Reality for Daz Studio ??
firefly43
Posts: 0
While searching for tutorials and such I came across a lot of things referring to Reality for Daz studio, somehow related to another program called Lux Render. Can anyone tell me what these are, and if they are good to find and buy?
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That is true and correct.
Reality is a plugin for DAZ Studio that translates your scenes for rendering in an external render engine called LuxRender. Check the LuxRender website for details: www.luxrender.net
LuxRender is free and if you want to render your DAZ scenes with it, you need a translator. And thats what Reality is. So you need both programs along with DAZ Studio.
Hope that makes it clearer.
LuxRender is a GPU based renderer, unlike Daz's built in 3Delight, which works off of your CPU.
Reality is a Daz/Poser bridge, or link to be able to use Lux from within these programs.
Here's Reality's page on the LuxRender site: http://www.luxrender.net/en_GB/daz_studio
Lux is also a physically accurate, unbiased engine, which allows for better photo-realistic results.
Octane is another popular one, but it requires an Nvidia card since it uses CUDA.
....Reality is a plugin that allows rendering scenes created in Daz Studio with the LuxRender render engine. LuxRender is an unbiased render engine which produces more photo real/lifelike quality renders than possible with the built in 3Delight engine in Daz Studio which are on par with professional grade applications like 3DS and Maya and/or render engines such as Octane, and MaxwellRender.
Reality is not sold here (TOS does not allow linking to other commercial sites) and not sure if it is permissible to name the site on the forums here. The safe option is to Google "Reality for Daz".
...geez you guys are fast. Do you have sub or hyperspace connections?
Linking to it should be fine, since it's specifically being asked about and not thrown into the forums as a commercial thread (at least that's how I've seen it, and haven't been wrist-slapped yet lol).
You can buy it on Preta's site:
http://preta3d.com/reality-2-0/
http://preta3d.com/purchase-reality/
You can also buy it through Rendo: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/reality-2-for-daz-studio/92598
XoechZ
Yes that was very clear!
Vaskania
Added info tells me alot too on how it will use my system to render.
The information on the sites sounds good. As seasoned Daz users would you guys consider it a good investment
EDIT
I did not mean to get anyone in trouble, was not aware that asking about other software was bad. I can't imagine why they would be upset as the plugin is specifically for Daz studio :-/.
I do appreciate the links!!
Because I do not want to cause anyone ill will with Daz, I will just assume it is probably a good purchase to make.
I personally don't use any external rendering engines (ie Lux), so have never bought Reality.
The official Reality for Daz forums are over at RDNA if you want to take a look over there: http://forum.runtimedna.com/forumdisplay.php?322-The-Official-Reality-for-Daz-Studio-Forum
They have a Reality gallery over there as well (warning, nudity): http://www.runtimedna.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=49
I will admit though that some images aren't the greatest representation of what Lux is capable of.
Well, that depends on what goal you want to achieve. As mentioned before, LuxRender produces much more "real looking" images. So if you are going for reality in your renders, it will be perfect for you.
But let me add something more: LuxRender is an unbiased render engine, that means it renders forever (literally)! In DAZ Studio, when you render an image, it is done after a while. In LuxRender it is not. LuxRender renders until you stop it. That means, you render until you are satisfied with your image and then stop the render. And LuxRender can be very CPU intensive, so render times of several hours are standard. Even on superfast PCs.
@Vaskania:
DAZ has a competing product - Luxus :-) http://www.daz3d.com/luxus
XoechZ.. damnit.. I forgot that thing was sold here. >.<<br /> /goes back and edits post
Oh well, this still isn't a blatant commercial thread. :P
But on the site I was just on it said luxus was the plugin for Cararra?? So is luxus a stand alone or a plugin?
Luxus is a plugin, just like Reality. They're both plugins to allow you to use LuxRender with DS.
The built in 3Delight render engine of DAZ Studio is a renderman compliant render engine. Renderman is a standard that was developed by Pixar for interfaces to 3D render engines. All renderman render engines are biased render engines. They take various short cuts in ray tracing light to speed up the render. To get realistic looking renders you need to compensate in how you do your lighting. 3Delight is an industrial strength implementation of the Renderman standard that has been used in Hollywood.
