totally understand PAs who decided the extra work is not cost effective anymore, and I respect their decisions even if it's frustrating. However 3Delight support has become one of the deciding factors when buying new content. I've been using DS long enough to remember the time where there were no DS materials available on most content and can create my own materials if I have to, but that means lots of extra work compared to simply adjusting the 3DL materials provided, so an Iray-only item must be really worth it for me to invest. Good for my credit card I suppose ;)
+5 with my system, the 3DL takes 3x as long as the Iray renders, and most of my Iray renders are 4-8 hours for high end rendering.
Two things...only a small portion of the full potential of 3Delight is being used with the current set of shaders for it in Studio. And updating the base shaders for 3Delight is doable, but rather complicated.
That said, if 3DL is 'slow', then it's likely not being run optimally, even with the current shaders. It should not take 'forever' to run.
As to making things 'match', yeah it's hard but with proper shaders (no, not presets, which is what 90%+++ of what is called/sold as shader here are) it's not really too difficult.
I'm sad because I'm a Carrara user. No Iray for us.
No Genesis 3 or 8 either.
Yeah, my experience with 3DL these days is that to get equivalent quality (by which I mean, a proper shading rate set and good shadow sampling and good lights), it takes much, much longer than Iray to render. Not 'forever' but very long, comparatively. I suppose if you're using comic-shaders, that might be different. But up until recently I chose to render a fox I was using for a story using 3DL (because working with LAMH in Iray was too painful) and I always HATED setting up those renders because a character render in Iray would take 2 minutes and a fox render in 3DL would take an hour. (For reference, since Catalyzer was released, a fox render in Iray takes 2 minutes.)
It took me a long time to move to Iray. I still like the cheats I learned and the colorful renders in 3dl but the renders are faster In Iray for me now. What I wish would happen would be that they update 3dl. Seems a shame not to maximize on 3dl fully.
You are not alone..I do cartoon like images and I need the 3Dlight so things are am becoming limited for me. I am mostly a Poser user but recently started trying to learn DS because I love 3D Universe toons and the way genesis can be morphed into alot of different figures. Love the dragons too..so now that I am learing DS more..I am finding iRay to be the main content and once again I may have to turn to solely using Poser.
I only use 3Delight ,I'm not going for super realistic ,and since I'm still learning to play with 3Delight ,I see no need to move to Iray ,but it is frustrating when an item loads with Iray ,so I do alot of resaving ,and the Iray to 3Delight script .....and learning to make do/get use of alot of older stuff .......which my CC enjoys...nothing tells me I HAVE to go with the new SHINEY
yes
to 1
read below for 2 and she has a free beta character for 8
DAZ could make it work if they wanted to if you read the thread on the Renderosity forum
For me the speed cutoff is:
For realistic images, Iray is faster at resolution 2000x2000 or more, assuming Iray fits and not doing anything really weird.
That said, I often get more use out of a smaller 3dl image, particularly once post work is involved; heck, for some art stuff, I'm better off doing 1080x1080, expand it 4x, run it through paint filter, then shrink it back down.
i havent tried the script yet, there different flavors of 3de, aoa, aoa advanced, the omnifreaker sets
i select surfaces, dbl click the DzDefault preset and manually load the alpha masks into the opacity channels
sample:
g8f Ana Lucia character in carrara idl
I do this myself all the time. I don't buy textures I create my own. There are some great texture creation software out there Substance Painter, zbrush, blacksmith3d, 3dCoat. Pick your poision and get kracking. I hardly ever go with what the content creator made for the mesh. I love to tweak things and add little touches that enhance the finished output. So don't get discouraged if they only do Iray. If you are in a rush to get things done that just means you need to budget your time better. I should say I don't budget my time as well so I'm in the same boat. ha ha
We have to remeber as well that 3Delight is a beast of a render engine. It was never meant to be run on a single CPU, but on render farms consisting of hundreds, or even thousands of CPUs.
