Iray in Daz
auggiebendoggy
Posts: 20
Hi everyone, I'm wondering what iray is exactly in Daz. I've read enough to know it's a rendering engine by Nvidia. But how does that work with DazS? Is it a plugin? Is it builtinto DazS? I've been using Car 8 for many years now and would like a better rendering engine. I've liked the looks of Octane but at 400.00, I'd like a cheaper alternative.
Can anyone give me a newbs explanation of what and how iray is in Daz Studio?
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
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Iray is a plug-in, but it is a plug-in distributed with daz Studio (as 3Delight is, among other things). It's a PBR render engine, Mental Ray's junior sibling.
It's a rendering engine, much like Octane. But it's free, and DAZ Studio is also free. You really should try it. It's called a "physically based renderer", like Octane, and it more realistically simulates light sources and how light reacts in the real world. The results you can get with Iray are, IMO, pretty stunning, even with stuff right out of the box. IF your interest is in realism, then it's probably the best and easiest route.
Keep in mind, however, that you will probably want a really nice and very powerful graphics card and lots of RAM in your machine. Otherwise renders can take hours.
With any of these PBR's, instead of adding a standard light (point light, sunlight, spotlight), you instead build a mesh object and apply emissive surfaces to it. Kind of like in the real world, where a light bulb is a physical object with a round surface that emits light. And you also apply much more realistic surfaces to your other objects to that light reacts more accurately. So for example, if I want a spot light, I model in Blender a round sphere inside a circular reflector, apply the Iray surfaces to it, and I have my light.
Like you, I used Carrara on and off (mostly off) for a number of years, and never liked DAZ Studio, and never used it. But in the last couple of weeks I decided to try it out since Carrara didn't have what I needed, and I'm pretty much blown away by how it's progressed. The G3 characters alone are worth a look. The improved surfaces and more accurate character design is amazing.
Thanks guys, so now I'm excited. FREE!!! I did play with DAZS for a bit and was really finding it not that far different from Car. Settings are in different places and labeled a bit differently, but I imagine going through tutorials will get me through it.
I d/l Daz so I'm assuming it's part of it, as Richard stated, 3D delight is included?
Does that mean it was installed when I installed DazS? If not, where do I find the install files?
Also are there iray tutorials. Ebergerly described the usage of making a 3d bulb and then using that as a light. Where would I find tutorials for iray?
any links would be appreciated. And yes, I will google.
Just look for the latest DS build. Install it and you'll have Iray with it. Iray was my path for using DAZ Studio.
Need a Nvidia video card with atleast 4gb of video ram built in you can get by with less but it is hard. The more cuda cores the card has the faster it renders the more video ram the card has the bigger the scene. You can use your cpu but it will take forever and a ati video card will not work with Iray. Just go to your render tab and pick Iray instead of 3Delight or Opengl. If you have a compatible card it will allow you to check it for rendering thru the video card.
Bear in mind that while a powerful GPU is desirable and will certainly give you faster feedback and rendering (provided the scene fits inside the GPU's memory limit), plenty of people use their CPU to render in iray. All of my gallery images were rendered on the CPU, for instance. Some of the renders wouldn't fit on any GPU that costs less than £5000 ;)
Auggiebendoggy,
You asked about the procedure in D|S for making an Iray light...
Here's a quick summary of how I do it, if I just want a simple overhead light that won't be visible in detail in my scene, although you will see the bulb emitting light.
First I jump into Blender and create a UV sphere. This will be the bulb. I also tend to make sure my modelling is in real world units, so I configure the Units dropdown (under the Scene tab) to be feet and inches, and make sure my dimensions of the bulb are something like 3 inches.
Next I create a second UV sphere which will be the housing. In Edit mode I chop off the bottom part of the sphere, which leaves me a bulb and housing. I parent the bulb to the housing (see the blue and orange lamp in Blender below).
You can do all of this in Carrara or Hexagon or whatever of course.
Name the objects "Bulb" and "Housing".
Next I export the lamp using .dae. That seems to work better for me coming from Blender, and I think the DAZ .dae will work great from Carrara. But you can try .fbx or .obj and see what works best.
Next import that into DAZ Studio. With your viewport configured to show an Iray render, you'll get something like the second image. When I imported with .fbx the bulb was no longer parented to the housing, and was in a different location.
Next we need to set up the surfaces in DAZ Studio and we're done
The first thing you need to do to configure surfaces is to convert both surfaces (bulb and housing) to the Iray base shader, called "Iray Uber Base". That just converts any existing shaders on the object to Iray shaders. So select the bulb, click the Surfaces tab (lower right, in the Properties area), and below that you'll see the tabs "Presets" and "Editor". Select "Editor", and below that you'll see a dropdown for the object (for example, "Bulb" if you named it that way). Click the dropdown, and it will show the material assigned to the bulb.
