Fastest Render Engine for Daz Studio
lmoroney
Posts: 41
in The Commons
I use 3Delight and IRay out-of-the-box with DS, and love 'em both.
But is there a faster rendering engine that I can use? Free or Paid, I don't mind -- I just want to speed up rendering time as much as posisble :)
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Octane (paid-for) is pretty swift, nas there is a plug-in for Daz Studio, but as most engines require, gets best results from messing with materials (so makes process slower ...)
..even 3DL and Iray require working with materials to get really good results. There is a thread which is devoted just to getting the best skin quality in Iray that has been ongoing for a couple years now.
Wowie recently released the AweSurface shader system for 3DL which opens a number of new options with that engine which in turn creates more work for the artist who looks to go beyond using "out of the box" materials. Some of the tests I have been seeing are encroaching on Iray quality.
no simple answer to that, because every render engine's speed varies depending on your scene and more importantly, your hardware.
if you do not have a strong video card, then 3delight is probably the fastest render engine available to you. If you do have a strong video card, then Octane is probably the fastest available to you in terms of raw render speed, but you will lose time having to fiddle with materials. With iRay there are so many presets available through daz that it saves you alot of that time, but the renders are generally slower than Octane.
...and in Iray, if you exceed your GPU's memory, the process dumps to the much slower CPU whereas Octane has Out Of Core rendering which splits the render load between the GPU and CPU and is still faster than Iray in CPU mode..
Actually, Octane does not use the CPU. Out-Of-Core rendering refers to Octane's ability to dump scene data to system RAM if VRAM is not enough to fit the entire scene. Having to use Out of Core functions does come with a performance loss, but the GPU still powers the render whether Out Of Core functions are being used or not.
the fastest engine is actually openGL which renders exactly what you see in your veiwport in texture shaded mode, wireframe, blocks etc, no more no less
it is actually adequate if you plan to postwork the hell out of your render!
...so it still uses the GPU cores then. Didn't know that.
Given equivalent complexity of a scene then the answer really is easy - iRay is always faster. People that say 3DL is always faster are doing the equivalent of comparing a 3DL scene setup with a very simplified material & lighting setup, eg, pwToon (a shader material set I chose here to exagerate for clarification), and saying that is the equivalent of an iRay scene and faster. It's not the equivalent of an iRay scene at all, but it is much faster.
It all depends on the quality of the images you are aimed for.
I have seen, that rendering in Character Creator 3 with iray plugin and with Nvidia AI denoising set to on,
will require only a couple of iterations to get a nice, clean image on my GTX 1080, with most of the scenes.
I hope, when Daz Studio 4.11 will mature enough and maybe get out of beta to release, we will see similar speed up in rendering.
You are so wrong, mate!
iray v 3Delight is very hardware dependent
a very very powerful CPU will still beat the best GPU to date if you can afford one, imagine owning a server farm for CPU rendering, your biggest video card is the VRAM limit but with CPU you can keep adding processors if using RIB and Renderman, it's what Pixar does.
Lol I have to give you that
Care to say why?
Mac user! Would you agree the Jackson's field for 3DL and the Jackson's field for Iray are equally complex, out of the box? With CPU rendering I can render the 3DL version in less than 2 hours while the Iray version takes 30+ hours. To make a long story short! My conclusion: Iray is not "always" faster. And to say that people compare toon rendering to Iray... well no comments. I'm done with this part of the discussion!
On CPU - nope, Iray will likely lose to an "equivalently complex" contemporary 3Delight raytracer setup (using aweSurface, for example; ask Wowie for specific render times). The reason is simple: Iray isn't optimised for CPUs.
So - not "always".
If you are a CG professional and have money, you could try Redshift. It has a Maya integration, and there's that Maya exporter for DS here in the store... of course if you don't have a Maya licence then the price of Maya factors in, too.
All products sold at Daz3D are Iray and/or 3Delight ready out of the box. If you use an external render engine, you will need to setup the surfaces yourself to some degree. But you will honestly have to do some tweaking per scene in DS using Iray or 3DL as well. So there is no perfect solution.
So your argument is that on your terrible hardware unsuited for the task iRay rendering takes a very long time therefore iRay is not always faster. What a ridiculous argument.
