Octane vs Reality 2
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I've used them both.
In general: the render times are longer than with 3Delight and I don't mean fifteen or so minutes longer.
I'm sure you've checked both their websites, so you know Octane requires an Nvidia based graphics card and maybe you want to purchase the Octane DAZ plugin as well, which I don't have.
You have to ask yourself: what do I want to achieve with my scenes: fantasy, comics, reality, sci-fi...?
Yes, I am aware the render times are longer. But the results look incredible!
Didn't realise there was a hardware specific requirement. I'll check that out.
When you say plug in, I think they both do plug ins. Is that to save you having to export the entire scene as OBJ and re-importing into the render engine?
By the way, I am interested in photorealistic renders. So which would be better?
When I bought Octane, it was a stand-a-lone, so every scene had to be exported to obj. Not a big deal of course, but then I had to reduce the filesizes of texture maps, or the scene would not fit into my graphics cards RAM. (keep that in mind if you need to buy new hardware, you will regret buying something with 1Mb video RAM).
For Reality you need LuxRender (free) but then you can also consider a cheaper alternative called Luxus. Here in store for $ 17,- or so.
Another possibility, but you need Blender (free) for that, is using a script from mcasual and export it to Blender to use Blender's build-in cycles render engine.
I don't know what Blender is.
So, for photorealism, would you recommend Octane or Reality2?
Well, see what I get for going to eat dinner....
Anyway, here's a sample from Luxrender...it's only been rendering about an hour and can use a bit more time 'cooking' (Luxrender will keep going until you tell it to stop).
Looks nice. Thanks. But I gather Octane looks nice too.
But I am not really anywhere nearer getting an answer to the question in post #4
What's your view on that?
Octane also continues rendering forever until you decide to stop.
I cannot tell which one is the best. I was not good in both of them; You need to develop special skills.
Anyway, an example of all three of them.
I stick to 3Delight. If it's good for Hollywood, it's good enough for me...
Octane and LuxRender are both a different kind of render engines than 3Delight.
3Delight is based on the Renderman standard developed by Pixar. It is a biased render engine. It does ray tracing but it takes short cuts to speed up the render.
Both Ocatane and LuxRender randomly generate light rays and exhaustively ray trace them till they are out of the scene.
All these render engines depend on a description of the material and how it interacts with and respond to light. Most content you buy here comes with material descriptions intended for 3Delight. The Octane DAZ plugin, Luxus plugin and Reality 2 plugin will all try to automatically convert material descriptions to the kind used by their target render engine. The only one I have used is Luxus and it does a pretty good job, but not perfect. Any great render you see out of these render engines required a lot of tweaking of materials. Of course you need to learn to tweak materials to get great results from 3Delight too.
Luxus and Reality 2 are both using the same open source LuxRender engine. Ocatane is using a different render engine which can use high end NVIDA graphics cards to speed up renders. However, you need an expensive, high end graphics card to use it.
Capacity is also a big issue. Most of the great LuxRender or Ocatane renders are very small scenes. Ocatane is limited by the capacity of your graphics card. LuxRender is more limited by render time. Big complex scenes take a very long time to render in LuxRender.
It all depends on what you want to do.
So true.
Suppose you have ideas of creating animations in the near future, I would even not recommend going for Octane or Luxrender.
If you are interested in doing interior design, I believe Octane does a great job.
I forgot to mention: Blender is a modeling prgram; at this stage I don't recommend it to you.
Ok, thanks everyone. Wise words.
I think I shall stick to 3delight for the time being, as I still have a lot to learn about 3d anyway.
Wise words.
Apart from learning (learning about lighting your scene is probably the most important)
it can happen that in course of time you develop a preference for something like Fantasy or Steampunk, or animation,
in that case 3Delight is perfect (and fast in rendertimes).
In the pic some examples, taken from the 3Delight website.
I have had Reality 2 for DAZ for about 3 weeks now probably and I think it is worth the modest expense to allow you to get really good renders most of the time. I have had no luck using the GPU acceleration so far but I suspect I need to go in and tweak some settings or something. Also some images still don't look too good after 3000 samples/pixel while other look great after a few hundred. I attach an example of what you can do with Reality if you don't mind running the render overnight, and this is after some jpeg compression. I only just heard about Octane today and it appears to be 300 Euros to buy the plugin and the render engine, whereas Reality uses the free LuxRender. Octane is compatible with a whole range of AutoDesk products (Inventor, 3DS, Softimage and Maya) so that is attractive to some but looks like maybe 99 Euro for each plugin. If you look at the Renderosity website you will find most of the best images are done with a 3rd party render engine. So I suggest you take the plunge.