I think there is such a wide use and spread of generation of characters from Vicky3 all the way up to Genesis 8 now that venders would be successful in sales no matter what characters they create for . it just depending on what they want to invest their time it. But I sure you there is a market for older products, its just rare for new content to be offered for them. That is why I am a huge fan of Sabby at rendo because she does still make v4/m4 content for poser and daz iray.
with that said I use both iray and 3dl I have been using Daz a very long time & I have a pretty good graps on the settings using both Iray & 3dl render engines for "animations use" .That is my only use for daz studio . & after running my rendered work through a video editor they pretty much look the same.anway. So my spending is almost nothing anymore here. IMO to me it seems like most of the stuff offered now days, I have a ton of already, that is so similar to whats being offered that makes no sense for me to reinvest in the same similar stuff over and over.
I do not use Genesis 3 , v8 and g8. Sadly they are not friendly for my needs. I'm not insulting them, they just don't work for me & I choose not to use or invest for them. So it really does not matter what the pa's make or not make to me any more, if I see something I can use or i can make it work for my needs I may buy it other wise. I'm pretty much sticking with the thousand of $$$ worth of content I have accumulated over the last 8 years that works in Daz3 , Daz4.6 daz 4.8 and daz 4.9 I have no intentions upgrading my Daz software anytime soon. only because I have so much content I want to learn how to use first the best I can and work with it more than one render after i have purchased it, before i even think about participating in this continuous race of keep buying new products just because they are new & was hardly ever using more than once because they are so specialized for one render engine.. So i have completely stopped the impulse buying and seriously check products over.before buying them..
I learned a few things here lately, My opinions & money mean very little here at Daz. So the money I do spend here now days are environment sets if they are offered in 3DL & iray or if it looks like it maybe a easy conversion from 3dl to iray I do buy some g3 clothing & hair items if they come in 3dl and iray and i think I can autofit them easy to g2. and some of the older content when on sale ... This comment is just my opinion and other opinions may differ,
The rationale I occasionally see mentioned by artists who prefer biased engines like 3DL and Firefly is that they enjoy utilizing long-established cheats to get results that are comparable to un-biased engines like Iray and Octane. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but I do find it curiously ironic.
EDIT: If I ever become a PA, I won't support 3DL.
The biggest appeal to me with 3dl is that it handles displacement FAR better than Iray.
Most of the other stuff is trade offs, but displacement, 3dl just wins.
If it's so [explicative of your choice] easy why don't the PA's use it and provide at least the basis of 3Delight surfaces for us. Make a friend not an enemy.
Because then they'd have to provide support for a renderer they don't want to work with, and spend a lot of time trying to get 3DL materials to look as good as the Iray counterparts.
I always prefered 3DL because I like the higher saturation and the ease of using fantastical elements (not casting shadows, for example, so you can use pwCatch to put in something that casts a completely different shadow) that require multiple passes/renders in Iray and other reality based engines.
I've managed to figure out the right render settings to get the saturation I like. Still can't have physicially impossible lighting effects happen without multiple renders. :D
On topic, I've been pushing myself to use Iray more and more because I saw this coming. I'm still not interested in making photoreal renders, but since the rest of the world seems to equate photoreal with "better" I knew that was the way it was going, and my best bet was to figure out ways to make Iray look the way I wanted with minimal postwork (my hand's not steady enough to do more delicate painting in postwork, so for the most part I rely on filters and layer blending.)
So, yes I'm sad to see 3DL phasing out, but I saw this coming for a while.
There is an expression that contains something about violence toward a deceased equine that comes to mind here...
The problem is any promo image of 3dl is one less for Iray. Any time spent on 3DL is unlikely to satisfy someone in 3DL land, and that's work that's almost certainly more profitably spent on Iray stuff.
I'm not thrilled about it, but ...
(Now, personally, I plan on supporting both with anything I make, but most of what I make is freebies, so whatever)