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First of all, reality 2 is not a render engine. It utilizes the Luxrender engine, and converts Daz Studio materials into materials which can be understood by Lux. Luxus, another plugin sold on the Daz Store, is another method to render using Luxrender and again converts DS materials for Lux. Reality 2.5 is fairly old and doesn't fully support all the Luxrender materials, but does have a superior auto-converter (in my opinion) and makes things easier to get started with. Luxus is newer and has full support for everything Luxrender is capable of, but as a result has a steeper learning curve.
As for which one is 'best' it really depends. 3Delight will almost always give a clean image. Because it's a biased render engine, it takes shortcuts to get the results so it might not be physically accurate but it will render a lot faster than the equivalent scene in an unbiased engine like Luxrender.
Luxrender is a physically accurate engine. The upside of this is that light behaves incredibly realistically, but the tradeoff is that renders will take considerably longer to render and may contain varying degrees of noise. This noise is caused by incomplete light calculations, and clears up the longer you leave it rendering. Luxrender does not have a fixed render time and will carry on cleaning up any noise the longer you leave it rendering. If left to its own devices, Luxrender will continue refining the image forever.
Both require very different ways of thinking. In some ways Luxrender is easier because you don't have to 'cheat' to get certain effects, but in other ways it's harder because in order to get those more realistic effects you need a solid knowledge of how to go about it.
Thank you, HeraldOfFire.
BTW, the "3Dellight's render time" turns to be much much longer if I add a big aperature camera to the scene!
How about the other render?
1. Reality 2 is NOT a renderer...it is an exporter to the Luxrender renderer.
2. Reality used to be sold here, but for some reason (vendor choice??)) it no longer is.
3. Neither is better...are apples better than oranges? Both do some things well or easier than the other. I suppose if you want, you could say 3Delight is 'better' because it is used in many more movies than Luxrender has been.
I've actually done a few short animations using Luxrender, and they don't look all that terrible so it can indeed be done, and done well. 3DL is the clear winner in that department though, purely on speed alone.
Thank you,mjc1016.
Thank you, Jaderail.
PS: It took 24 Hrs to complete about 10% of simple portrait rendering when I used a big aperature (f1.0) camera.
PS: I was using Mac Mini i5...
There is a BIG difference from REAL FILM in a Camera and a 3D render. In FILM all that is needed is the FILM exposed to the light for the proper Time. In 3D your Computer must CREATE that light (calculate it) and then it FALL on the FILM (render). EVERY angle, every hue and difference of that created light must be calculated BEFORE it will hit the FILM (render). That is why High render settings take longer, better lighting takes longer and at that setting your after a VERY high number of calculations.
Thank you, Jaderail.
PS: It took 24 Hrs to complete about 10% of simple portrait rendering when I used a big aperature (f1.0) camera.
PS: I was using Mac Mini i5...
What else was in the scene...lighting, hair, etc?
What about render settings...samples, shading rate, etc?
Render size?
In a special case like this, Lux may be the quicker option.
Thank you again,Jaderail.
Thank you,mjc1016.
Just a simple portrait like the attached image.
Why f1?
There is obviously something else going on, because a scene like this should not take too long to render.
I re-created your scene.
Same resolution.
Nothing fancy; ambient light set-up is from AoA, made a bump-map for the wall.
Rendertime time: 32 minutes.
In the second picture you see my camera set-up
I have a four year old 2-core machine.
Okay Now I'm confused. WHICH camera setting was set to F1? I think I was discussing a 100% different thing.
Luxrender like other "unbiased" renderers produces beautiful results, at the expense of speed. I have been partial to these renderers for many years . . . for me, it is easier to produce excellent results with them as opposed to the scanline renderers in Daz or Poser.
Here's an image I did with an unbiased renderer from ArtVPS, nearly 10 years ago, that really exemplifies why I like them-- crispy sharp details (if you let it run a long time). I love this model-- a great critter called "Alpha" from a now departed vendor called Sanctum Arts. It was a huge model for its time, and the unbiased render (left it to run overnight, if I recall) really got the crispiness. Today its still a "pretty good" render-- but at the time it blew me away; was a much much better render than I was getting out of hybrid or scanline. At their best, unbiased renders do that, they produce the results that make you say "wow"
You get the same thing in software renderers like Lux and Maxwell, now . . . much harder to do it in the 3delight engine. There are some hybrid renderers which produce jawdropping results; Vray is notable. 3delight, with a lot of tweaks, can produce stuff that's "pretty good"
So my recommendation -- if you've got a powerful system, and you don't mind long renders, invest the time in learning Lux
@Jaderail:
maybe I am the one that is confused, but it was mentioned that a camera with a big aperture (f1) was causing a considerably longer render time. Your explanation is correct f1 (f1.4 in real world camera's) have the largest lens opening so the largest amount of light entering the camera.
@crocodilian:
I don't agree. With some effort, 3Delight can create stunning results.
And to someone who is new to this community, I would not recommend spending money on something else. (In some cases you even need a dedicated graphics card).
First learn to use DAZ Studio with its build-in render engine to create results to your own liking. Meanwhile you improve your skills and also after some time you might discover that you are attracted to a certain style, theme. And only then decide that another render engine is a better choice.
For example, after a while you find that you like to create and render modern interiors, I would recommend Octane.
