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...my issue with Iray is the memory usage as I have to keep the scene and Daz programme open which leaves me with very little remaining memory for rendering and my system goes into swap mode which is even slower. At least with 3DL and Octane. I have a standalone I can use which means once the scene is submitted to the engine, I can shut it and the Daz programme down to conserve resources.
..the issue with Iray is that unless you have a beefy Nvidia GPU card, you are stuck in the slow lane rendering on the CPU. 3DL is much faster however with most products being released with only Iray materials that kills the 3DL workflow having to do a lot of manual conversion (even after using the scripts). In this respect, it feels as if Daz has turned it's back on 3DL rather than looking to open more of its possibilities (thankfully people like Parris, Kettu and Wowie are the ones doing that however it still does not help with Iray - 3DL conversion)
@DustRider, the information I posted is based on my personal experience and workflow. Below a couple of images showing Iray vs Cycles with equivalent materials and same hdri light. Both the images take about one minute to render so you can see yourself the difference in quality. To get the same quality with Iray you need about 10x time.
If you need proofs then Blender is free so you can do your own "apple to apple" comparisons yourself. Below some links to help your google-fu.
https://www.blender.org/
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.it/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRzzaRvVDng
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSZ3C5OTU2E
https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
I also agree with @valzheimer that each engine has its strong and weak points depending on what you need. For still pictures DAZ Studio + Iray + Photoshop is a good choice anyway. You can also use Photoshop for denoising.
It doesnt NEED keyboard commands.
You might, however, note that in the IBL Master readme there are links to sample scripts, some of which are so new they aren't yet live links, so Daz is still working on the suport infrastructure that these third-party tools use.
But with Octane you have to spend a lot of time manipulating the shaders, so either route involves work.
Hey, Thanks for the images!! That does help a lot, now I just wondering what was used for the Iray render, GPU or CPU?
Warning: FOSS software rant (sorry, just had to do it), for anyone wanting to avoid the rant, just jump down to "Rant off".
Yes, Blender is free (as in Beer, and Freedom), but it also suffers from the same problems that plague so many FOSS packages. There are many things that are just plain "over the top stupid counter intuitive" that even just using Blender as a render stage takes a serious time investment to even just evaluate it. The whole counter intuitive learning curve makes it not so "free". This is coming from someone who supports, uses, and teaches other FOSS packages. A few FOSS developers get it, and understand that making their software at least mimic how things are done in the top commercial packages, and intuitive, is important for adoption and support. Gimp and Inkscape come to mind as packages most people here might be familiar with where the developers have made them fairly intuitive and usable. One that I think is really at the top right now in terms of intuitive usability (i.e. if you know how to use and understand the most common commercial software of this type, you can quickly become functional with it) is QGIS (Geographic Information System software). Over the past few years it has gone from quirky sort of usable to very logically laid out and intuitive. My hope is that Blender 2.8 will put Blender on the path to mainstream intuitive, instead of geeky "do it my way, it's the best, besides, it free so don't complain". Sorry, but I couldn't help myself, I'm teaching a class that relies heavily on open source software, and have spent way too many hours (and hours, and hours) the last few months searching the web for the simplest things, that should be easy, and actually sort of are, after you finally come across the key bit of info or logic. Time that could have been better spent actually doing something if the developers, and long time users, had a clue what it's like to try to learn to use this awesome product (and no, QGIS isn't one of the packages driving me nuts, it's a welcome gem, and sooooo easy for students (and instructors) to come to grips with).
Rant off
Yes, blender is on my "to learn" list. Partially because of Cycles and Evee, but also due to all the other great things it has. But even though it is free as far as $$$, the cost in time and frustration of learning it makes Blender a lot more expensive. I think I'll wait for 2.8, seems like it might be a bit counter productive at this point to learn one UI, then a couple months later needing to learn the new UI.
Anyway, Thanks again Padone, much appreciated!!!
You may want to keep in mind that UIs can be a rather personal thing. Some people (including but not limited to me) find it intuitive (no genuinely. Other software apparently doesn't do blender's thing of having shortcuts match up with the names of what there doing and as someone who is actually bad at remembering shortcuts its way easier to remember "g for grab" than "random allegedly ergonomic letter for grab") Not that blender doesn't have it's idiosyncrasies, but I often find when people complain about it's UI once you move beyond right click select there don't seem to be a lot of specifics
On the other hand I cannot stand gimp. It doesn't feel particularly intuitive to me, it just feels like Photoshop but slightly clunkier and slower. On the other hand I love Krita which does more of its own thing and consequently has actual *advantages* over PS (like well integrated brush smoothing, guides, and symmetry). But of course if you're coming *from* PS I imagine gimp might feel more intuitive because it's more similar to what one is used to
...if you have PS. Some of us don't.
