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The nice thing about Tron is that while I thought the young Jeff Bridges looked a little unrealistic... he was a computer simulation in a virtual world. So hey.
...Wait... Jeff Bridges is real? I thought he just one of those made up things they use to scare little children... Like Santa Claws or dentists.
I don't care how much they cheat. It is the end result that matters. The fact is that Iray has no options to "cheat" and save time. Nobody is saying Daz should drop Iray...but it sure would be nice if the program had some kind of option to simplify it, like an Iray-Lite mode geared for animation. Not everybody needs or wants everything to be physically perfect. Look at movies. People pay good money to watch movies that fake quite literally everything, with 24 frames per second motion blur (which is certainly not realistic.) Nobody cares if that blood is just syrup, and doesn't even look like real blood. Bullets do not spark every time they hit something. Real explosions are not Hollywood explosions. But you don't hear too many complain about that. Yet they did complain when the Hobbit ran at a higher frame rate than other movies. Go figure! (I complained, too, but because the movie was so dreadfully boring.)
As I said, Unity has a ways to go, but that time is indeed coming. I'm not saying Unity will be the animation hub, but there will be people using it, possibly at the expense of Daz Iray. People are using it right now. People are always going to use what works, period. Iray has so many limitations that it is just not practical for many things. Whether it be the hardware required, or the difficulty in making any non realistic images, like anime. RWBY comes to mind. This show with a cult following was created with POSER (yep, Poser, not Daz3D.) The show has an anime inspired look, and fast action. You wont get that with Iray. However, it is notable starting with season 4, production has moved to Autodesk Maya instead. Its also being featured in a Twitch Anime Marathon that starts October 9 (whoa, tomorrow.)
Here is an article about a CGI cartoon series created with Unity. Being able to work in real time and make changes in real was huge time saver according to its director.
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tv/behind-scenes-mr-carton-animated-series-made-game-engine-149794.html
A modified version of Unity was used in production of The Jungle Book...yes, Disney used Unity! The company that owns Pixar, the best CG animation studio on Earth, used Unity...let that sink in. And once again, being able to work in real time was the key reason for this decision.
http://www.icgmagazine.com/web/bare-necessities/
So yes, that time is coming soon, like real soon (maybe not even Daz Soon®.) Being able to do stuff in real time is a massive, ahem, game changer. That one aspect alone gives game engines a big advantage, regardless of how much they may be cheating or not. Sometimes they just don't play fair!
This thread starts with Unreal Engine, so here is an upcoming cartoon series created entirely with Unreal 4. And it gets better, the video playing on the monitor is revealed to be playing in real time, he starts moving the camera and stuff live in front of you. And Nvidia is also one of the partners behind this project...I guess Iray was not suitable for this?
I never hear about animation being rendered with Iray. I tried searching, but came up empty. I heard a couple car commercials were, but lets face it, cars are "easy" in terms of 3D. Cars in commercials have been CG for years. So what is Iray going to do? What will Daz do? If nobody uses Iray for animation, then obviously few will be using Daz. And if Daz figures are difficult to export for animation, that would hurt their chances of being used in these game engines. Those are problems that will need to be addressed at some point in time. Maybe that time is not quite here yet, but mark my words it is approaching faster than you might think.
Daz Studio, in its current iteration, would never be considered by any studio for animation. Period. iRay is the least of the problem. I'm surprised someone stayed with Poser for so long and not surprised they decided to go to Maya. The brutal production schedule of an animated series almost demands that you move to a platform that was designed to assist and accommodate fast turnaround of high-quality animation. This almost always means Maya or Houdini. Hollywood Studios are more commonly turning to real-time engines for pre-viz, visualizing the shot before it goes to the farm for the final render. Pre-viz saves lots of time in the long run. So real-time game engines have a place in professional productions as well as indie studios and they will only get better. The question is where will Daz3D's place be in that future world? Will they continue to stick to decorating pretty, elaborate still photo sets with scantily clad women or will they dip their toes in the exciting waters of animation? I think this next release will tell us which way they are planning to go.
"...The fact is that Iray has no options to "cheat" and save time...."
