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From a perspective of someone who has very little time to spend on 3D and (and with use cases that are perhaps very different than what people in this thread are referring to) - I find iray in DAZ Studio one of the easiest render engines around to get acceptable results, and at least for the scenes I do, it mostly is quite fast and responsive compared with other renderers I am using (Modo in the past, now also Blender).
Part of this is of course that I have lots of Daz Studio content that was already prepped by others for iray with extensive materials, but the point is that in the end, the combination of tuned content and iray allows me to get results that I could never get with Blender - I just can't afford the time it takes to get there from a content creation point of view. At least for me, that time factor is a much bigger factor than machine cost issues.
To have at least one positive voice on iray in this thread - I really quite like it in the context of the rich content ecosystem it sits in.
Anyways - I would also very much like to see DAZ figures natively in Blender. In an ideal world, I want all the modeling capabilities in a general purppose 3D app like Blender together with the Daz figure stuff much more than two separate apps. For this i'd love to have the iray engine be available in Blender too so that I don't loose all the content I have - or a material converter that works flawlessly :)
I think you've listed the reasons we like Daz so much! :D
But I think those reasons refer to Daz Studio in general, and not to Iray specifically.
Well, people say Nvidia has not abandoned Iray, and that they're actively developing it. That's what I wanted to hear! :)
I find the Diffoemorphic plugin excellent at getting characters and products into Blender with very little effort. I always transfer props and general background items seperately from figures as once a prop has been transferred it can be added again just as simply as in Studio.
The image shows the steps I take, with the final one being an option as I like using Rigify. I don't adjust the materials as I like to use my own setup I've created, but at the default they look good. I click those buttons and let them run with default settings, which works fine in my experience.
... The same as Iray, if your lighting sucks, your render will too.
It's good that the process suits you, the one you use now, but I too don't usually have much time, and I found Iray was a hog on resources, which impacted on my time; Blender has allowed me to do more - obviously for you it works fine - but we are all going to find our best way of working, and hopefully if we have an open mind - continually re-evaluate that.
... Will I still exclusively render in Blender when I finally (presuming I do) upgrade my 980ti to a 3000 series? I'll have to wait and see.
RTX in Cycles
That's awesome!!!
You can enable the denoiser in Iray as well, and you won't see black grains...but everything remains very blur, so it's basically unusable.
I guess we'd have to have 2xTitan RTX to get to that speed.
It would be interesting though to see what happens when they move an object or when they edit a shaping parameter, because that's when the Iray viewport becomes very slow.
I believe they updated the denoiser. I don't know if the updated denoiser is in the latest DS public beta. I haven't installed anything in a while. Trying to get some new stuff in my refurbished PC that I bought after I got out of stroke rehab but it's taking time. My right side is still weak and I have limited movement. The only thing I did on that new PC was my taxes.
Unless I missed an update, DS beta doesn't have the optix denoiser just yet. It blows any denoiser I ever tried out of the water, as far as I know only e-cycles has it enabled. I also haven't updated my vanilla blender in a bit since I use the e-cycles version, it might be in there now.
I don't have anything against the Beta, but this time, when I tried it out twice a few months ago, it was very unstable.
I always use the Intel denoiser, it's pretty cool. But it's external.
I guess Daz has been working on it. http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/change_log
Update to NVIDIA Iray RTX 2020.1.0 (334300.2228)
Increases minimum driver requirement (on Windows) to 451.48 - to properly support CUDA 11 and OptiX 7.1
Failure to update to the minimum driver is likely to produce a blank image
Installing updated driver may require restart (multiple)
Made changes (i.e., additions, modifications) to Shader Mixer low-level MDL bricksthat correspond to integration of NVIDIA Iray RTX 2020.1
Added DzMdlBaseBlendNormals, DzMdlBaseWorleyNoiseInput4, DzMdlBaseWorleyNoiseInput7
Manually recreated DzMdlBaseWorleyNoiseInput3, DzMdlBaseWorleyNoiseInput6 to preserve backward compatibility
DAZ Studio : Incremented build number to 4.12.2.31
Ah thanks Kevin, seems I do have an update for the beta ready. Have to upgrade my driver, hopefully don't break my PC lol. Here goes nuthin.
You script fixing up materials and things like that? Just stills I presume? How do you export at the right tessellation? Lots of problems involved in doing that I'm sure.
On the subject, there are some big developers using iRay, like Solidworks. I very much doubt it's going to get so far behind. NVIDIA want their technology in things like that so probably offer it for free (very expensive render servers of course). There are many interesting avenues one could go down but it's all about opportunity cost for Daz isn't it. Developers aren't an unlimited resource.
Can I just add that with respect to demos like marbles, until we've seen it in action ourselves, it's very hard to make any judgements about its quality compared to iray. I would be very surprised indeed if there are two different teams at NVIDIA, one making crap RT and the other doing real-time, bleeding edge RT.
Thanks in advance for trying it!
