Iray Only Content
old-dog
Posts: 21
Hi folks and ESPECIALLY you developers of content -
I know that it is gauche of me to point this out, but not everyone has the budget for a new NVIDIA 2080. - this is (where I am) a $2300 item.
I actually paid for a 1060 and it is neither fast enough nor at 6 GB, large enough. I can't actually use it. One character and out.
Wishing to do any sort of animation the notion of renders that take more than 10 -15 minutes each is also a matter of some concern. The effort to complete one in in terms of labour becomes measured in weeks. If it is complex - longer.
So IRAY isn't really a good "answer for everything". It is great for photorealism and marketing massively expensive hardware.
...but when you provide a product and offer it "IRAY ONLY" you make it extremely unlikely that I am going to consider it, because converting and using that content is painful. Effectively you are creating a two-tier market for DAZ and this will ultimately damage the product and the market.
The only thing I can think of is to somehow do a pre-render of an environment so as to be able to render the character correctly... and then overlay the images. I haven't heard of that technique but I imagine it is something that others have invented/developed already... and discuss somehow without using words I recognize. There's plenty in the rendering engine I have still to learn, but the limitations I am finding in IRAY in terms of scalability and speed are serious enough for me to ask vendors for a bit of love, and the rest of you for suggestions as to how to get decent animatiion-feasible-render-speeds on more limited resources.
Thanks
BJ
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Comments
I don't disagree with a word you said there (other than there might be some ways to optimize your scenes to fit into a 6GB 1060. My 8GB 1080 renders acceptably But that's another topic). And totally get that trying to do animation with Iray must be painful.
I would say on the content creator's behalf that I think some of what you're seeing is a "return on investment" decision. For content creators, their investment is time. Going through their product and creating high quality 3Delight surface settings, saving the presets, adding 3Delight promo renders, additional QA cycles, etc. That all takes time. And what they have to ask themselves is whether that additional time will result in more sales. They certainly wouldn't be able to count on charging a higher unit price; so it's about "Would creating 3Delight materials make enough people buy it who wouldn't have otherwise to make it worth my time?"
I've recently done some beta testing for some content creators and they told me that they struggled to find anyone who knows 3Delight well enough to even do beta testing. Unfortunately, as much as I loved the 3Delight engine, I think we will continue to see a decline in the number of products which have surface settings designed for that engine.
I will agree here, iray items and thier complexity really do reach the caps these cards are capable of really quick. You have to learn how to work around that though, by rendering things seperatly which takes longer and is a bit of a pain. Even with 2 1080's I can hit this and my renders creep along.
I will disagree with the price of the 2080, I just looked at them today because of the update to nvidia's drivers. The 2080ti is $1299 USD, so not near the $2300 @old-dog stated. (unless he's speaking about a different currency)
Needless to say that $1299 is outta my price range as well.
That is why I made this product - https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray
It is specifically designed to help anyone reduce the amount of resources used in a scene in an intelligent way. It will still require you to decide when and how to apply it but the two big promos shown for that set had 15 people or more and overall, I only used 2GB of vram per scene. And I only have 980TIs which have 6GB on them. So if I can do it, so can you!
Please feel free to read over this thread about it as well - https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/287461/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray/p1
Exactly... it is also painful for content creators to convert AND it is accompanied by (as JonnyRay said) additional promo images, additional material presets, and in the case of environments, additional lighting setups and render settings because buyers insist on prelit scenes now. It is really not worth the effort (for environments) because glass and metal don't look good in 3Delight. I do include 3Delight materials in my clothing products, though. Not as difficult in that case.
I can live without both promos and prelit scenes for 3DL if that is a big deal, and I understand that there are few of us that continue to use 3DL so it's understandable if the content creators go where the interest is, but at least try to use materials that can be converted without too much work to 3DL, many IRAY materials are a pain in the ** to convert to 3DL.
A bit OT but some IRAY promo scenes are getting almost silly because people put glass, mirrors and shiny metal all over the place just because IRAY is good at that ;)
https://www.daz3d.com/rssy-iray-to-3delight-converter-and-merchant-resource
Not tried but remember seeing it so went looking.
I have picked up your product Mattymanx, and I am working on learning to get through the process. Have to have different lights too of course. I actually would prefer to get the IRAY to go properly, and 6GB should work. Considering getting a second vid card for the system to use for itself, keep all that VRam for the scene. Hair has been the very devil though.
