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If anyone is still counting, I only use 3Delight and I do require it, because I can't afford to go buy another computer just for rendering. Both my desktop and laptop are Macs. And, although I think there are advantages to each engine, I don't see iray as more advanced. Just different. I "get" 3Delight, probably because it's what I'm used to and I like the effects I get with it.
YES.
I only use 3DL. I would like to use Iray but it renders so slowly... and anyway I don't make my renders in DAZ, I export my stuff in Vue and render in Vue... so Iray and all types of shaders in DAZ doesn't help me for anything. So, yes please, continue with 3DL.
I started with 3DL almost five years ago but switched to Iray the moment it came out. I find lighting in Iray much, much easier. I'm also a keen amateur wildlife photographer (using Canon DSLRs) so this may have helped with Iray.
Cheers,
Alex.
I realize this is an old thread, but I figured I'd throw my answer in anyway.
Yes, I still use 3DL. I prefer to buy products that come with 3DL shaders, but it's not a deal breaker for me if they don't. If I want the product enough, and it only comes with Iray shaders, I'll take the time to adjust the shaders myself to work with 3DL.
Depending on the project I am working on, sometimes I don't want photorealistic renders, after all. Sometimes I don't want physically accurate light behavior. I want EXACT control over how light behaves in my scene, even if it's not realistic. That's something 3DL gives me. Iray does not.
I think any concerns that Daz is going to drop 3DL from future versions of Daz Studio are probably unfounded. Again, not everyone wants physically accurate lighting or photorealistic renders.
I generally prefer Iray, but I still use 3Delight, because sometimes products are 3Delight only, and other times, 3Delight just does a better job than Iray.
Use it and require it. I have zero interest in going down the photo realism rabbit hole nor do I have any real desire to render realistic looking humans. I'm an actor with a lot of actor friends so if I wanted to make a short movie with realistic looking humans I could easily get a bunch of my talented friends to participate in it. I'm interested in NPR and toon figures, particularly cell shading. 3Delight is pretty much the best option for that. Hell even just using Open GL can be very useful.
I just love OpenGL it is soo fast. I agree that if Daz added freatures to Opengl Daz would rock. The toon like quality of opengl does not detract from its usefullness it increases it. I just wish Daz had a game engine renderer like Unity and Iclone that was Opengl for animation. Iray is too constrained by vram for animation work.
open gl is great for some rendering of stills - however as the render is running through the graphics card is can be unstable. 3Delight is a must for Mac users. The Iray render, as I understand it, runs through a windows graphic card brilliantly but is not functional for Mac so the the Mac groans through the CPU to compensate for it. In other words whether you are making stills or animation, 3Delight remains crucial for all Mac users regardless of realism or any other style. Open GL will also miss some of your rendering or sometimes appear just like a screen shot, which it is effectively doing.
In the beginning yes i used 3DL but only because i hade an AMD video card. As soon as i had some extra cash i got a GTX 1070 and moved to Iray.
..with Parris' IBL Master and the forthcoming "Mega Shader" (for lack of a better name) utility from Wowie, more and more of the full capabilities of this render engine are being opened. I've been using IBL Master now for several weeks and getting great results in a fraction of the time it took with UE or Iray in CPU mode.
The thing is that Iray makes heavy use of CUDA to perform well, and does not support OpenCL. CUDA is only available on nvidia cards and Macs use AMD cards these days, which use OpenCL.
If you want to try out photorealistic rendering, you might want to check out Blender's Cycles renderer. It supports OpenCL and therefore works great with AMD cards. There's a wonderful script called mcjTeleBlender for exporting Daz scenes to Blender for rendering. You'll often have to tweak some materials to get good results (I find that human figures often have too much bump mapping and too much gloss, for example), but in my opinion, the results are worth the effort. As a bonus, Blender Cycles lets you save images in HDR format so you can process them using HDR photo editing software. Right now, Iray has no support for HDR as far as I know. I typically find that with a little bit of materials tweaking, I can get better results in Blender Cycles than I can in Iray. And saving as HDR opens up whole new possibilities for postwork that don't work so well in low dynamic range images like jpeg and png. And since I have an AMD card, Cycles renders much faster than Iray.
Here's a link to the mcjTeleblender site if you want to check it out: https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts4/mcjteleblender3
...for me, Blender is a lost cause because I never could wrap my brain around it's UI.
Mega Shader? Not familiar with this utility. Can you provide link?
He calls it AweSurface. Check the last couple of pages in https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/55128/3delight-laboratory-thread-tips-questions-experiments#latest for more info. It's not released yet, but according to what he says it's in its final stages;)
..thanks, forgot the actual name.
I don't know Blender very well either. But when using the mcjTeleblender script, the only thing you really have to learn about Blender is how to adjust material settings if they don't look right after being imported from DS (and you really don't even have to learn that, as I will elaborate on below.) The mcjTeleblender script takes care of everything else. You can set up your lights and cameras and all in DS. And they will get imported into Blender where they pretty much just work. Materials are really the only thing that sometimes require tweaking.
If you really don't want to learn how to work with materials in Blender, you can also make these adjustments in DS, although this can be a bit slow and tedious since every time you make a change and find out it didn't produce the effect you wanted, you have to go back to DS, tweak things again, re-export the scene, go back into Blender, etc. I found it much better to take the time to learn how to adjust the materials in Blender itself so I could adjust them in real time while getting a real time preview of how Blender was going to render them. YMMV, but I think it's very much worth the time to learn how to work with materials in Blender rather than keep switching back and forth between Blender and DS once you've exported the scene from DS.
Of course, sometimes you get better results by messing with the lighting in Blender too. For example, by changing a spotlight to an area light. But once again, lightning is a relatively small part of Blender that you can learn pretty quickly. Especially given you don't actually have to create a new light. You just have to tweak the one you imported from DS. That said, learning how to light a scene directly in Blender can produce better results. But again, that's a very small part of Blender that can be learned rather quickly and on an as needed basis.
So I guess that was a long way of saying try not to let Blender intimidate you. After all, you can ignore 95% of Blender if all you want to do with it is use its Cycles engine as a renderer for your DS scenes. Again, I'd suggest it would be well worth your time to learn how to edit materials in Blender. But you can learn that in an hour or two. You can basically ignore the rest of Blender.
...actually looking forward to Octane 4 which will have a subscription channel for 20$ per month. Octane allows for out of core rendering whereby the only the excess texture load dumps to the CPU instead of both textured and geometry like Iray does and is still pretty fast. While yes, it would also require converting materials however I've done that for Reality/Lux in the past. The really nice feaure, I can also run Octane as a standalone which means I can close the scene and Daz programme after submitting the scene to the render engine thus freeing up more system resources.