But if you are more in to the fantasy theme, 3Delight gives you that 'something', that extra 'feel' to it, something that is hard to describe.
In the end Luxrender does not make better art. Only you can.
Good... Okay I feel better now.
Gotta disagree there. Unbiased renderers are physical light simulators. They do a much better job in reliably producing great looking images than do scanline or hybrid renders.
It certainly is possible to do a very good render with a scanline; but its much harder, and most people just don't do it. Particularly for folks new to 3D, I'd recommend -- if they have an adequate system-- going straight to an unbiased renderer. They'll more easily get results which satisfy them.
And the techniques are general. If you know Luxrender, you're most of the way to working in Maxwell, for example. Unbiased renderers/light simulators are all going to have the same fundamentals, light and materials. But each scanline/hybrid renderer has their own nomenclature, strange kludges, their own very parochial way of doing things; a long time ago I invested a lot of time and effort in getting up to speed in mental ray, for example-- a knowledge base that's mostly useless as I don't use 3DS any more.
I'd also add that you clearly don't need a fancy graphics card for Luxrender-- it has GPU acceleration, if you have it on board . . . I don't have a compatible card, and just turn that off.
As scanline renderers go, 3delight isn't a particularly good one-- with a lot of tweaks, you can get something adequate with pretty poor render speeds, but there's no comparison in speed or quality to, say, Lightwave or Vray, nor even to Vue. I do admire the cleverness of DS folks in getting 3delight to produce to some good work (and of the Poser folks in doing the same with Firefly -- by my lights a better renderer than 3delight, FWIW), but its a huge amount of application specific tweaking required.
And as for cost . . . Reality is cheap, and Luxrender is free.
3delight is far better than it was, but it still doesn't impress me much, and for folks starting out, the real trick to getting great looking stuff is getting a good render . . . much, much easier to do that in Lux than in 3delight.
I strongly disagree there. The material settings in Luxrender require a very strong working knowledge of how surfaces react under various light scenarios. You can get fantastic results, of that there is no doubt, but there is also a lot of margin for error. The most obvious one being 'glowing' surfaces which end up creating light instead of absorbing it, which is a common error among newcomers to Lux, along with problems such as superglossy surfaces which cause light rays to bounce around the scene almost endlessly which drastically increases render times and fills a scene with noise.
Reality tries to simplify these things, and does a fair job of it, but it does so by locking off certain settings which can make it harder to tweak your image. Luxus gives you these settings out of the box, but again the learning curve is quite steep and requires a strong knowledge of the materials you use.
You can get reasonable results with presets and automatic conversions, this much is true, but the same could be said about 3Delight and its various presets for materials and lighting, any of which can give you a beautiful scene with minimum fuss. As far as making 'good' renders, 3DL and other biased render engines will always fall behind their physically based counterparts simply because they cut corners by definition. For ease of use, however, they are also miles in front because you can 'fake' lighting and use other tricks which are simply impossible in the real world.
It depends ...
If you want photorealistic - the exporters to Luxrender (Luxus, Reality), Octane or Blender cycles make that easier.
But it is possible in 3delight too: http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/images/12161/
If you want to make artistic pictures - you are free. 3delight is as good as the unbiased renderers mentioned above.
After some quick experiments...
(I've been staring at the renders too long, I've almost convinced myself there is a subtle difference, but then I realise there should be a huge difference between f1 and f1000!)
I'd have to conclude I'm not getting a slower render with larger aperture.
(Depth of Field turned off and just altering f-stop.)
I think f-stop only comes into play to calculate the DOF its not connected to 'exposure'.
Its probably the amount of blur to be calculated that slows things down.
Blur is notorious for that, whether its soft shadows, blurry reflections or DOF, so that's not really surprising.
The nearest thing to 'exposure' in DS is the 'Gain' slider in Render settings.
The reason I use f1.0 (f-stop=1.0) is just because I want to see the effect created by using "virtual" camera.
Also, I like to compare it with real camera.
BTW, since the f-stop>f1.0 is impossible in the real world, it is real weird that DAZ Studio can set f-stop >1 (example f0.8).
Yes, I set-up f-stop is for DOF, not for exposure.
One has to wonder, why, if unbiased renderers are 'the best' that the industry that uses the most rendering chooses Prman or 3delight as their workhorse renderers?
In reality, neither type is really better than the other...just better suited for certain applications.
And if you want to learn the most about rendering, learn both methods. The Renderman family has a lot of carry-over value. The unbiased group, while each one has its own individual idiosyncrasies, is closer to the skill set one learns for needs to learn for photography. And it is more the application being used, like Max, C4d, Lightwave, Maya, etc, that determines the way materials are handled than the renderer itself. There are a lot of commonalities, at the renderer level, that also carry over..it's the actual interface that varies so much...which is predominately determined by the 'host' program.
And as to the speed of some unbiased renderers...it's down to what they are running on. A GPU only renderer, like Octane, is so fast because it is, literally, using hundreds of processors, at the same time. Use a 'cluster' and give 3Delight the same number of processor cores and see what its speed is like.
It's the DOF that's causing the increase in render time, not necessarily the low f-stop itself. And with such an extreme range, there's going to be a lot of extra calculations that aren't going to have any impact on the final, displayed image.
It's the same effect as bumping the number of raytrace bounces to double digits...you are forcing calculations to occur that aren't going to have much, if any, influence on the final image.