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Here's what literally 5 seconds of tweaks plus 30 seconds of rendering gets you on a Titan RTX (virtually the same rendering performance as a 2080Ti):
30 minutes? Maybe 5 years ago...
I like that random Greek column.
It is absolutely on point. I am talking about the finished product here. Consumers have generally favored convenience and will set aside a level of quality in favor of that convenience. Consumers also don't tend to care how something was made, either.
And again, that last paragraph you wrote does not matter. In the least. Because the final result is what matters. And if that final result is good enough, then the consumer doesn't care.
Another thing a lot of you are not even thinking about is physics. You want to animate with dforce??? Good luck with that. On the other hand video games have proper physics that can be applied to...everything. You want a bouncing ball, you got it. Video games have had fun with physics for years, going back to Half Life and its Source engine.
A lot of people made goofy animations with Source thanks to various mods like Garry's Mod. BTW, Valve has a brand new Source 2.0, which they will make tools to use this engine freely available. It does not do ray tracing, but for non-photo real work it could be a fun engine to play with. Watch for the physics here, all of the effects are done in real time. My favorite is when she uses her hand to push things around on a shelf and finds some ammo. That is not a scripted action, that is the player interacting in real time with all of those objects.
BTW, I read that Unreal is in the credits for The Mandalorian and they are using this method for some of its scenes. Its already happening.
I very much agree with this! We tend to forget that the tool is not important, the result is what matters. As in..I have a very expensive video card and I render with a PBR rendering engine, so it must be good then=)
Video
sadly I don't own many modern ArchVis scenes to compare
And some pretty serious animations too (although that's much more likely to be Source Filmmaker than Garry's Mod, as it has a much more powerful suite of keyframing and animation tools).
Even for still images, I still often use Source Filmmaker, because a low horsepower computer can comfortably handle much more complex scenes. Will they look as good? No. Can I be more creative? Frequently.
(Also, despite some serious rigging limits, you can actually get rigged items into it, whereas DS's import function invariably throws a tantrum when I try to import any model that has bones in it).
For its age, the original Source engine is unusual in that it does support proper reflections, albeit to a limited extent. No, it's not true raytracing, but you can get perspective correct reflections in surfaces, as compared to many game engines that don't bother at all (leading to many bathrooms with conveniently grubby mirrors). (Fair warning: the following image features an arachne/spider daemon, so anyone who is particularly arachnophobic might not want to click through). This was a silly* image I did around Halloween last year, and all of the reflections on the floor are as rendered in Source.
* A standard Halloween gag for me is dressing up my various fantastical characters as not-quite-right characters from popular culture. The previous year had the arachne as Spider Gwen, the AI as Motoko Kusanagi from "Ghost in the Shell", and the half-dragon as the dragonborn from Skyrim.
And for such an old game engine, it still has very powerful vertex animation tools and it's possible to pull off some pretty impressive facial animation
Actually, although it has its flaws, there are a lot of ways in which Source Filmmaker does hands down beat DS:
- there's an honest to goodness particle system.
- really easy locking and constraining almost anything to anything else. I will frequently lock a model's head rotation to the world in order that I can then adjust the exact angle of their neck or torso without affecting where their head is looking.
- navigating around the scene and manipulating models is an absolute dream in comparison.
With more sophisticated graphical engine behind them, animation tools built on game engines could be a very major consideration in the amateur or even semi-professional markets in the years to come; I think it's far to say that even the Source engine hits a level of animation and shading to be a very capable story telling tool, and it's now fifteen years old. (Half Life 2 was released November 2004).
Sortry, dude, I get that there are people who, for one reason or another, dislike iRay or prefer a different rendering engine, and "questioning the capabilities of iRay" is fair game, but to even begin to suggest, much less claim, that a medium (at best) resolution image using simple props, low res textures, minimal reflective surfaces and specularity, and flat lighting—presumably chosen to show off the Unreal engine at its best—is "better" than a high res image using complex props, high res textures, multiple reflective surface and specularity, and real world lighting, solely on the basis of the claimed time to render, is so out of touch with any meaningful common sense definition of "better" with regard to visual imagery that it DOES beg the question of the claimant's aesthetic sensibilities.
"Quite well" =/= "better."
You can do much better than that in UE4 though, just to be fair.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAAPTiuFdwU
Spot on! Thank you! I never thought to search "living room", although it seems obvious now. I kept searching "flat", "apartment", and "loft"... lol. Thanks again!
I'm completely uneducated when it comes to game engines but I get the impression that people stick with IRay in DAZ Studio because it can render all the nice features that seem difficult to export. Such as HD morphs and geografts. If anyone can show me a G8 complete with those features rendered in a game engine, I'll be more than willing to take on a new learning curve.
Just to be clear, I know that there are specially written applications based on Unity, for example, that can render specifically chosen geografts but that takes programming skills which I don't have.
This is my very personal opinion...people stick with IRay because the store is full of one click solutions and ready to render stuff. And they might have invested in some pretty expensive hardware just to be able to use it.
Of course people stick with what works for them. It is only when it becomes a PITA to use the built-in solution that alternatives are sought. Such is the case with IRay at the moment, with all the problems of CPU fallback and driver issues. I'd probably put up with the slow renders if IRay was stable but it isn't. I'm struggling to fit two characters and a couple of props into 8GB VRAM without it dropping to CPU. Add these problems to the long render times and those alternatives become more and more attractive.
wolf359:
At issue was a comparison of Unreal vs. Iray in a single frame render and a claim that Unreal was significantly faster for similar quality.