Next select that material, and click the "Presets" tab. You'll see some dropdowns below that, select "Shaders". You should see an icon on the top named "!Iray Uber Base" if the list is sorted by A to Z. Now double click that icon, and it should apply the Iray base shader to the bulb.
Now go back to the editor, select the housing, and do the same to apply the uber base shader.
Now you're all set to configure the shaders to act like a light bulb and reflector.
With the Bulb selected, under Surfaces/Editor, click the Material dropdown and one of the items should be Emission. Select Emission, and the top line should be Emission Color. Set that to full white (RGB = 1, 1, 1). Emission Temperature is the way to make the light more realistic in color, but leave it at default for now.
The most important setting is Luminance. I tend to set the last dropdown (Luminance Units) to candelas/ft^2, but you can leave default. But you'll need to crank up the Luminance value to something huge. Think in terms of 50,000 cd/ft^2 or 100,000 or 500,000 or even more.
Also, you can add an IES light profile under "Emission Profile" if you want really awesome and realistic light patterns like a real light bulb. Lights bulbs don't have a uniform light pattern because they're imperfect, and your eyes detect that subconciously. Anyway, just search the internet, those files (.ies files) are freely and widely available.
Now we're done with the bulb, and we just need to set the housing to be reflective.
Select the Housing object, and under Editor select the material. Now click on the Presets tab, and under Shaders click the Iray dropdown. Scroll down to Metal, select a shiny metal of your choice, and double click. That should apply a shiny reflective surface to the housing.
At this point you're done.
Below is an image of the completed light in an Iray render, after adding a simple plane to the scene and dialing down the environment light.
Of course you can modify the housing and bulb sizes if you want. But you can see that it is a reasonable facsimile for a real light in your scene if you don't get too close.
And here's a partially completed Iray render of that light using an IES profile from a manufacturer for a spot light. You need to make sure your bulb is rotated/oriented correctly for the IES profile, but you can see how the actual light profile isn't uniform.
And the other benefit of IES profiles is you can take your simple spherical bulb and configure it to be a spot light or bulb or a simple sconce-type light and so on, just based on the light profile.
And notice on the bottom of the image how cool the bulb looks :)
And here's a final render of the same light, using a "bulb" IES profile, and with an accurate color temperature for a "soft white" compact fluorescent light bulb (2700 K), It may look surprising to be so yellow, but I'm comparing it to the light in my room and it's pretty accurate.
By the way, I *strongly* recommend you make some detailed lights like this and save them for future use, so you can just drag and drop into new scenes. I think the vast majority of users don't consider light profiles and colors, and as a result their lighting just looks "off".
By the way, if you've ever assumed that regular light bulbs produce white light, here's a photo from inside my office, which is lit solely by a "soft white" compact fluorescent bulb. For some reason the forum rotated it, but the left side of the image shows the room light bouncing off the walls, and the right is my computer monitor with a totally white screen. Notice how closely the wall light matches the Iray render, but is not even close to the white of the screen.
Big difference. so yes, light color is extremely important.
And here's the exact same light, the ONLY difference is I applied an IES profile for a super tight spot light. So no need to redesign your light, just select different IES light profiles.
One of the neat things in Iray is that is calculates light bounce quite well. Here is a test scene that I set up with one figure, a large ground plane, three primatives to simulate buildings, and one distant light.
Notice how there is light bouncing back into the shadows from the surfaces in direct sunlight.
Yeah, I think that's the case with most or all physically based renderers, like Iray and Cycles and Octane an so on. As a matter of fact, sometimes they do too much bounce calculations and that slows your renders a lot. The default setting (-1) calculates many many bounces, and takes a lot of time. You can experiment and crank that down to maybe 5 or 10, depending on the scene, and speed up your renders a lot.
A lot of folks familiar with 3dl complain about how slow Iray is.
But I found, after attempting many different strategies, that a nearly photorealistic 3dl render takes about as much time as Iray in CPU mode; it's just that many people are content to strip out a lot of bounce and similar to get the faster 3dl.
Excellent. Although I'm unfamiliar with DS, which I've already started learning just recently, I appreciate the help understanding iray a bit more.
One quick question, I use Hexagon 2.5 for modeling, Is there a way to parent object in Hex?
People complaining about how slow Iray is? lol
This is the fastest render engine I've ever used (even on my laptop Quadro K5000M GPU)
Fastest with the best looking results... I never rendered much before Iray because 3Delight always needed postwork. A finished image = Render Time + Postwork Time.
Yep,
that sometimes sounds funny.
Some really long time ago i tried an indoor scene, only lighted by a ceiling lamp und "photorealistic conditions (bounce) with 3DL. Even after 3 days it wasn't finished.
Same situation with iRay needed 12 to 16 hours (CPU only) to be good enough.
OK - with 3DL most people use UE2 settings creating environment light out of the nowhere after only a few cm. And yes OK - this setting renders the same scene within 10 minutes.
But you seriously can't compare this with iRay.