However, I work it though, the simplest answer seems to me to build an IBL from the rest of the scene, and then put my target character(s) through the motions. Then layer them on the scene.
Just wondering if anyone has done this. I suspect I can do it but don't want to waste time if someone knows a reason it shouldn't work.
I've also tried the Riversoft/Sickleyield thing. Which worked OK for some things. Again it is a matter of practice to get through it.
My point here is that this is a problem for a segment of the customer base. I totally get that the vendor isn't willing to support the folks in the cheap seats but the way things are set up right now, its a problem. I've had to spend significant money and time to work through it already and that's a cost being put on every other user who can't come up wiith a top line nvidia rig, and utterly excludes folks who have other graphics cards.
Lotharen - I'm in NZ and in New Zealand the price I quoted is what is charged at the cheapest. Nor do Kiwis make 2x the amount of NZ dollars to compensate for it ( I wish ) :-) So it effectively costs me 2x any price you find in the US,. yet another level of pain.
So while I make a damned good income here in NZ it is becoming ridiculously expensive for a hobby. As Mike Aronnson points out - I don't need the promos or the pre-lits. I don't use pre-lits.
Thing is, if a vendor even just used the Sickleyield converter to get a decent set of shaders that vendor has saved every single 3delight user who gets his product that same amount of work instead of every last one of us having to do the same work over and over and over again.
...and I do not agree that NVIDIA users are the only market and maybe they are not even in the majority of those who use DAZ. There are a lot of people out here making 3delight work because it IS faster, the hardware is cheaper, and time is not on our side.
You can get used "Titan X" cards for $450-$800, with more cuda-cores than the 1060 and 12GB of VRAM. You don't need to spend $2,000 on a card that has less than older hardware, with a new label, just because it is new.
As for 3DeLight being faster, it is faster because it uses older "fast" tricks to render. If IRAY limited itself to those same tricks, it would render the same quality, faster. 3DeLight may be faster than an IRAY render, out of the box, but it will look nothing like the IRAY render either. You are comparing apples to diamonds.
nVidia has been doing rendering cards for 3D-rendering since at-least 1990. As a matter of fact, the greater majority of the "rendering world", uses nVidia cards, which is why IRAY is being used more than any other rendering engine, at the moment. No other video-card is designed around 3D-rendering, currently. Most went out of business. Radeon's focus is on trying to beat nVidia's dominance in the "video-game rendering" market, not the "3D-rendering". (High-speed, sloppy, fast-frame renders, versus high quality, realistic renders used by professionals, for businesses.)
CPU rendering was nVidia's only real threat, years ago, after all the other video-card rendring devices went under. However, since CUDA, CPUs have been left in the dust. OPEN-CL, is not limited to only Radeon, as nVidia can do that too, as well as CPUs. That still leaves nVidia the "better choice", as you get the best of all five worlds. Open-CL, Open-GL, Direct-X, CUDA, and Tensor (Volta/RTX).
There is a reason why programs strive to "handle the best", because they need to reflect that, in the mirror. No program strives to be outdated and second best, for sake of nostalgia. Arcade systems tried that...
Directly from the 3DeLight website. https://www.3delight.com/
Based on "Legacy RenderMan compliant render technology", (RSL) which is based on old pixar shader-language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Delight
Version Release History:
3Delight Studio Pro 12: June 2015 <= (Notice the last version update)
3Delight Studio Pro 11: October 2013
3Delight Studio Pro 10 "Blade Runner": October 2011
3Delight 9.0.0 "Antonioni": December 2009
3Delight 8.5.0 "Bronson": May 2009
3Delight 8.0.0 "Midnight Express": October 2008
3Delight 7.0.0 "Django": November 2007
3Delight 6.5.0 "Ennio": February 2007
3Delight 6.0.1 "Argento": November 2006
Few people use 3DeLight, now, or ever... "Maya", "Katana", "USD", "3DeLight Cloud" and "Daz3D"
https://www.3delight.com/forums
The "Forum" there has only one topic, "Maya", with 11 topics and 79 posts.
https://www.3delight.com/documentation/display/3DFM9/Changelog
They seem to be focused on some "new version", as it starts at version 1.0.0 - 2018-8-31, and only mentiones Maya and Katana, no mention of Daz3D. The latest version, without Daz3D, is up to version 1.2.8 - 2018-12-13. No mention of Daz3D anywhere in the update notes.