The cheats he is referring to are not the sort of cheats that a person who uses a raytracer will want to use. They are the required compromises that allows a renderer to finish drawing fast enough to meet the real time objectives of the animator. If a raytracer employed such cheats, it would no longer be considered a raytracer. The "iRay lite" you were describing is actually the full production version of iRay. It allows you full control over how your subject is rendered, without resorting to "cheats". This is what wolf359 was talking about. It is Daz iRay that is iRay Lite. Take a look at Nvidia's iRay website for a read on the real iRay. Nevertheless, iRay is a raytracer and the full version is not much different than other raytracers on the market. It is not the most popular, but it is capable of producing stunning images. You can get any look you want from it as long as your 3D application is able to drive it (DS is not able), whether that be the cartoon anime look, a photoreal look, or something in between.
Raytracing in it's modern form is really just a cheat anyways. To make true non-cheating light your raytracer would need to calculate trillions (probably even more than that) of "rays" from every single light, then each ray would be split into trillions more whenever it interacts with anything that does not absorb 100% of the light.
To create an animation that's at least close to real world acurate a 40W cool white forecent bulb emmits roughly 25,500,000,000,000,000,000 photons per second. That being said we are still a long ways off from having true 100% acurate lighting in CG.
On the other hand we have gotten very good at making apoximations that are very convincing looking. Though it still comes down to... how much processing power are you willing to throw at light path calculation.
Regardless of how much a purist you may be, there is still a defined definition for raytracing and I dont think to qualify it must track down every single ray of light in the scene. It just has to devise its image from tracing light and not from baking lightmaps or false GI. When you are using a realtime engine, it is definitely not raytracing. It is doing another thing. And this other things produces affects that are generally not desired by an artists who uses a raytracer.
That being said we are still a long ways off from having true 100% acurate lighting in CG.
Yeah, but I have rarely heard of this being a problem. What does 100% accurate mean and what value is it anyways? Exactly copying reality this way is so boring and uninspriring. When one is creating a movie, they are taking an artistic license on reality. The more immediate concern is "can you make the light look the way I want?", not whether it is 100% accurate.
Interesting, didn't know about that. To be fair though, it was used for visualization only. None of the final shots you saw were actually rendered with Unity.
Yeah, I hope that is made clear. Unity is nowhere near being able to produce the image quality a Disney movie requires. But it is a good quick way to block out a scene or check for mistakes before sending out for final rendering.
Use AOA lights with 3Delight instead of Iray. It renders really fast, the result doesn't look any worse like with those game render engines. Problem solved.
Depending on the game and engine... Yes it is raytracing. Just, very low resolution raytracing, and very limited light bounce (if any). The raytracing and shadow drawing will be just high enough resolution to look good from the average camera distance from your main character. When the camera gets too close you start seeing stairstepping around the edges of shadows, and other oddities in the lighting.
I guess it depends on how you define a raytracer. Unity game engine, for example, can utilize raytracing for some things, shadows for instance. But I would scarcely find anyone who would say it's a raytracer. It is a hybrid rasterizer at best.
I'm not sure having or not having raytracing is really an accurate way of determining whether or not a given render engine qualifies as real-time. I say this mainly because I could swear Iray had a real-time mode as well as the VR capabilities. And of course DAZ has only implemented a fraction of the available capabilities so far in DAZ Studio.
There is no real-time mode. Perhaps you mean interactive mode? That is not the same as real-tme rendering. As for VR rendering, sure, most any renderer can producte frames fast enough for VR if you connect it to a supercomputer. That's whats required if you want to use iRay's VR capabilities.
Actually, I did find some information on it; it's an OpenGL compatible display mode that happens to support MDL. Got that information right from the folowing thread: https://forum.nvidia-arc.com/showthread.php?14237-What-is-the-different-between-Iray-Interactive-and-Iray-Realtime
Speaking of unconvincing computer models in movies, let's not forget Oliver Reed's CGI "double" in Gladiator. Reed died during production so for his last scene a CGI Reed took his place. If the uncanny does indeed occupy a valley, that scene was worthy of its own Grand Canyon.
