Reality renderer plugin for Daz?
handel_035c4ce6
Posts: 482
Quite accidently stumbled upon Reality renderer plugin for Daz
http://preta3d.com/reality-details/
Do someone uses it?
Post edited by handel_035c4ce6 on
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Comments
I used to all the time. It was what got me into using DS instead of poser.
Luxrender is as great if not better than Iray. But for me, the built in Iray preview is what turned me to iray only since I can adjust on the fly inside of DS instead of going to another window/app to do my changes.
I have a Luxender folder at my DA gallery if you want some old examples
Luxender is for B&W renders?
As fro Reality - does it really makes obsolete the special shaders packages for Daz?
luxrender is for whatever type of render you want. It also comes with a bunch of filters. As for Iray shaders, yes, you will usually have to redo them in Eeality. Every renderer handles materials and shaders differenty, be it luxrender, Octane, etc.
I still use Reality/Luxrender with Poser at times. The advantages of LuxRender included 1) Free, run as many installations as you like 2) It would run on almost any CPU or GPU, as long as there was an opencl driver 3) You could set up a RenderFarm with whatever computers you had, even mixing Windows, Linux, etc. But, there were still some bugs to be worked out, and some people had a lot more trouble than others (I never had too many problems). Unfortunately, some new GPU drivers have "broken" GPU opencl rendering in most cases.
If you want to do B&W renders, you can switch the "film" settings. For example, I ran renders with the "Kodachrome" setting, then switched to "Ilford B&W" for B&W renders. Did not change any other settings.
Reality was able to do a pretty good job (in my opinion) of automatically translating many Poser Firefly and Daz Studio 3Delight shaders for Luxrender. Of course, some tweaking was always needed, and some shaders had to be redone. The last version of Reality (before LuxRender essentially shut down) attempted to translate Iray shaders, but more work was needed.
The good news is that there is a new re-boot of LuxRender as LuxCoreRender, and the first stable release is out. I have been able to run some renders in CPU mode. I think GPU and CPU + GPU modes work in the current release. They also have a denoiser in the current version, similar to those in IRAY and Octane.
https://luxcorerender.org/
Paolo (Preta3d.com) is going to annouce a timetable for Reality updates for LuxCoreRender soon. I plan on getting it for both Poser and DS. Reality is not free, but it is very reasonably priced, and the previous versions were often on sale.
...my experience with Reality/Lux was not a very good one. First, it seemed as if render times on the CPU were measured on a geologic scale as after an overnight job of 10, 12, even 15 hours, the scene was about as grainy as Iray around 35% - 40% convergence. Yeah I know a later version of provided a "speed boost" however it really depended on what era of CPU you were using. I was lucky to get 3x, (far from the advertised 10x boost) which was still slower than Iray ion my system. Also the speed boost came at a cost in that it sacrificed final render quality to a degree. I ended up uninstalling everything because of the bugs in Reality 4. There were patches issued which fixed one situation, only to introduce a new bug elsewhere.
As I understand they finally have full GPU rendering (as mentioned above via OpenCL), however Nvidia OpenCL development lags behind AMD, and if a scene exceeds a card's VRAM, Lux crashes rather than dumping the scene file to the CPU like Iray and Octane do. Lux development also ceased work in a GPU + CPU hybrid mode in the months just before Daz introduced Iray in the 4.8 beta. .
On the other hand, what i liked was that Lux through Reality was a batch process, meaning that once the scene was committed to the engine I could close the scene in Daz and even shut down the Daz programme. Two other features that made Lux better than Iray were the film emulation filters which meant you could render in that style without resorting to post, and again, networked rendering.
I stopped using Reality same reason as FSMCDesign. I loved Reality and Lux, like any software/render engine has pros/cons. What I enjoyed about Reality as a beginner was the interface, materials and lighting system, which taught me most of what I know today. Also, projects that are rendering can be saved on the fly, can stop, save, return anytime in the future to continue render, where left off. From my experience Reality does a better job of rendering base figures, Iray does a better job with technical objects, such as cars, building, etc.... Both are excellent, just persons preferences makes the difference.
Damn! Not the magical panacea as they advertize it:-)
Being a Blender guy and more or less used to the nodes there and the freedom they give (in Blender nodes are everything shaders related) don't want to start and learn another system (Daz) if not forced to.