...been there with Lux/Reality and Carrara as well as even 3DL. I find that has less impact on my workflow than having to "optimise" scenes to get them to fit in small amount of VRAM or post production to not have them come out grainy (as I mentioned above, I don't have PS with its Denoiser tool).
Octane's out of core rendering is faster than Iray in CPU mode. I can actually put my small VRAM card to use whereas it's almost pointless to do so with Iray as scenes pretty much will dump to the CPU anyway (then often to swap mode depending how much physical memory the scene takes up having to remain open in Daz during the process). If I can submit the scene to Octane in standalone mode and close out the Daz Programme (like I could with Lux and 3DL RIB), that means more system resources will be freed up for rendering and the job will remain on both the GPU and the physical memory I have.
...my last experience with PS was Ver 2.5 (on a colour Mac II back in 1992). Oddly even with that gap of 14 years, I found Gimp to be fairly easy to learn. The one nice advantage, Gimp supports .abr brushes. You can't have them all loaded at once but you can set up brush folders that can be swapped in and out as need be.
I find optimising a scene often takes just a few minutes. Ultimately it is texture size that eat up RAM and VRAM, so that is what you concentrate on. Since you find converting to Reality/Octane shaders much easier for you, how come you are saying that Iray to 3DL is such a pain, I would have thought the conversion work was similar (albeit harder than 3DL to Iray).
Very true, different UI's work well with different people. My son picked up Blender in an afternoon back in 1999, I was pretty amazed, but he is a keyboard shortcut person, so it just clicked. I forgot to mention Open Office/Libre Office as being a good example of trying to make FOSS user friendly - very well done. It did take a bit of work to come to grips with Gimp, but it didn't make me go "wtf, how can I do anything in this" like when I first opened Blender.
Sorry again for the rant, I was a bit harsh on Blender in my last post. It just gets old dealing with usability issues in open source software, when it doesn't have to be that way. I fully understand it, and some of it is completely justified (someone makes a very useful piece of software to do things the way they work, and gives it to the world to use and modify, but doesn't want to spend countless hours making it easy for everyone else to use). However, for applications that are very popular, and receive a good deal of financial support from the user base, I think usability needs to be addressed better for continued support.
I do intend to learn Blender, because it is an awesome bit of kit. Hopefully I'll do it sooner than later. But waiting until 2.8 comes out seems the best course of action right now, no reason to learn the way things work now, only to have to re-learn it in a few months (of course I said that with the last big UI change too, lol).
..because some channels that exist in 3DL don't in Iray as well as the other way around. Even Carrara addresses the same parameter channels as did Reality/Lux. A good part of such conversions also involved simply replacing one shader set with the other. That exists for 3DL to Iray (via the Iray Uber presets) but there is nothing for going the other way.
I tried to stay in Daz Studio and use iRay for my work. I really tried. The benefits are obvious: Daz figures are designed for DS. There are loads of assets that work relatively seamless with it, and its a timesaver to work in as few apps as possible. But as an aspiring animator, I eventually realized that I would be spinning my wheels in Daz Studio, and iRay is gimped for animation (motion blur is must for animation work). So using another package is the only option for me. Redshift, being a biased render engine, has been surprisingly shader agnostic, making the transition easier. For serious animators, a jump away from iRay is probably inevitable. It's just a matter of choosing an interface that speaks to you as an artist. Iray in Daz Studio was specially tuned for still frame renderers, thus there is little motive for changing by the community. For me, deciding to finally change was the best creative decision I have made.
Wisdom from an OG. And Valzheimer too?! Thanks so much, mate. It all made perfect sense and was immensely helpful, answering my questions before I could even post them. My skill level is low, but Iray has lowered the bar to the point that most things will look great at [mostly] default settings unless I get too cute. I've found that ignorance can be an asset in that I don't know enough to quit before I attempt the improbable. Although I could just rule out the whole Octane affair since their logo employs six sixes, lol. Thanks for all the links, you guys.
You're welcome. I also understand your "rant" on Blender. The interface is sometime not "common sense". But there are customization options in the preferences that do help. And after a while you get used to it eventually. Plus you will find really tons of tutorials on the web for Blender. So this helps a lot too.
As for my example, I tried to be as fair as possible. So of course I used the same GPU for Cycles and Iray and GPU rendering for both. I didn't specify it because it seemed obvious to me.
It is certainly true you'd have to deal with Blender if you decided you wanted to personally use Cycles today. But Blender and Cycles are separate things. There is no cosmic or legal reason why Cycles couldn't be a rendering option from within DS, either via a plugin or because DAZ integrated it. (Cycles is distributed under a license that permits commercial use, so don't fall for anybody's GPL fear-mongering.)