I think we are generally agreeing on most things, especially with that last paragraph. Where we part is basically over ray tracing, but just how important is that in the scope of things? When you say "can you make the light look the way I want?", it becomes of question of what it takes to accomplish that. If a video game engine can do that well enough, then it would be pretty logical to take that route. It obviously requires rethinking the work flow, and some models may need alteration to work. But that is where Unity comes in. Just like Daz, you can buy just about everything in their store, fully rigged models, environments, animations, scripting, textures, audio, particle systems and more. You can even buy full pre built games to retweak or whatever (actually there are a number of users and the so called "asset flippers" that abuse these kinds of assets, but that is another topic.) This is a good situation for any small time wanna be animator. It will result in a lot of small indie projects getting made. And eventually one of those will become a breakout success or gateway for a career for the person behind it.
So Unity really has everything, all it really needs is to keep improving its engine. And eventually the quality will get to a point to where it is "good enough" to pass muster for general animation. It may not be there yet, but I truly believe this is the future. When you speak about people using game engines for preproduction, that will only lead to this change faster. As the game engines get better, eventually one of those directors will say "why don't we just animate the whole thing in the game engine?" And that is when it will start to happen. The benefits are just too obvious to ignore. Real time feedback cannot be topped. Don't like that animation? Change it and see your result instantly. It changes everything.
Iray has parameters to change, but not without massive drawbacks to its quality, like grain. A game engine is generally optimized by its very nature and will not have that problem.
I'm in total agreement on how the next version of Daz will tell us how seriously they are looking at animation. I believe that the singe frame picture rendering segment can only go so far. There will always be a market for it, just like there is a market for photography even though we have technology to take moving pictures. But that market will get more difficult as time goes on and more options come up. Animation and video has always been more attractive. Lots of people talk about the big movies, TV shows, and such. You have to seek out people to talk about paintings and photography with. Thousands might buy a comic, but millions will see the movie. That is why animation is important. If Daz somehow broke down barriers to animation, they would reap great rewards. Right now they are handcuffed by both their model and Iray.
..it's an OpenGL compatible display mode that happens to support MDL. ...
Oh, if that's what you mean, I stand corrected. OpenGL is just a means of viewport display. It is not rendering. But if it supports MDL, it would be a cool way of previewing your render on your display. But you will still have to wait for the render.
"So Unity really has everything, all it really needs is to keep improving its engine..."
I'm almost sold on Unity. It's installed on my computer and I have been dabbling in it. But with Unity, you have to go elsewhere to animate. Once you have the animation, you can import into Unity and they have this wonderful camera system and real-time engine (almost there for me), but you still have to animate it first. Where? For most production companies it has been Maya but Maya costs an arm and a leg. This is where I pray to the DAZ gods. I don't ask for much..... just a decent mocap pipeline to DAZ. Fix the broken FBX import and make motion capture files more compatible with your armatures. Fix IK too. Ok, these 3 things and I will repent of my sins (I've been watching too much of the Handmaiden's tale).
I have this same wish. Please DAZ. And make your Morph3D stuff properly open to custom content creation instead of continuing down this weird walled garden path.
Ue4 is better then Unity and looks way better
just a statement no proof
i could just say the opposite and then ?
Better? Better is in the eyes of the creator. I find game engines, like everything else, have their strengths and weaknesses. Not having to wait for renders is a compelling argument, but I tend to drift toward realism for my movies and neither Unity nor Unreal can meet my standards yet. But they are very close. By the way, I don't see much difference between them. Each one can be made to look like the other. It depends on the artist. They both use real-time renderers which place the same limitations on them. One day computing power will allow real-time raytracing. That is the holy grail. On the other hand, plenty of people don't strive for photorealism. I think cartoons and anime are ideal candidates for game engines.
So I just came back from Bladerunner 2049 and
SPOILER ALERT (select white text to read)
I thought Rachel was damn near perfectly done. There were only some tiny flinching of the eyes that looked ever so slightly off. Here's an interesting article I found about it where Villeneuve also talks about how CG Tarkin and Leia took him out of the movie.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-blade-runner-2049-resurrected-that-character-f/1100-6453912/
That was amazing, wasn't it!
I'm in agreement with the director, and with you guys on this film. It's sad it takes so long, though, to get it right. I saw the film today and that scene is fairly quick, but I couldn't see any problems. If I hadn't read the spoiler, I wouldn't have known, it was that well done. And I'm a fan of the actress.