LuxRender is an open source render engine. It is available free. LuxRender is an unbiased render engine. It uses a Mont Carlo algorithm to generate light rays from the light sources you have in the scene and then ray traces them until they are gone from the scene. This allows you to render with light sources that are close to modeling real light sources and get renders that look more photo realistic. LuxRender includes a detailed model of sky light that models how sun light interact with the atmosphere.
.
Reality and Luxus are both interfaces between DAZ Studio and LuxRender. Reality is sold at a different store. Luxus is sold in the DAZ store. The main issue in rendering in LuxRender is that it treats surface materials and lights very differently from 3Delight. Both Reality and Luxus will try to auto convert most surface materials for you, but to get good results you will have to tweak the material yourself. You will need to use different lights from what you normally use in DAZ Studio. I believe Luxus will try to auto convert some kinds of lights, but Luxus has its own lights that work in 3Delight and LuxRender. I don't have reality, but I'm under the impression you have to do the lighting in the Reality plugin.
Render times with LuxRender to get a quality image are generally much longer than with 3Delight (assuming you know how to use both render engines fairly well). LuxRender renders the entire image at once, and the signal to noise improves with time. It may take 10 hours to get a quality render with LuxRender, but after only 5-10 minutes you will be able to see enough to find out if the lighting is way off. LuxRender can use OpendCL graphics cards to accelerate renders.
Octane is another unbiased render engine, but it is not free. Octane can use CUDA enabled (Nivida) graphic cards to accelerate renders.
Both Octane and LuxRender have image size limitations when rendering using graphic cards. These limits depend on your graphics card.
That is a lot to consider. Hmmm. Not sure what I will do at this point. You have all been great with information and explaining now it comes down to how long I really want to wait for a render (though they could run while I sleep) and what quality of render I want. It dose always impress me how much all of you know and the willingness to share.
Thanks for giving me what I need to know to make a decision, now it's just up to me which way I want to go.
You could take a look at the Luxus discussion threads:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/18543/
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21492/
There's quite a bit to read as its run into a part 2. It might give you more of an idea about Luxus/Luxrender.
I own both plugins - Reality and Luxus. For me, Reality is easier to use, since it has it´s own interface which is quite logical and lets you do all the settings and adjustments with ease. There is also a material preview window in Reality, where you can see what your surfaces will look like before you render the scene.
On the other side Luxus has no interface. It is simply embedded in the DAZ Studio GUI. All the settings of Luxus are available (when installed) under the surfaces and parameter tabs in DAZ Studio. That makes it a bit harder to use, especially in the beginning until you get comfortable with all the settings and parameters and what they do. But Luxus gives you more control of LuxRender because it has much more settings and parameters than Reality.
A beginner who has never worked with LuxRender before can easily get lost with all the settings that Luxus offers. Reality is more user friendly but gives you less control.
As for using Reality versus Luxus, that also partially depends really on how you are used to using DAZ Studio, too. I own both, but prefer Luxus since it came out.
I for one never got comfortable with the UI separation Reality does, as I very often do scene setup, do a bit material dabbling and light adding, and then switch to scene setup again, etc - quickly re-iterating through the steps. I always thought of the Reality UI (2.5) more of a hinderance than an aid, due to how I a work.
As for material setup, both plugins do a decent job as for automatic translation of materials, but you will have to learn a bit about LuxRender specifics/materials (and lights for that matter) for both plugins to make the most out of them. The Reality interface 'hides' quite a few settings of LuxRender - so in the beginning Reality might be easier to grasp in that regard as you have less information to pick up, but quite a few things LuxRender offers cannot be done in Reality due to that as well, unless you text edit the resulting LuxRender files.
As DAZ3D has a 30 days money back guarantee, you can buy Luxus and then try it and request a refund if it doesn't work for you. Oh, and the Luxus plugin exists both as Carrara and DAZ Studio plugin, just to clarify, so make sure to pick the right one should you want to buy it :)
From what I understand, Reality doesn't hide so much as simply hasn't been updated in so long that it doesn't really take advantage of a lot of the things that have been added to LuxRender by now. That is probably going to change when the new version is released which will be....somewhere between DAZ soon and the rapture.
I have not found Luxus to be any harder to figure out than what is natively in Studio. In some respects, Luxus is easier, in my opinion. I don't have Reality so I can't comment or compare on that.
I know this isn't exactly following this thread but I've read that the Blender Cycles renderer is going to be used by other software companies other than just in Blender.