I shall wait I think,
you go first TheKD
too many other things I use get broken from time to time updating Nvidia drivers
I'm usually real cautious Wendy, but my health issues make me more cautious as I can't rip apart a PC like I could when I had the use of my right hand. A lot of waiting these days and seeing what happens when others experiment.
Well, that was an ordeal lol. Install driver kept failing for some reason, had to use DDU and remove it completely, then restart, and it let me install after that lol. Don't see any optix denoise check box anywheres. Maybe it's like optix, and it just uses it if you have the hardware? I don't see anything in the log about it. Anyways, test #1, 2 minutes 50.83 seconds, told the denoiser to go at iteration 70, and stopped it at iteration 108. PS, click it to see the fullsize, I made it display on the thread waaaaaay smaller than the render is.
Lighting setup for it is one emissive plane on one side, one plane with a cloth material as a reflector on the other side, and default HDRI dialed down to .2
Tried another go, this time starting denoiser at 160 and letting it run to 200, got:
After only the second render after opening it fresh, that is not giving me any warm and fuzzies lol.
Maybe it's not fully enabled yet in DS. Thanks for trying!
I think it has improved quality wise though, everytime I have used the denoiser, I usually started it at hundreds of iteration, and lost a lot of skin and material details.
That's good to know!
Oh, I think I messed up, and the denoiser didn't even kick in on that other render lol. Had to keep reducing render size before I get it to fire, Finally worked without running out of vram at 2000 x 3236. So probably won't be using it much, 2080 super can only handle denoising at such small size with only one clothed person lol. Here is a side by side of denoised, not denoised. Both at about 220 iterations
Still better than the last time I tried it at preserving materials.
Not bad and it can save time. Thanks for testing it.
I wondered about the Iray situation as well. I think DAZ is reading the tea leaves hence the need for DAZ Bridges to Blender, Unreal. etc. Also notice on the DAZ website they hardly even mention Iray anymore in the same vein that Carrara disapeared back in the day.
Most scene items the deffeomorphic plug exports and sets up decent shaders very well; there are a couple that manually exporting is required.
I use the Diffo plugin for characters, but have my own material setup for them; takes me a couple of minutes to apply them.
Mostly stills, but I have started experimenting with animation, just because it's there and powerful too.
Do you mean that you have a library of characters with the materials you have set up over time? If so, how do you save them in Blender? That's one of the things that I have not figured out from tutorials yet unless it is just a matter of saving a .blend file for each character.
I believe that's still the Private Build Channel. Public Build is I think still 4.12.2.6.
TD
Ah, so we don't have it yet. Thanks, Tom!
You can save all your materials in a sort of materials almanac .blend file that you can link from into your scene. You have to add a fake user for each material in the outliner tab, under materials. That way, it is easy to write a one-click script to re-apply all of your materials like in the attached code, where each object is associated with a list of materials to append/link from the almanac file in the order of its material slots.
Edit: Maybe I glossed over details. To build the almanac, you open it, and File/Append into it any useful materials from your other .blend files, and File/Pack external data into .blend file. You then give it a unique and self-documenting name, and add a fake user for it. It's ready to in turn be link/appended wherever it may be needed. You never have to waste any time re-applying materials.
I have a material saved in a file for the (head I thing) and on a new character I append it, change the textures to the ones of the character. I also have other materials saved in the same file I use regularly, cloth and others. I don't like packing images as that quickly increases the size of files. I have them linked to their original source as a rule, and only save locally when physically changing a texture from the original for that specific character itteration. I don't mess with the eyes or mouth.
I then copy it to the various other parts as required, swapping out textures for their respective types. From saving the file in Studio, to having it ready to use in Blender - takes about five minutes - a little more if I'm transfering a lot of correctives to a lot of clothing items.
I also have a selection of Hairs I've converted, and either append one of those, or if I don't see a style I think suitable, check out the ones I have yet converted, of which there are many. :)
Well you save a Blend file, and append the character; it's important to make sure all the parts required are in the collection, becuase that is what you should append; making sure the parts are in the collection means that when appended they are all in that collection and it doesn't get confusing with multiple characters in a scene.
Append is the equivalent of Studio's Merge.
Edit
I discovered Emma & Jordi's Makenna the other day, and realising I had never even loaded the character into studio, I loaded, set up the textures as I like them and then exported for Blender.
You'll see I have a lot of Collections. the Makenna one contains all the parts I would want to include - including the Rigify parts that can end up anywhere if not part of the collection at creation time.
Thanks - your help is much appreciated. I just wish I could understand some of it. I guess my head is too deeply embedded in the DAZ Studio universe so link/append/almanac/Pack/self-documenting all mean very little to me. Again, people who are so experienced with Blender will often say "just watch the tutorials" - well, I've been doing that for a couple of weeks now and I am still on the starting blocks. I have not produced a single useable scene in Blender yet but I'm not giving up. One day ... one day.
They have been stuck on that build for a while wonder if that version of Iray is still under NDA still related to Ampure