3Delight rendering - questions
daveso
Posts: 7,771
in The Commons
I'm not knowing aqbout 3Delight as I just use Iray..but I have no GPU and all rendering is done via CPU.
Is 3DL faster than Iray?
Does it work faster and better with CPU?
Will Iray textures work in 3DL?
What else we need to know.

Comments
3Delight is a "renderman compliant" renderer and as such it has always been cpu only, it has been part of DS since the beginning. It CAN be faster than Iray in cpu mode but it depends on a LOT of factors. If you load something with only Iray shaders/textures and set the renderer to 3dl it will auto convert to 3Delight surfaces but it generally does a poor job which is where the new conversion script comes in handy.
Edit: you can see some examples of renders done in 3dl here https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/130611/show-us-your-3delight-renders
People will tell you 3DL is faster than Iray. They are mistaken.
The critical thing is that render speed will depend on how many calculations the render engine needs to make, and that depends on light fidelity and realism, how much the light is allowed to 'bounce' through the scene, and so on.
3DL defaults to a simpler, more reduced level of detail than Iray is, and has a few more tricks to reduce render time.
Of course, it depends on what you want to do; once you reduce a lot of lighting quality and so on, you end up with a fairly primitive/unrealistic render. Which might be fine, particularly if you are going to do a lot of postwork.
3DL is no better with CPU than Iray, and if you do roughly similar things, 3DL is like Iray in CPU mode.
Iray textures will work in 3DL, but the shaders may not look very good. You want to either use a free script or Sickleyield's new cool converter. The maps are mostly the same, though.
While it doesn't have all the features of the new Riversoft/Sicleyeild converter there is also this free converter: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/139326/irayto3delight-conversion-script/p1