Nvidia Iray
hazneliel_cc85b88108
Posts: 118
Can an honest person tell me why nvidia Iray is good?
For me is just slower, and the only thing I can notice is the render has sprayed pixels all around.
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That's how the render starts but if you wait long enough it will make a really nice picture and it's the easiest way for non-artists to make realistic renders although that's really the design of a PBR (aka PBS) rendering enviroment which are available in other render engines besides iRay.
It is slow though. I have one going on 2 days 8 hours now but I have no nVidia card to speed it up. Lucky I don't plan on entering DAZ forum contests but this once or twice.
If I were to throw together a quick answer:
1) On newer computers with decent nvidia cards, it is faster than 3Delight; my renders tend to be 10 to 60 minutes for a long one.
2) the lights are a bit more physics based so if you are starting from scratch and not from 3Delight, they can be easier to learn since they work exactly like you were lighting a scene for a real camera
3) the look of the renders is a bit more movie-like rather than painterly
4) it doesn't require 3Delight to go away because there are ways to make materials that work in both render engines
On the other side:
1) iRay doesn't run on non-nvidia cards so some people must render at much slower speeds
2) there is a vast amount of knowledge that people hav amassed using 3Delight which doesn't apply anymore
3) many people are used to the look of 3Delight and are uncomfortable with the new look
Define "honest person", please?
Plus and minus: Iray requires a lot of real world lighting techniques and photographic knowledge.
This is a plus in that if you know all that stuff, it's very intuitive. This is a minus in that if you don't, well. Lots of learning to do. Plus if you want to do something that's not realistic, then it might be impossible.
Roughly speaking, for a simple scene, it's WAY easier, with many machines, to generate a decent realistic render with Iray vs. 3DL. Specific cases vary wildly and with lots of experience and proper tools you might find the two end up fairly on par.
Thanks for your feedback.
My point here is, I have not seen a render in Iray that looks far superior than 3Delight in the sense of realism and shading, every comparison I see they look the same in that sense, only differently lighted and shaded but I cannot say one is superior to the other.
I have seen a lot of 3Delight renders that archieve this realism through post editing techniques (sometimes just and action will do)
I'm afraid 3Delight renders now look a bit fake and dead for me unless there is a lot of postwork and/or the artist is very good. However, this is a personal opinion and people should use the tools that achieve their personal vision in art. The one thing I should add is that now that iRay is the default render engine for Daz Studio, 3Delight shaders may slowly return to days when Daz Studio was new: you have to learn to roll your own. It is an opporunity to people to really learn their tools but there is a decline in the number of products that include new 3delight shaders.
I think we need to step in with a reminder that "wars", whether platform, app, or engine, are not welcome. If you don't like iray (or 3delight) renders then that is fine, please continue to work with and develop your skills in the engine you prefer.
Without IRAY I would'nt be using DAZ studio, I don't like th cartoony look of 3Dligh.
Use the renderer you like best, not the one other people tell you to use.
At the end of the day the only thing that counts is that you are happy with the end result of your images/animations.
I don't like 3delight, but that is because I suck at using it, not because those with skill can't achieve some incredible images; not at all cartoony.
The bottom line IMVHO really is what your personal goal is for the render, and which one you feel most comfortable with. For me, I do most of my renders now with Iray or Octane Render. It is simply much easier for me to get the results I want with Iray or Octane. I have a laptop with a GTX 970M, which also gives me good speed with Iray and Octane, typically faster than a similar render in 3Delight.
This in no way means 3Delight isn't a great render engine, but I simply find Iray and Octane easier. For example, the I did the render below using Iray. I would have no idea how to get the same results in 3Delight, but since Iray so closely mimics real world light physics, it's much easier for me to understand how to do things to get the results I want. Your mileage may vary.
See the full sized image in my gallery: http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/84140
Iray is cool if you have the right Hardware. 3delight works great if you don't. I like 3delight on my HP laptop because my laptop only has a ATI video card and cannot be upgraded. My desktop has 3x Nvidia 6gb edition 780's doing Iray renders with a HDRI image for light and it renders my scene in about 2mins. It depends on your hardware. Iray needs a decent Nvidia video card to make it worth using. If you don't have one that works it is better to stick with 3delight. Just use either GIMP or Photoshop to fix your renders and make them standout.
On second thought, I should add that I'm not sure Iray would be useful to me, even if I DID have a pile of money laying around. Nothing I've read suggests high end hardware would bring Iray render times down into a range I'd be comfortable with. I want a g3 figure in an empty scene and "typical" lighting to render in a minute or two, tops. I am not a patient man.
Silver, maybe I just have something wrong with my rig? I have an i5 with 24gb RAM and a gtx 760, and it takes me 30m to render G3 with the headlamp (whenever I try to render using anything else, the render starts out looking completely whited-out, and I don't have a long enough expected lifespan to play with the settings when iterations take half an hour) to render just a figure in an empty scene. Point being, the stuff I have read suggests MUCH more modest gains from adding 2nd, 3rd, or 4th card than going from 30m to 2.
I have a Intel i7 6core and 64gigs of ram and am using 4 video cards in my rig: 1x Nvidia 640gt to run my dual monitors no Iray on this card and 3x 6gb Nvidia 780's with 2300 cuda cores each to do my Iray renders. I have one G3F charater with HDRI as the light source and it takes more time to load the model and textures into my video cards than it does to render it out. I know some people have found that having more than 2 card does not make things faster but this is due to their hardware limitations and they are using their primary video card to both run their monitors and to do Iray as well. You need a motherboard and increased memory and chipset that can handle multiple cards and most motherboards for home use are set up for at most 1 to 2 video cards. The board I have has 8 memory slots and 4 full speed pcie3 slots and a 1000watt plus powersupply powering the beast. This is a hobbie andy most people won't spend this much on a computer but I build PC for fun so I slowly built my system and am happy with the speed it provides me.
Folks think they have a good gaming rig, then it will be good for rendering; it will be OK (ish).
It is easy to get overkill for gaming.
It is practically impossilbe to have too much processing power for rendering; if you don't believe me, ask the big film studios.
I use a 970 for driving the monitors (yes monitors 2560x1440); and a 980ti for rendering.
I'm considering another card, but know I'll need a better MB and RAM to take full advantage of it. I use a i7 with 4 cores; I don't overclock it as I consider that a waste. Although I do have a profile saved in the BIOS.
If I add another card, then I'll be going for at least a 6 core and preferable 8 core, and a minimum of 32GB of RAM, preferably 64GB. Well, I would if my credit card hadn't hidden itself. Hell I may even go for a Xeon system.
3delight rendering speed is the same as Iray with CPU only if you try to do realistic renders with ambient occlusion and global illumination.
Iray workflow is so much better. The default Iray shader has everything I need, with 3delight I had to create my own custom shader using the shader mixer just to get half of what the default Iray shader can do. Setting up a scene in 3delight takes so much work, everything from lighting shaders and occlusion settings have to be adjusted to get the right look. With Iray one material preset can work with all all lighting scenarios and no need to adjust ambient occlusion settings.
With GPU Iray is way faster than 3delight when it comes to realistic scenes and more accurate.
If I were to describe each 3delight is like painting a scene and Iray is like taking a picture. You can paint realistic scene, the more time and skill, you put in but it will be hard to match the realism and quickness of a picture.