Reality Vs Iray
Deke
Posts: 1,636
in The Commons
I see Reality is on sale today and touting a new version. I've never used it. I have worked with Iray over the past few months on my Mac...and even installed a coupld gtx gpu's to boost the effort. So is Reality with jumping off the Iray ship for? If it was faster...and worked in the background allowing me to keep working in Daz while rendering...then I'm interested. Any Daz users with experience in both renderers?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Personally I use both. Reality currently has greater functionality. You can make almost all adjustments while you are rendering including your lights in lux, f stop etc. Lux has a host of good filters. Lux is one of the best renders I have ever used and Reality makes it easy to go back and forth between DAZ or Poser if you have both Reality plugins and Lux. Reality makes the set up to Lux and any necessary materials adjustments easy. Lux is my favorite render with Iray a close second. I rarely use V-Ray anymore. Also, I love the hybrid renderer in Vue for really big scenes but they can take days to render. For both Iray and Lux it boils down to the lighting and understanding how to use the in a peoper manner. I would highly recommend Reality to anybody who wants to learn about superior rendering abilities. Also, good support for Reality far superior to Iray in this community even though Iray does have very good support on the nvidia forums and with other programs that use it. Octane is essentially using the Iray nvidia tech. For the results you get using Reality to Lux you would have to pay for software that cost hundreds to over a thousand dollars with no better and in some instances worse results. Sory for spelling and grammer but I am in a hurry.
Thanks for the info. What is the relationship between Reality and Lux? Is Lux a separate program that I'd need to buy? I suppose much of this come down to what you're rendering. Adjusting lights on the fly may be great for those rendering stills...but I'm mostly rendering animation, so I'm interested in faster renders and background rendering. And I'm using a 2008 Mac Pro Tower (with 2 nvidia gtx 680 cards) so I'm sure that older setup may limit some of Reality's capabilities.
No. They both can use CUDA, but Octane is a totally different rendering solution.
@Deke, Reality is a way to use Lux in an easy manner. Lux is a render engine. Reality bridges your work into lux by providing you with a nice middle step that makes it more user friendly. I haven't used Reality in many years but it was a great tool and was worth the price.
Thanks...and the Reality product page says LuxRender is directly include. I may hold off a whiel as it seems their site is overwhelmed with folks downloading the product.
LuxRender is the rendering engine, and is indeed a separate program that you need but it's free, you'll just have to download it.
Reality is a DS plugin which helps you going from DS to Lux. There's another one available called Luxus.
Thanks....so any thoughts on comparing Reality and Luxus?
Using CUDA does not mean the renders are the same, it just means they use the same instruction sets - as any application running on a PC or Windows will, with respect to the Intel/AMD instruction sets (though they may differ in exactly which extensions they use).
There is a lot more to software than the hardware it is compatible with. They are both physically based sure, but after that the technology is very different. And no, you can't get the same results in the same time. Octane is faster. You can get nice realtime feedback on a regular old 660ti. That won't happen with Iray. Period. (also i've read a lot about speed comparisions over the years(pre DS Iray) and done my own test with Iray vs octane myself. Iray is waaay slower.)
Octane is also in the process of supporting OpenCL. Iray doesn't plan on that tech.
Octane supports out of core memory so you don't need a huge amount of Vram to render a big scene, that tech isn't available in Iray(at least not the DS version).
There are lots of other differences in the tech.
But yeah, Reality VS Iray. I liked handling materials with Reality more than the Daz Studio surfaces tab. That's one of the things I don't like about DS Iray, it still uses the typical DS surfaces tab.
So the real question is Iray vs Reality/Lux vs Octane? Which isn't a big question as the cost of Octane puts it way out of reach. Why is Octane so expensive?
Octane does get expensive as you also have to by a plugin for each application to use it in that are generally over 100 dollars each. I have not looked recently at that. For the money you cannot beat Iray or Reality/Lux both are very good with more flexibility currently in Reality/Lux. However, it ultimately boils down to how well you learn and use them. Reality/Lux will take longer to learn as it feautures more options. I have chosen to have and learn both. Iray also comes with 3d Studio Max and Maya which I have.
Its not neccesarily (that)expensive, it wasn't designed for hobbyist, just happens some hobbyist use it. Professional render engines are costly. Check how much 3Delight costs if you use it outside of daz studio. well it's free version is better now, 8 cores. So many could stick with that. But adding more cores add up in price.
Octane is often compared to tools like Corona/Thea etc...totally different market than what is here.
