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Iray vs Optix

ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255
in The Commons

I'm curious if anyone has any insight on the Iray to Optix (and related software) transition. As we know, Studio has used Iray as its rendering platform, and from what I've seen Iray is a very full featured collection of just about everything you'd need to make a 3D rendering application like Studio. It seems like it was designed to allow a very small team of folks who have some background in C/C++ to fire up Visual Studio and make a complete rendering application, and Iray includes all the scene, camera, material, etc, info/models you need all ready to go, and you just have to build the scene file in the expected format and you're all set. Or something like that. 

And from what I've seen of Optix, it's getting away from that approach, and is more geared towards large professional organizations that want to do a lot of that customization themselves, so it (along with a bunch of other SDK/API's) provides much lower level tools which require a lot more developer work to make a rendering application.

As I posted in another thread, about a year ago NVIDIA seemed to clearly distance themselves from further support of Iray, which, at the time, seemed like it was clearly dropping Iray in favor of the more professional-based Optix (and presumably the RTX technologies). 

So it seems to me that small 3D rendering application developers are now faced with a major hurdle if they want to move forward, and that hurdle is they need to drop the very simple-to-implement Iray for a much more complex and developer-intensive professional set of tools like Optix and the other RTX-related technologies. 

I haven't followed any developments in this area, so I'm wondering if any of the tech enthusiasts has seen any news on this, and whether it's as challenging as it sounds. I suppose since Iray is used in so few places there isn't much info on it (at least that I can find), so I'm wondering if anyone has any insight into what's required. I suppose the small studios can hang on to Iray for a while, but I can't imagine that lasting very long if NVIDIA is out of the loop.

Thanks. 

Comments

  • BeeMKayBeeMKay Posts: 7,019

    Quite intersting thread: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1046762/optix/optix-with-turing-rtx-support-eta/

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255
    BeeMKay said:

    Quite intersting thread: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1046762/optix/optix-with-turing-rtx-support-eta/

    Thanks. Yeah, that's the one bit of semi-related info I found the other day, but unfortunately it doesn't really answer the question about Iray.

  • DAZ_RawbDAZ_Rawb Posts: 817
    edited April 2019

    Iray is still supported and developed by Nvidia, they have publically announced their plans to bring RTX technology support in to Iray. They have handed off sales & support of Iray plugins to third parties. Daz Studio's situation is not changed by this because the Daz Studio developers build the plugin we use to integrate the Iray library.

     

    Optix is a physics and particle simulation GPU acceleration system built by Nvidia. Optix can simulate things such as audio wave reflections in a space, radio wave reflections, gamma radation propigation, ocean temperature simulations and many other things. One of those other things it could be used for is doing light bouncing and propagation in a space to do visual rendering. Optix Prime was built as a library that setup Optix specifically for visualizations of light. The current public release of Iray is based on Optix Prime.

     

    I hope that clears up things for all of you.

    Post edited by DAZ_Rawb on
  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255
    edited April 2019

    Thanks DAZ_Rawb, I really appreciate the info. That clears things a lot. I guess I didn't realize that they were only handing off only the plugins support part, not total Iray support. That's a relief as far as Studio goes, but for me it's also good news as I've been considering dusting off my C++ and playing a bit with Iray, but I thought it was pretty much dead. 

    There goes my weekend. laugh

    Cool. Thanks again. 

    Post edited by ebergerly on
  • Daywalker DesignsDaywalker Designs Posts: 3,586
    DAZ_Rawb said:

    Iray is still supported and developed by Nvidia, they have publically announced their plans to bring RTX technology support in to Iray. They have handed off sales & support of Iray plugins to third parties. Daz Studio's situation is not changed by this because the Daz Studio developers build the plugin we use to integrate the Iray library.

     

    Optix is a physics and particle simulation GPU acceleration system built by Nvidia. Optix can simulate things such as audio wave reflections in a space, radio wave reflections, gamma radation propigation, ocean temperature simulations and many other things. One of those other things it could be used for is doing light bouncing and propagation in a space to do visual rendering. Optix Prime was built as a library that setup Optix specifically for visualizations of light. The current public release of Iray is based on Optix Prime.

     

    I hope that clears up things for all of you.

    It certainly clarifies and confirms a few things I felt about the relationship between the two.

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