what came 1st - 3DL or Iray? and other pertinent questions
daveso
Posts: 7,818
I'm a bit confused,(as usual). What came 1st Iray or 3DL ?
why does iray seem to be the chosen render engine?
which is better? and why?
Post edited by daveso on
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Iray is the new kid on the block.....with all the cool new bells and whistles
What is "better" is personal choice, alot of people still like 3dl, but Iray gives alot more depth of possibilities and a much more natural look.
You should google that question and then follow the long dark tunnel of 'best for what?" and "I can get similar results when I...."
3D is the /was the default render engine and iray is semi-recent.
Iray is newer and better in most ways. It handles light more realistically, and it takes advantage of increasingly powerful GPUs which (once the 1180's hit the market) makes it faster than 3DL.
right noiw I'm using CPU render with iray ... 3DL would be faster then?
Honestly, when attempting similar levels of realism, Iray@CPU and 3DL run about the same speed.
Iray defaults to a highly realistic lighting and material system, 3DL defaults to a low level of realism. But both can be adjusted.
3DL has a few weird tricks that Iray does not, and 3DL handling of displacement is loads better.
Iray is massively faster if you have GPU.
Also, it's a lot more 'coherent' than 3DL; 3DL has all sorts of complexities and stuff that doesn't work with other stuff and elements that don't work quite right. 3DL tech fans will start in on how to use it right, you just need to recode the lights or camera or shaders.
I think Iray also handles SSS, translucency, and refraction much better than 3DL. For example, I've found it nearly impossible to create 'cloudy water' in 3DL, while it's trivial in Iray.
I ended up abandoning 3DL because I kept hitting weird or confusing behavior that would take me a long time to try to figure out... and half the time I'd find out 'can't use X with Y.' In addition Iray was just faster in almost every case; if I don't want very high realism, I can simplify stuff in Iray, and even in CPU mode get a decent enough image in 5-10 mins.
I do miss the displacement, though.
3Delight was here first. 3Delight is a biased rendering engine. A biased engine takes shortcuts on how light behaves in order to make rendering more efficient. This means that, for example, a light in the scene lights infinitely in the direction it's aimed unless you specifically set a falloff and the distance for that falloff. It is very hard to produce "photorealistic" renders with 3Delight, and it is very slowed by transparency or refraction even with shader tricks that help speed it up. The bear up there is correct in that while 3Delight doesn't handle normal maps extremely well, it does do fast displacement. 3Delight is a CPU renderer.
Iray is a new engine that Nvidia basically created to sell their graphics cards. If you have an Nvidia graphics card recent enough to have enough CUDA cores, Iray is lightning-fast compared to 3Delight, especially when there is water, glass, metal, or anything refractive or reflective in the scene. It chugs like a cottage cheese margarita on CPU-only renders. Iray is an unbiased engine. This means it uses more accurate math on how lights work and how they interact with some surfaces, meaning its lighting and its rendering of metal and glass in particular is much more realistic than 3delight's (it's not really "physically accurate," that's a misnomer, but it's much closer). Making things look photoreal is very subjective, but it's much more possible in Iray than in 3Delight, and generally easier to achieve. Iray is terrible with displacement but handles normal maps well.
The current market is skewed toward Iray because we vendors like it (it has so many lovely tricks we've wanted forever) but also because it's easier to sell a product with Iray renders than 3Delight renders unless you postwork the living tar out of the 3Delight renders. So even if a product technically supports 3Delight, the renders for it are usually going to be from Iray, because no one would buy it otherwise.
The best use of 3Delight at the moment is for certain types of toon renders that Iray doesn't do as well because the scripted shaders and cameras for them were made for 3Delight, and of course for people who can't afford an Iray-ready graphics card and can't afford the time it takes to do slooooow Iray renders on the CPU.
*chuckles at truth, then watches renders take eight hours, then cries*
well. since 2010 iray is a subset of the Mental Ray Engine developed by the Mental Group in 1989. Nvidia bought the company in 2007. Mental ray was not hardware dependant and had no GPU support, until 2010 when iray was added to it as a rendering option.. The original Mental ray was a plugin render engin for the major modeling packages. Nvidia has stopped issuing subscriptrions for it in 2017.
3Delight has been around since 2000. 3Delight was the first RenderMan-compliant renderer combining the REYES algorithm with on-demand ray tracing. The version in Daz is limited and does not take full advantage of all the features - example - distributed rendering..
Oh, another thing I really love about Iray is that you can individually tile every map. This is VERY USEFUL. That's not true for most 3DL shaders.
You can? How?
In the Surfaces pane use the image-selection menu (the one you get by clicking on the micro-thumbnail of the map) and select Image Editor - it's the same as the dialogue for chnaging gamma on an image in the 3Delight shaders, but has more options.