Has anyone actually debated the comparison wrt animation?
No.
It's built in, and it produces decent to great results with minimal effort, expecially once one has some experience. Time of render can get excessive, which is why instancing Studio is a feature I use.
I came to studio from Blender, been using it for years, but sucked at characters. In studio, I can render characters that actually might be ok.
'Pretty expensive hardware'? Not really.
Joking right? Sven is quite right - people are buying ever more expensive chunks of hardware just to keep up with the ever increasing demands of IRay and the figures/textures it is expected to render. I already mentioned the VRAM issues and that's with 8GB. The next step to get more VRAM is 11GB and that requires a VERY expensive 2080ti. Of course, you can render with CPU and system RAM but the point of this thread is how slow IRay performs with a GPU. I'm getting close to my 3 score years and ten and don't have the time to wait for CPU renders.
One of the reasons I render in 3DL is I don't have to worry too much about memory management and such. And, as a Mac user (CPU rendering only), pathtracing in 3DL is much faster than in IRay. When it comes to animation I'm very much a hobbyist, and, by dumbing down things by a fair amount, I can get down to 30-60 sec/frame which is good enough for what I do. But I admit that the realism doesn't even come close to the example in the OP:) It shouldn't be compared to IRay but to Basic OpenGL
Fair point! But the speed difference is mind blowing.
Hmm, that's relative of course. I know I won't be buying a PC with a hightech GPU just to be able to do complex scenes in IRay, way out of my price range.
Yeah, I stuck with my iMac for years, trying to manage with either 3Delight or Luxrender but I was jealous of the IRay images being produced without the need for spending hours tweaking materials in the Reality plugin. Eventually I threw my savings at a PC with a decent GPU. Since then, I have upgraded my initial GTX 970 to a 1070 and just recently I sold my beloved iMac with the intention of putting the money towards a new RTX GPU but the problems with IRay have put me off and I'm now looking at some of the alternative ways to render.
The speed difference would only matter if the faster render wasn't much much worse than the slower render.
Also, unless we missed it, not sure what machine did the Iray render. At least one other user reported the time given seemed awfully high.
My machine probably costs about $2000. Which is on par for a 'good' machine. (Heck, I remember buying a solid PC back in the 1990s for, oh, $1500)
When we're talking high end, expensive hardware and software, you get into the range of Maya ($1500/year) or C4D ($100/month) and machines that are probably more like $6k or higher.
So, yeah, if you need to scrimp on quality because you are running on a basic machine, cool. But the entire premise here opened with 'better, much faster.'
And, well, no.
I sadly had trouble finding something to do a fair comparison as I don't like modernistic decor, while I have endless livingrooms etc none are that style.
What I can say is you can get things looking as good if not better than iray but it takes effort and unless using raytracing and a costly card I don't have needs reflections and lighting built which on my system is slower than iray.
Once built though you can move around the scene in realtime.
the OP didn't do the renders either. AFAIK they screenshotted a Youtube video
Nah I don't have to do that, I just don't use IRay
...just a general reflection...
Most DS users want to simply create high quality realistic still images using content from the DAZ store. And for that IRay works well. But I can see limiting rendering to one brute force pathtracer coming to a way's end at some point.
Expensive? I turned a friend on to 3D rendering and he's doing it on a r5 1600 and 1060. I build the system back in 2017 and it cost less than 1k brand new. He's been doing character portraits of his D&D characters that look as professional as anything you're ever likely to see. He's not doing it at a production scale so how long the renders take, I think he starts one and does something else for a while, is pretty much irrelevant.
I do my rendering on my purpose built gaming and work from home box. New it cost less than $2k. I've upgraded the CPU, something I would have done regardless of whether I rendered or not, and added an second GPU, that expense was strictly to render more but I make VN'sand the more renders I get done the faster I get each release finished and that means more patrons and more money in my pocket. The card has more than paid for itself in 7 months.
Why do I use iRay over 3DL, knowing I can get as much CPU horsepower as I want simply by taking the stuff we send to ecyclers home instead? Because I can quickly and easily produce renders with natural looking reflections and shadows without having to worry too much about lighting and such. This isn't laziness or lack of skill. It is the demand of doing production work. The more time I spend setting up a scene then the fewer scenes I get done when I do spend the time working on my VN's. The length of time the renders take is pretty immaterial for this as they're done in downtime, overnight or while I'm at my day job. Writing this post has been intermixed with setting up a couple of scenes. They'll render overnight and, if I get some more done tonight, into tomorrow while I'm at work.
If you are confident that your scenes are perfect then leaving them to render overnight is fine. For myself, I am constantly noticing things that could look better so I render, tweak, render again and so on. The next scene is always a follow-on (story) from the previous one so I can't do batch mode for the very reason I stated above - I render and tweak each scene. That is also why render speed is so desirable and why these examples of renders coming out of game engines are encouraging. Shame that DAZ doesn't see it that way but that's just my opinion.
By the way, someone will advise me to use the IRay viewport. I do sometimes but it crashes a lot - especially with my extensive tweaking (shaders, especially). Also, the viewport is just so slow in IRay that I prefer to work in OpenGL. A good compromise would be something like Eevee.
Unreal Engine is capable of some pretty amazing things.