@JD_Mortal
I can possibly move from 6 to 8 GB here - a used 1070 TI is now about where that 1060 was when I bought it years ago, but NZ is not the USA.,
A relatively closed market, shipping costs and as soon as the price > $300 they hit a tech importer with enough extras to double the imported price, There is nothing over 8GB is on the used market here for less than 1000 and the 1K one is a water cooled hybrid overclocked rig. Not sure I could trust it.
So I'm pretty much at the mercy of a process involving changes using MattyManx's kit because paying an extra $500 for another 2 GB of VRAM strikes me as a poor bargain. In time this will improve of course. I might live long enough.
You are comparing apples to diamonds.
My purposes are not the same as yours! I do not need diamonds... I need whatever it is I do to be FAST. I like IRAY quality but not the time and money. The NVIDIA might well be able to be fast but the limitation that it has to have the entire image in VRAM for the render to happen at all is hell. If it doesn't fit IRAY slows to a half-day an image. OpenCL has provided FUBAR images forever and its limits make 3delight look really good. This was never intended to be so complicated. Not from DAZ.
When you start doing conversions of products, then you pick up some procedures over time. I use a lot of older products in my images, and I have a 980Ti (on sale half-price when the new 10er series came out). No chance to buy a new card anytime soon, as that would also mean a new PC.
I always use https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer to reduce mapsizes for further away characters, and the above mentioned shader / converter sets are also incredibly useful.
And recently, I have started using a render service: http://www.jacktomalin.com/iray/
Well worth the money.
By the way, try the public-beta version... If you want to render fast animations, the "Denoiser" option is exactly what you need, for speed.
Working with @MattyManx's kit again. I get an acceptable render of my whole scene in 3DL in < 15 minutes. I do1 character alone and get unacceptable rubbish in IRay after an hour, ( just the GPU so Mattyhas that part figured - it fit in the VRAM! Good work Matty!). Tried the openGL again and it actually did half decent work - but for the fact that using that image with the IRAY shaders all the metal colors slipped into confusion.
I may give this another half-day of effort... because I think Matty has a damned good product that I am not quite using well enough. There's got to be better information about the ways to get pixels to converge faster though - as most of what I have seen in searching has been older and options names are - not clear. The 3 letter acronym disease is rampant in this space - and the question "WTF does that slider do?" just appears way too often in this process. Faster vs Better Quality is what we're interested in but we get a bewildering plethora of things we can set to utterly ambiguous (on that scale) values. In the menus for IRAY (and for 3delight for that matter) DAZ would do well to indicate which way to move things to make them better or faster.
I won't ask for cheaper. That stopped being an option years ago :-)
I dug up an old IRay manual online just to understand the beast a bit better @BeeMKay may have a decent answer there for me for any "sometimes" single renders. Thanks for that Bee. Not going to do animations that way though I do not think.;-) - perhaps in a year they'll have heftier systems or bitcoin mining will stop being a thing so the price of VRAM calms down. Meantime, this is just a hobby. I have stories and books to write.
@JD_Mortal - I went off the Public-Beta wagon a couple of years ago as my day job got more difficult. I may have the time to do it properly again soon. I just always fel;t the responsibility to do more than just report X-broke. Usually I'm a sys-admin but I also wrote code (parallel pthreaded C for Real Time embedded systems) and hate to just offer up "X-broke". I feel an investigative obligation on my plate if I pick up the beta again. Good suggestion though.
First job this holiday though is to install the Zen MBoard and set up housekeeping with that... won't make the 1060 a lick faster but it'll help me. .
old dog
Have a look at ordering a GPU from Australia, there are plenty of online hardware stores. One that I use to build computers does have post and courier options though I pick stuff up. They are basically wholesale. Umart online is a good one in Queenland, and one of many. When I was living in Perth I was ordering parts from them and NZ is closer to Brisbane than Perth is!
The $A is a little more than the $NZ but I think the wholesalers are on asian/us rates. These days you can easy pay with PAYPAL, and skip all those sale taxes or mark ups doubling the price in NZ
Totally agree with you. I have disabled iray in my install :P as I an trying to make a graphic novel and time spent on iray is loosing effort to dealing with changes instead of pushing my art where i want it.
That said if I like a model or asset I do sometimes buy iray only things - but to convert or put up with in 3DL.Yes seeing 3DL surfaces and settings on a product does make me choose it over one that will need more work to convert.
One point with 3DL is while I am creating or modifying a scene I can externally render rib files in 3Delight Display program versus wait while my Daz is rendering a iray scene that I will probably put into Gimp and reduce to a cartoon.