You will find that Blender is a world all to itself. many struggle with learning Blender because it does things so much more differently than the rest of the software world, so it's not surprising that if you veture out from that world, that things will be much different than expected..
Since you are a blender guy, respect! I have used quite a few modeling apps and Blenders UI has never made sense to me. I am a 3DSMax guy, it makes sense to me
There is a version of classic LuxRender (LuxBlend) that integrates with Blender. There is a also a version of LuxCoreRender for Blender. I have not had the time to learn Blender (on the to-do list) so I have not tried them. Not sure either how it compares to Cycles.
I didn’t care for reality. I had a lot of problems with the plugin creating nodes in my content files making files impossible to open. Support was unhelpful at resolving the issue and I removed reality from my system. Never again.
One of the things I like best about LuxRender is how (relatively) easy it is to set up a night scene, lit by streetlights, signs, etc., with incorporated fog effects.
I started with Blender simply because I knew nothing about the 3D modeling:-)
I still use Reality, love it, no plans to switch to iray.
If you're a Blender guy then you should use Blender then. The latest BlendLuxCore v2.0 plugin is better integrated inside Blender and you'll be able to use nodes (that is the case since V1)
You can render inside Blender or Export a scene to render inside the standalone engine and make your tonemapping there
Advantage inside blender ; you'll get the full blender power and you can do things that are not possible inside DS
Drawback : if you want to work with DS's models then there is a lot of more work than just using Iray inside DS
Question : what is your goal ?? If it's just using another render engine then I'd say it may be not worth the effort.
As one of Reality's early adopters, I find it bitter sweet that its popularity was so quickly overrun by Iray.
I used Reality/Lux before I bought a PC with a capable graphics card. I used to render on my iMac with a linux box as a second Luxrender engine on my home network. The main reason I switched to IRay was the fact that most products for DAZ Studio come with IRay materials and converting them to Reality was becoming a pain. Also, GPU rendering is faster.
However, Eevee in Blender is tempting and there are utilities out there for export/import between DAZ Studio and Blender. Some here have lots of good things to say about the Diffeomorphic Blender Add-on which exports DAZ native scenes and imprts them into Blender. I haven't had chance to play with it extensively yet, though. I also neeed to learn the Blender node system as I find it quite scary right now.
So very true, Paolo is super awesome !! Helped me tremendouly. I learned a lot using Reality as a beginner, I still keep Reality updated, may return to program in the near future.
It only looks scary. Especially if you look at node trees with 50-60 nodes and more. But actually you don't really need those. For 90% of the purposes you need 10-12 nodes at all and those 10-12 nodes are all simply a combo of standart combos. Add to this they are not only totally free but also you get thousands of tutorials where the Blender fellows share their combos (roughly said - "node" in Blender is called everything shaders related).
I use to use it but gave up on it after version 2. With Iray being free and integrated into Daz Studio and all new products having Iray shaders and mats already done, I see no point in trying to translate my scene to a 3rd party render engine that does the exact same thing as iray.
I use to use it all the time but haven't touched it since Iray came out. I like it so much better and seems more powerful, plus it's free.
Yes I watched a video recently and the node system all started to make sense. More sense than the Surfaces Panel in DAZ Studio, actually, because you can see the actual cascade effect that one setting has on another. You are right though, looking at dozens of nodes connected by spaghetti looks daunting but I'll have to get used to it if I want to use Eevee.
I'm... not a fan of Iray becasue I have to use my PC for things other than JUST art. With Reality I can set the priority lower, and let the other PCs on the network do the work with it's distributed rendering. Makes that 15 hours about 1 hour, for a better result than I can get with Iray.
THIS!
When I was a kid wanting to get into 3D all I knew about was 3DS Max, and that it was out of my price range. I wish something like Blender had been around. Now actually I own copies of Max and Lightwave, but I'm also always up to date on Blender because I completely support the concept.
Also the new Blender 2.8 fixes a lot of complaints people who came from other 3D packages always make. At this stage for the indie animator Blender is just as viable a tool as any of the other programs out there, and it's a great time to start if your just beginning.
The ability to create should be as democratized as possible, (and not everybody out there animates because they want to work for Disney or Pixar).