Clearly DAZ has some sort of licensing contract with Nvidia that makes it possible and financially feasible to distribute an Iray-based product freely for now. But if that agreement has to be periodically renewed, one day the terms may not be so favorable. Or Nvidia may abandon Iray for some reason. I suspect sooner or later, due to market forces, DAZ will at least consider integrating Cycles--or maybe even Eevee, if permitted by whatever license Eevee is eventually realeased under.
...now that would be an improvement as Cycles isn't GPU "brand specific". I've seen some very nice results with it, jsut that every time I install the latest version blender and see that same UI and workspace that I saw 9 years ago that still is not natively pointer driven (unlike just about all other 3D software), I close it and uninstall.
Okay I know you have a pechant for exaggerating when it comes to blender, but... 9 years ago was pre 2.5, which was when the whole software was pretty much completely redone... Including the UI. If you can't see the difference between this:
And this:
I have to say I worry for your eyesight
And I could have a body morph done in Blender before I loaded in an object and was able to move it to the center of the viewport in Zbrush.
I'm not claiming that Blender is perfect and everyone should use it and nothing else, I just think there's a pretty wide gulf between the statements "Blender's UI doesn't work well for me" and "Blender's UI hasn't changed in 9 years" one of those things is a perfectly reasonable opinion the other is objectively contradicted by reality. I feel the same about say "Blender is optimized for working with hotkeys, which doesn't suit my workflow" vs "The only way you can use Blender is if you memorize lists of hotkeys and you can't access those tools any other way"
Myself and others who use Blender have said in this forum multiple times that while they can speed things up you can get by with very minimal hotkey usage, but somehow it feels like everytime Blender gets mentioned even if its just in passing someone will reply to the effect of "Hey you said blender. Did you know the UI is terrible and you need to memorize lists of hotkeys to use it?" And I might be gettining just a bit frustrated :|
Haha, that s excactley me. No clue moving an object in blender. Once succeeded it keeps sticking at your cursour like a piece of dog poop.
...when I open even the newest version of Blender I still get this, which looks very much like when I first encountered the programme.
...until it looks and functions more like this when first opened it just doesn't work for me.
We get you don't like Blender; you mention it at any and every opportunity it seems. I don't like Hexagon, and I try not to mention it every time you extoll its virtues.
Enough with the app wars already.
...sure thing.
Thanks again! Makes Blender and Cycles a bit more "interesting".
Well, since the thread has derailed from Octane anyway, I don't feel bad about asking: Does anyone have any experience exporting to Marmoset Toolbag and using it to render?
Soon Octane will be free for up to 2 GPU's and a single pc, I have Octane and like the speed of it, it is faster than Iray and very good if you don't have the fastest GPU's and want to save cash a simple subscription will improve your render times considerably. Octane can also load textures to ram and not just GPU. Cons - Not all materials from Iray translate ideally to Octane so be prepared for editing materials for Octane (lights and glass materials mainly) although selecting appropriate textures for Octane is extremely straightforward to do. I also use Cycles and Arnold as well and have tried Luxrender in Blender, The fastest render engine from my experience is Octane and next is Arnold which doesn't apply to this thread really since it is Maya, but it applies for what I am doing.
Not sure if I can recommend anything here without being slapped by mods but there is a very good cycles library that sells for 80.00 USD and it gives you about 100 materials, another is about 40 USD made by a physicist who is into 3d rendering and his material bases are beyond realistic. I bought those when they came onto the blender market and from there you can make any material. I'm relatively new to Daz (under a year) but not new to Blender and have been using it for the past 4 years, it was sort of what started me in cg.
Out of all of the render engines I have used, I currently find Iray is my favorite for final render, the renders are always very good and realistic with the least effort due to its integration with Studio. Although I am still waiting for Eevee on Blender and this might change a few opinions I have but that is just me following the hype.
The one big benefit with Iray is the relationship with Daz in that Iray and MDL materials for Iray are basically one click setups, a second for Iray is the realism. Octane is good at translating Iray materials in Daz but sometimes you will want to tweak the resulting Octane material using the expansive database which is also a massive benefit of Octane again, it is faster than Iray but Iray OTB with Daz is pretty well integrated and lighting is fantastic and beats Octane with less tweaking.
I think it is a trade for speed, Iray is more accurate than Octane but Octane is lightning fast and with tweaking can look as good and sometimes better than Iray.
As for blender, it is free but if you want a better interface you basically have to go to the marketplace and fill in the gaps be it appearance or functionality... over the past 3 years I have dropped 900 in the blender market to get my blender install where it is fluid and intuitive but I wouldn't trade any of it, in some ways it is no different than getting Studio free and then adding assets and shaders for cash, you build what you need and it can be extremely powerful when customized to focus on your goals.