Inherent in the initial statement was that the hardware would be suited to the task. Not some uber gimped useless garbage. I'll make this simple for you, on two testbenches with identical hardware except for GPU, and the GPU's are as close to identical as possible except for being Radeon and GTX, iRay is always faster than 3DL when rendering a scene not specifically designed to favor 3DL.
there are people with multiple Titans who's uber powerful CPU's still render faster in 3Delight, Ivy Summers being one
She is right with opengl and photoshop or gimp this is the fastest render available!!!
Since you are attacking me in an IMO overly aggressive manner I feel obliged to reply.
Don't put your own words in my mouth, thank you! My statement is still there if you care to read it.
Those are your own assumptions, I can't see it.
I specifically mentioned rendering with CPU.
On a general note, did it ever occur to you that I did not maybe get that hardware as a dedicated rendering rig? I am a hobbyist when it comes to CG, my useless garbage I primarely use to earn a living.
You bought a Mac, unless you are a video editor and even then you must a fetish for FCX, you don't use it to make a living. I'm an IT pro and build computers for a living. No one has to a Mac in 2018. I wasn't the one who brought an aggressive tone into the thread BTW, you did. I respond to people in exactly the tone and in the manner they use. You are more than welcome to back down the tone you used when you entered this thread and I'll stop treating you the way you treated others.
Keep the discussion civil please.
They are not equally complex.
So can Iray use the GPU in your thought experiment? Because if it can, it's not an identical setup.
"The same set" - do you mean that "Jackson's field" which is, as I understand, a prop you bought in the DAZ store?
Same geometry and textures all right, HDRI and all, but - what materials are you using in your 3Delight render the rendertime of which you cited? Its default "3DL materials" from the store, or have you converted this prop to aweSurface?
Because unless you have converted the mats to aweSurface, you are not rendering with, for example, indirect light. All the DAZ, Rendo and Hivewire store products that have "3Delight materials" and come with "3Delight lights" use oldschool approximations like AO.
And AO is way simpler to compute than full GI, so it's technically faster. This is why the guys think you are "cheating". They just have been led to believe that 3Delight has not progressed since 2010, because this 2010 technology is what the stores offer.
The proper comparison is Iray+CPU vs aweSurface.
Just do it and you win the argument.
// for those lurkers who missed the release of aweSurface: it's a surface shader by Wowie you can get here in the store as a bundle with lots of useful stuff and also as a free version with fewer goodies in the freebie forums here; aweSurface is the only publicly available shader for DS that uses all the raytracing goodies that have been available in 3Delight for the last five years or so, a feature set on par with any other unidirectional pathtracer out there like Arnold //
Ok fair enough, I used aweSurface. And I'm not interested in winning any arguments really, this thread was all about if there is a faster renderer than Iray and 3DL, right? It has been answered, it is OpenGL. I apologize to nonesuch00 for sounding a bit harsh and just wanted to point out something that in my experience isn't simply true. That's it! Can we just let this go now, please?
https://www.daz3d.com/jackson-s-field
iRay uses the Nvidia GPU. 3DL has access to the Radeon. Identical as close as is possible. Otherwise you're intentionally gimping one or the other. It's not a thought experiment. in my day job I evaluate hardware before purchase. I only build PC's as a side gig. If you want to debate the validity of test approaches have at it but be prepared to come with more than snark.
I'm afraid you have been misinformed: 3Delight has _no_ GPU acceleration whatsoever. It's a CPU-only renderer, like a good number of classic production renderers used in the VFX/CG industry.
The problem with GPU acceleration is the VRAM limit: production-grade texture assets amount to dozens of gigabytes. Check out this Disney scene they have made available for the public:
https://www.technology.disneyanimation.com/islandscene
There is "out-of-core" rendering and it may eventually get some traction in the professional field, but the developers of 3Delight have taken the cloud computing route, which means expecting GPU acceleration in 3Delight is pretty unlikely.
So the only fair comparison of Iray and 3Delight (or any other renderer that does not utilise the GPU whatsoever) is to limit Iray to CPU only.
There is no need to get all defensive: a thought experiment is a legit scientific term. Or do you mean you have actually run those comparisons on those identical testbenches? Now you know that even if you did, that experiment of yours was biased.
But you didn't point it out! AweSurface is still new. Not everyone knows it's even out. It's impossible to keep track of every product out there (thanks for the link to that prop, BTW).
So the guys assumed you were talking about that ancient "inferior" technology and tried to call you out on that.
This thread ain't a particular good example of successful communication on anyone's part, it seems =P
It is not true not only in your experience, but in general. It's just that it's something of arcane knowledge =)