But yeah buying each plugin for Octane is optional! But would add up if you did. You can always use the standalone (though I prefer plugin personally)
Actually I have licenses to all the top end renders you can think of some with plugins are over a $1,000 dollars. Most people here are hobbiest who can not afford to lay out for a rendering system that cost $600 to $700 US dollars after you buy a couple of plugins. Hobbiest can get the same results with less expensive software, e.g. Reality/Lux or Iray. Most hobbiest are not sitting there with a render farm cranking out videos day and night. I have been involved in 3D programs since the 90's. I was a vendor here and rendo and several other places in the early 2000's. I have paid for licenses to all the mayor 3D software packages and rendering systems. Octane I bought but returned it for a few reasons, the version I bought was suppose to be a final but it was more like it should have still been in alpha testing, the plugin to DAZ did not work at all and they could not solve the proplem and suggested I get the Poser one, and at the time nvidia did not support displacement so Octane did not either. I have been modeling since the 90's and use displacement on a number of things I have modeled. Some of those problems have now been fixed and I think it is a great program. When I see it progress further I will likely buy a license again. If a hobbiest has money to burn I would recommended it but I would also recommend they look into others as well including just learning Iray and obtaining the reality plugin to Lux which currently is less than $20. Personnally I do not know any top end professionals or companies that use Octane. Most seem to use VRay. There is also now RT Vray which uses the GPU. Others I know use Mental Ray and Iray which now come with Maya and Max. There is no doubt in my mind that Otoy if it contnues to support Octane will be a competitor to VRay. I started using Iray a couple of years ago and dropped it as soon as I realize I could not use displacement which now I can.
For me the desire for Octane came years ago when I was tired of my Lux rendering speeds. Reality was a nice tool, but waiting 4 days for a render was unacceptable. I actually bought a slave computer (which costs more than Octane does now) to speed up my lux rendering. And it was till too slow for me.
Now that Iray is available to DS users I can see how most hobbyists would just leverage that. They don't care about a lot of the feature differences or notice the limitations that Iray for DS has. And Lux and Reality have continued to improve. Years ago Lux GPU acceleration was still unusable...So now DS loyalists have a few good options for reasonable speed unbiased rendering.
Octane has a demo, granted the demos aren't of the DS version. The standalone, the 3DS max version, Poser plugin and I think a few others are available. For my personal work I use Octane, but in the office it's Thea render and we are looking at Corona. But that's because we have specific needs and skillsets on hand.
Important thing for most DS users is presets. So iray wins that hands down. I prefer making my own materials so that's never been an issue. Reality used to have a decent starter library of presets, might still have that now. Octane does have a database of materails but they are mostly to learn from IMO. Since lots of people want presets I think its worth noting that.
What is the better rendersystem?
Or what are the differences between them?
We have a thread on this...let me find it
I am having a hard time beliving I lied, but I can't find the thread for some reason...Its possible we had this discussion in several threads and not a dedicated one but I reall thought there was a dedicated thread.
Threads on teh same subject have been merged
Both are excellent renderers, and in the hands of people who know what they're doing both are capable of producing some excellent images. What it really comes down to for me is how thet each fit in my workflow. Reality doesn't. At all. I like to do a lot of very quick test renders (usually 20 or more) just the amount of time it takes to export and load the geometry to luxrender starts to be onerous at that point. Whereas, in Iray I can just have the aux viewport rendering and don't even need test renders. I'm also a big fan of twaking materials and reusing saved presets, especially partial presets and the like. While I understand reality has improved its ability to save and reuse presets, it is still not nearly as easy and straightforwards a process as using the DAZ Studio interface is. It doesn't matter if the render is marginally faster, if the set up time is going to take me longer.
All that said, this doesn't mean I think Reality is bad. It just doesn't do it for me. If you don't do 50 test renders, don't do a lot of material tweaking, and have an AMD GPU there's a good chance you'll really like it and it might be faster for you. Given the original OP has nvidia GPUs there probably won't be that much of a speed boost. If you're looking at Reality because you think it's magically going to make your stuff look better it won't, nothing does that other than practice.
I believe that Luxus will allow you to produce test renders (or perhaps viewport) more easily than Reality as Luxus has tighter integration with DAZ. I'm not sure how to update Luxrender for Luxus though; I've personally never used it before.
But I do agree with your sentiment that Reality and iray have completely different workflows.
I don't have much experience with Iray but it does look impressive. I've used Reality since it's inception and was dumbfounded with what I was able to output and send to LuxRender to create my scenes. If you understand photography and lighting it will make perfect sense, if you don't (and I didn't) it's not much of a learning curve and there are literarily thousands of photography tutorials that you can get hold of that would apply to how to archive the same lighting in photography as you would in LuxRender (via Reality or Luxus)
In addition to that you mention you are a Mac user; along with very complete documentation at the time of release the developer of Reality, Paolo Ciccone is a Mac developer from California, so when something comes up on mac or windows or both he's on it. My past dealings with the guy were extemporary and he's obviously dedicated to making an application that works as well as it does in Windows as it does in Mac OS. The one thing the mac does not do that windows does as cleanly is the OpenCL assisted renders and that is due to an issue with Apples OpenCL tools in Yosemite, which Paolo was one of the first to report back to Apple and they responded that it would be corrected (no time table), so hopefully in the very near future that is taken care of.
I don't get any compensation for promoting this software but I and many other users here share a love of it and the developer has earned the respect of many of it's user base by nothing less than a level of dedication that you don't always get to see.