Is Reality Worth It?
woodenauthor
Posts: 20
No, not this reality, the one available from the store!
What I'm mostly curious about is the learning curve and how well it currently stacks against the current Iray functions. If its something people are still using heavily, then it might be worth it. If most people dropped it because they could switch, then I'd rather save the ten bucks or so. The promo images look impressive, but I also don't want to spend another forty hours poring over manuals and user guides. I don't mind reading instructions, but I find a lot of these programs tend to be somewhat sink or swim unless you can spend the extra time watching videos and such to understand the definitions of phrases haphazardly thrown around. If its fairly intuitive, I'll be good to go.
Thanks for the feedback!
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Comments
Frankly, Iray is better and faster assuming you have a Nvidia GPU.
Iray is the future for DAZ users - pretty much all new products are set up to be rendered with Iray.
Luxrender engine is excellent in its own right (the render engine used by Reality), but you would need to set up the materials in the scene yourself - so unless you enjoy the process of setting up material settings as part of your process, Reality might be more of a pain than a joy.
A friend really wanted me to try reality.
My experience with it was negative. It filled my files with junk that made open and saving difficult and support by the pa...was unhelpful as they insisted I had another version installed but I did not find one and it really was a hassle.
Depends really on your hardware
if iray works well then use that but if you have a rig that struggles with it and no Nvidia card it may be better for you.
I tried it in the pre-Iray era. The results were really nice, at the time, but required the frustrating process of going through each and every single surface material.
Then Iray came out - and was essentially for free.
Reality seemed to render organic surfaces slightly more realistically, whereas Iray rendered hardware slightly more realistically. This might have changed since that time, obviously.
Reality and Octane Render look more photorealistic to me. However, the amount of set-up required to prepare surfaces & materials discourage me from using either, and Reality still takes too long for me. The set-up for Iray takes long enough for me, and I have tons of shaders.
I was pretty heavily into Reality back when it came out and there was an active, lively thread on RuntimeDNA. I loved the results but it really was a hassle applying all the materials and tuning everything - ALL. THE. TIME. Then Iray came out and I switched from a hardcore Poser Fanboy to a DAZ/IRAY SuperFan overnight! :)
Welcome to the Church of IRAY.
That being said, Reality can generate some amazing renders, and if you actually LIKE twiddling with shaders/materials and have lots and Lots and LOTS of time to do so, then you might enjoy playing around with Reality.
I would say no. I tried Reality (and Octane) with Poser back in the day, and while both gave impressive results, both required a hell of a lot of work getting textures converted. I found it more work than it was worth.
With Reality/Lux, I could offload some of the cycles to another machine that doubled my cpu threads, but Iray is faster with an Nvidia GPU. Yes, the surface setup was a tedious process.
Reality stinks. Oh wait, we were talking about the product?! Thanks for the info....I'll stick with iRay if I ever get a powerful enough computer.
Thanks all! I'm fairly comfortable with Iray, so Reality got left behind!
...Wowie and others have been opening more "doors" to what 3DL is really capable of. I have his AweShader and will be working with it now that I am back up and running again.
This is a piece I did in 3DL using Parris' IBL master shortly before the Awe Shader release and an HDD meltdown I experienced. Render time was something like 12 minutes.