Iray - What Was Your First Reaction When Seeing it Work?
Nyghtfall3D
Posts: 813
in The Commons
I was still using a GTX 750 Ti when DAZ introduced us to Iray and was expecting all kinds of error messages or system crashes while creating my first scene. When I selected Iray Draw Mode for the first time and saw the render start to quickly coalesce in my Viewport, my eyes widened, my jaw dropped, and I thought, "This changes everything!"
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Comments
PBR was what I wanted.
When the Iray beta was out, I was surprised that I could do it all from the Daz interface. It wasn't so much the output as it was the work flow.
That was the revelation for me.
Happy, I suppose... To have a native PBR finally.
I'd never done any sort of rendering before, so my reaction was something like "what is this magic?"
Yes, native PBR. I was already enjoying CPU-based PBR with Reality, but the combination of native, GPU-based PBR is what blew me away.
It's slow; closely followed by, damn it! I really don't want to get a nvidia card, but I did.
A lot of happy swearing, after struggling to get any decent render in 3DL done in less than dozens of hours. Now, BAM; realistic images done in a fraction of the time!
"I can finally ditch LuxRender!" LOL
"Seeing it work." That didn't happen for a long time.
My first experience of Iray resulted in watching nothing happen for over 30 minutes. Not being prepared to have the computer tied up for hours or possibly days solid doing renders, I didn't look at it again for well over a year. I had a GTX 675, 1GB at the time, and while Iray knew it was there, the number of renders it could contribute to was as close to zero as made no odds. A year later when I started playing with it again, I was seeing render times of 12 to 48 hours. I had to do promo size & quality renders, and it was achingly slow. It took a long time to save for that Iray-capable graphics card (and a Windows PC to put it in!)
1st thought was why does it look like powder donuts
My first impression was It looks great in still render, Wow!
But after that it was WTF . Iray is a lazy dog rendering even with my 980ti's & way to slow rendering animations, Deforce is the same way, really gives great results for still renders, But I'm just to impatient to wait for it to its thing when using it in animation. deforce to me is just useless in animated short stories, unless I had a unlimited GPU resource or a render farm. and time to reload everything after it crashes every other keyframe.
Wow, lighting is so much easier and more realistic than 3DL.
Cheers,
Alex.
I was rendering with Reality and Poser at the time, and the big Reality speed upgrade had made it basically unuseable on my first-gen i7. So watching that first Iray render cook on that old beast... "Oh my god, it's working!" was probably my first reaction. lol
I liked Lux/Reality alot, I liked Iray even more.
I thought "I might have to retire Poser" LOL. Which I did, even though that was never my intention ;). I had already been using DS more than Poser at the time Iray came out in DS, but Iray clinched it.
Laurie
I'll never render 3Delight again.
I didnt like it. It rendered slowly on my old machine and I still do not like many limitations of its light system. I also thought every characters as a bit orange.
i have since grown accustomed to it.
LOL I never have
I started using DS with Reality, so no 3DL for me.
I was thrilled to have Iray native in DS, but I was using unbiased rendering for awhile with Vray, Maxwell, Luxrender, Keyshot, Kerkythea and now Iray.
My first reaction was 'wow' followed by 'Darn, now I'll need to find alternatives for some of my best shaders!'
I'll admit I haven't used 3DL since starting up with Iray, but I guess that's mostly because I'm still pursuing a goal of photo-realism rather than one of other artistic endeavours at the moment. Playing around with different lighting and settings helps me get a better idea of what works and what doesn't. I doubt I'll ever be happy with the level of realism I can produce, but hopefully I'll be 'happy enough' to make the odd fun render in 3DL again.
...
Yeah I was wowed at the time that it didn't take upwards of a day or more to render even a simple scene on the CPU (I only had a 1 GB GPU card which was pretty useless) and converting materials didn't involve a lot of frustrating trial and error. I also found R4 to be buggy as heck.and it seemed every new patch broke something else.
The downside, as IRay was integrated into the programme, it took up more system memory resources during rendering as I had to keep the scene and Daz programme open during the process (with larger scenes dumping to much slower swap mode), and everything looked "too smooth" (basically bump and displacement values between 3DL and Iray were quite different).
Damn... damn... damn!
Damn this is slow... (no gpu)
Damn this does amazing renders and lighting!
Damn, another buy-in for Iray shaders and such... still worth it.
...I'm still on the fence about that. There are some effects and styles that just work so much better in 3DL which often don't in Iray without resorting to post. There are times I need a more storybook illustration, graphic, or "painterly" style (instead of photoreal), which is easy to achieve in the render pass given all the different effects plugins and tools available.
Also you can turn off shadow casting which cannot be done in Iray because of the physically based lighting system. I remember when I first rendered my girls at the bus stop scene in Iray, I saw the shadow of the helicopter on the photo backdrop plane. The only way to fix that was to move the helicopter (changing the composition) so the shadow was hidden behind one of the girls.
True, setting up lighting in 3DL is more complicated, but with my background in theatrical lighting, that never was a big issue. When used sparingly (so as not to seriously impact render times), the Uber Area Light is a great resource. I also like the fact that in 3DL the basic Daz and AoA lights use the same 0% - 100% intensity scale that theatrical light boards do. No fiddling with exposure time, aperture, and, ISO s well as with the luminosity values of photometric lights (along with a lot of lengthy test renders until it looked right).
That's because shadows can't be disabled in the real world.
...precisely, though they possibly can be removed in post, however you have to paint them out which I do not have a steady hand for, particularly if the backdrop is a fairly "busy" photo like a cityscape such as the one I used.
So, you want real-world texture accuracy while maintaining artistic control over lighting and shadows.
...yeah, nothing wrong with that. Advert agencies and Hollywood do it all the time, I shoudl be able to as well.
Crikey software like PSP and Photoshop exist primarily for the purpose of manipulating photo elements to one's liking.
you can in Octane
well in Carrara at least not found the object layer in the DS plugin yet but I only have 2 not 3 so maybe it exists there too
Didn't say there was, just clarifying what I understood you were saying. :)
...however with 3DL as I mentioned, it can be done "in render" without needing another step.
At the time I was already quite jaded being the rendering engine junkie that I am.
so I was not impressed with this new Daz render engine that is literally slower in CPU than the old Maxwell 1.7 CPU unbiased render engine was over on my ancient Mac computer
Also I had the teleblender script where I was seeing cycle renders resolve in seconds to Clarity that would take hours in Daz studio Iray.
so I quickly concluded that I was not going to invest in Nvidia hardware for stills I could easily acheive in a fraction of the time in blender and where animation renders were a nonstarter.
...Will be interesting to see how quick the new Iray version renders once I finish my upgrades and get that Titan-X up and running. Already rebuilt the two girls and will just use the same setting as the 3DL one, but with all the materials converted over to Iray. The original test a couple years ago took over two and a half hours at 900 x 600.