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We need 3DL for our 2D'ish Visual Style and PWToon shaders. They are VERY fast renders. That makes it essential for me! :) For 3D, Iray indoor is much faster for me (GTX 960M). I like IBLM for outdoors, but I still have to revert to Uber and AOA Advanced stuff for indoors, which runs much slower on my system. It never hurts to have many options/tools in the bag!
The next build of DAZ Studio looks like it may have the new Optix denoiser for Iray which allows for cleaner renders with fewer iterations needed. I have yet to see much info about how the hardware requirements for Optix denoiser are but if it works in CPU mode that might be something people can keep an eye on when it is released.
Man... you're in for a treat with your upgrade. SSDs making the rocking world go round!
You can get a full 3Delight license for free. I think the current one built into Daz is limited to one core. A full license is way way faster.
Also... Octane... It has no Texture RAM limitations, so I've done 8.5GB renders on 4GB cards. I have two GTX 980s, the primary is for normal PC operation, the secondary is strictly for rendering. Its fast, and most renders are 10 minutes for high resolution, single character with a simple background. You will still spend time futzing with textures though.
UHF, the DAZ Studio 3DL is _unlimited cores_ on one PC. It has been that way for years. The freebie version can be faster on a lowly PC because it has no interface. It's command line. If you have many cores, the DAZ version will be faster. The free one is limited cores - I think 8.
8 threads, so only four cores for most of us. I have the free plugin for Maya. I really like it because it acts a lot like Renderman. But the core limitations make it unuseful for me. If it wasn't for my true love (
Arnold), I would consider buying a license.
Well, I can confirm it's using all 4 of the cores on my laptop :)
Laurie
By the by, for those frustrated by ue2... a quick and dirty (and pretty good!) method of doing bounce light in 3DL:
Convert surfaces to UberSurface (or US2).
Turn on Reflection, set it to Raytrace and not Environment
Reflection Strength at about 25% (adjust to taste), Reflection Blur to 75% (depending on material -- obviously, more metallic/reflective materials should be less blurry and more reflective, but those numbers should work for a large range of regular stuff)
You might want to up Reflection Blur Samples to 16, probably more would be overkill.
Set Render Settings/Sampling/Max Ray Trace Depth to about 5 (you could go higher but it's probably overkill).
Bam. You only need a few light sources and you'll get decent 'bounce,' and should work with a wide variety of lights.
It's slower than regular stuff, but not as slow as hardcore bouncelight options.
...
...
...Blender has a an extremely steep learning curve, including just for its UI. If you are comfortable with memorising and using lots of shortcut keys, using a node based shader system to convert materials, and scripting to customise features and operations, than it may be a solution. Be prepared to invest a lot of time though.
...there is still a good amount of content over at Rendo that has Poser materials which are much easier to convert to 3DL than Iray as they use the same channels.
Yeah, with only 3 CPU cores and 8 GB (~7 GB after Windows and system utilities) makes sense that rendering in Iray would be painfully slow as having the scene and Daz open also takes memory so even a mid sized scene could be dumping into Swap Mode (virtual memory partition on the HDD) which is far slower than rendering on the CPU. I have this happen more than occasionally with my 4 core i7 and available 10.7 GB of memory (though that should be remedied after this weekend).
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BTW ran a couple tests last night with the updated version of IBL Master (which tackled the matter of render artefacts in 3DL bucket mode) and the render times consistently average around 9m:45s compared to about 2.5 hours in Iray CPU mode for the same test scene.
Did you drop max path length to the same value you are using in 3DL, KK?
leg textures are a big one for me. I get rid of so many leg textures. Is your character wearing pants? then why are you having Iray load up 3+ 4k textures?
Also 4k hair textures so many new hairs come using like 10 4k textures and its just... unnecessary IMO, even for closeups
I mean this is just inaccurate. I've seen a lot of claims about blender, but saying you have to learn scripting to use it is just ridiculous. And, as I have said before, I knew about 5 shortcut keys the first 2 years I used blender and got around fine. There is AFAIK absolutely nothing only accessable by shortcuts eventually you start ending up using them because they are faster (its way easier to press e for extrude than find a button for it)
If the UI doesnt suit you thats fine, but saying you have to learn scripting is something else
...I mentioned scripting for customising the UI and layout which isn't required to customise the UI in Daz.
...for 3DL Max Ray Trace Depth is set to 3 and Pixel Samples are set to 12. In the Iray version, Max Path Length is lower (set to the default of -1) with Instancing Optimisation set for Speed.
Took some time to load each version.
Max path length of -1 in iray means no path lenght limit.
Yeah. -1 is basically like '100' or whatever (I think practically it's something like 10 or 12?)
Which is why I keep suggesting people set Iray max path length to 3-4, so it actually compares to 3dl.
Point of what test?
What I'm saying is that if you want Iray to not be 'so slow,' you need to lower the stuff that makes it so slow. Like ray trace depth.
And a max path length/ray trace depth of 3-4 is sufficient for most needs.
I don't think that's a sensible test.
In any case, if people want Iray to run faster, set Max Path Length can help a lot.
Ignore this, I misread.
That would badly affect transparency, even simple alpha-mapping as in most hair. And anyway in my tests the gain you get with this "trick" is not much. The best way to speed-up Iray is to avoid sss when not really needed, and to use a good denoiser in post so you can go with fewer samples.
Makes eyes turn black too.
Laurie
I have mine set at 10 which works with nearly every eye but it also depends on the number of layers and a lower setting can work too.
I'm clueless about 3DL, and I just took an Iray scene and merely switched the renderer to 3DL. And it was a bit faster I think, but the results were horrendous IMO. I'm sure I'm not doing it right, but the results were flat and weird shadows and colors and painful to look at. Though I saw some references to really nice 3DL renders on the 3DL website. So is it true that the reason for the difference is that the DAZ implemention is incomplete, or is it just that I didn't set up the shaders and render settings correctly? And is 3DL a ray tracer, or is it using some sleight-of-hand to generate a fast render?
Re: turning black; try it.
If you are following my other suggestion, to not use Refraction and Translucence, it works even better. Just use cutout opacity.
I generally found renders are 1.5 to 2x faster.
Yes. You need to use the 3DL shaders if included or tweak the shaders and adjust your lighting and your gamma to 2.2 but some older texture sets won't look good at 2.2. PAs didn't know about 2.2 until Parris, kettu and wowie started letting folks know a few years ago. DAZ is using an older version of 3Delight but it is still capable of much. It's free for a reason. If it was totally accessible, you wouldn't have anyone buying 3Delight, which used to be really expensive. The bonus with the DAZ version is it has the ability to use unlimited cores on a single PC. If memory serves, the full version 3Delight sells the studios can't do that. The Free version you can download from their website doesn't have that - it's limited cores (I think 4) - with no GUI - it's command line. 3Delight has raytracing but it's a Reyes renderer, based on all the stuff Renderman is/was (current Renderman has advanced quite a bit and so has 3Delight). The progressive renderer in 3DL is a raytracer. The RIB files you can export are Renderman based. If you're good at scripting, you can access many of the features even in the version DAZ has in the Scripted Render. Kettu has a free script in a thread here that gives you access to some features.
Never mind.