3DL, Iray, Octane?
vonHobo
Posts: 1,706
Regarding the recent email for the free Octane Render Kit ...
I am guessing that before Iray came along, everything in DAZ was 3Delight.
I started my DAZ journey when Iray was the standard. I never purchase 3Delight content because I prefer Iray for many reasons.
Now we have Octane which is touted as being quicker and better than Iray.
Will DAZ be moving to Octane as the standard eventually? Will new products have Octane rather than Iray materials?
I built my entire library of content on Iray. I'd hate to have to convert it all to Octane, but if Octane is really that much better than Iray maybe it would be worth it?
I know change is good but ... somehow I'm dreading this.
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Comments
I'd love it if there were Octane mats; it is so much better than Iray.
Sadly as it stands, it isn't as 'easy'. It has, however, improved a lot.
I'm sticking almost exclusively to Cycles in Blender. If i get the urge, then Octane is very well integrated i understand; no idea if my understanding is accurate.
Honestly, because of the speed of Octane I hope Daz moves to Octane formally. Iray is so slow.
I agree. That's the one thing I hate about Iray. Even the Viewport Preview is a mess in Iray.
only isue i have with octane. is its millions of settings. and its online thing of course
..well, replacing Iray with Octane would mean having to learn and work with a whole new materials language which in turn would require having to manually convert materials for a large library of existing content. As Octane is totally cloud based you'd have to work online which is subject to connectivity speed, reliability, and for some, monthly download/connect limits, no thanks.
Originally I was very in Octane4, particularly for its Out of Core rendering which meant I wouldn't need a Quadro 6000 or RTX 3090 to fit everything in VRAM. That was until I discovered you had to be online while using it (hence the "offline dongle" for Enterprise users). .
Hmmm. I had no idea. Don't think I want to do cloud-based renders.
I don't mind playing cloud-based gaming. In fact I'm waiting for Amazon Luna to be released and I've signed up for early access. Google Stadia is similar. The future of video gaming is without consoles, and cloud based. But for 3D hobbyists I don't see the point of cloud rendering... maybe for a game studio that needs a ton of renders, or for architecture firms?
You're not rendering in the cloud with Octane. You're still using your hardware. I mean, the offline dongle's not doing the rendering, now is it? With cloud rendering, you send your job, including assets to a cloud-based render server, and you collect the completed render. You need to be online so that OTOY can confirm your licence, and apply whatever restrictions they see fit.
Not sure if it has gotten any better, but my experiments showed that octane was slower and looked less realistic out of the box rendering daz people and scenes. I am sure if I learned how to tweak the materials, and set the render settings just right it could do better, but that's even more setup time. Also, I despise these stupid online licenses. Who knows when otoy is gonna decide to charge for the plugin again, so just not worth it to learn in my book. I don't trust otoy at all lol.
...I use the term loosely to describe any software that requires you to be online throughout the session. The dongle allows enterprise licensees to bypass this requirement and work offline . If Octane only "phoned home" at start up to check your licence/registration, then let you cut the connection and render away, that would be different but as I've interpreted it from what I read on their site, is that you need to remain online while working with it.
If Octane became bundled into Daz permanently (like Iray and 3dl are), then would it even be necessary to require one to be online as Daz3D, not the individual artist, would be the licence owner.
Whenever I'm working in Daz, Carrara, or Blender, I go offline so as to have as much of my system's memory and processing resources available as I can for modelling, scene building, and rendering.
I set my default for DAZ Studio to offline.
A few times when the default was online, I was not even able to run DAZ because it could not log in. So offline is better.
I go online when I want to update metadata for a new product.
...indeed. As I understand (and have even read about here) Adobe has made changes that messed ups some people's access to their subscriptions.
As to Octane vs Iray. like many people here I have devoted a lot of time and effort to learn the ins and outs of Iray, it's lighting system, and its materials system over the last five years. I for one would be very displeased if Octane replaced it. here. I'd go back to 3DL if that happened particularly given the work people like Wowie, Parris and others have done to provide access to much of that engine's more powerful capabilities.
Alas the version of 3DL we currently have will be the last as even they (along with Renderman) have moved away from from RSL (Renderman Shader Language) to OSL (Open Shader language)
It's worth mentioning that in the December driver update, Nvidia claims a substantial speed improvement for Octane. Of course that doesn't help anyone who's looking to Octane as a way to avoid Nvidia, and really, that's the only reason I can think of for considering Octane, at all. I'd rather have fewer issues setting up a scene than have faster renders, since I can do other things while rendering, and even render overnight, while setting up requires all my attention.
I don't think DAZ would replace Iray with Octane, it would just be added as a choice within DAZ Studio render settings?
But I was just wondering if products will be coming out that use all three render engines now, as most Iray products have a 3DL version included.
Personally, I'm happy with my whole library as Iray products. I don't like switching between the 3DL and Iray, and the Iray renders look so incredible. Octane would have to either be lightning fast and as good as Iray, or ten timers better than Iray in general for me to switch over.
Totally agree with you on that.
Thanks for all the info. From what it sounds like, Octane is cumbersome to setup although it renders faster than Iray. It will only run on NVIDIA graphics cards, just like Iray. And it's a bit rough around the edges (in DAZ Studio)?
Sounds like Iray is here to stay for a while.
Maybe in 5 years we will be using a hologram render engine. Let's hope.
...check some of Sven Dullah's works over on the 3DL Render Thread. He's working with Wowie's AweShaders and turning our some pretty incredible lifelike images.
This is one I did a couple years ago where I pushed the limits of 3DL as far as I could at the time (before the AweShaders) . I didn't use Uber Environment, only Parris' IBL Master and AoA's Advanced Distant Light for the lighting. Render time was between 12 - 14 minutes at 1,500 x 1125.
I also optimised a direct copy of the scene which I all materials converted to Iray and rendered at the same size as a comparison (CPU mode as I only had a 1 GB GPU at the time) and it took between two and a half to two and three quarters hours to finish.
The only photo "cheat" is the city skyline backdrop matte (the sky is a skydome from IBL Skies). There was also geometry behind the camera that is reflected in the shelter windows as well as off camera for shadows. In all, fairly busy scene.
Looks really nice!
...TY.
In many ways I still like 3DL because lighting is a cinch compared to Iray. None of this messing around figuring out lumens, lighting temperature, ISO, apature etc.
IBL Master produces the Global illumination needed without the often painfully long render times associated with UE (which increase incredibly when there's lots of transmaps like in hair or foliage, present).
I too have spent a lot of time learing Iray, but I still moved to Cycles. I still have that knowledge and the very occasional times I use Iray - then I benefit from that knowledge. Also, much of what we learn can be applied to other render engines (physically based to physically based), although settings - of which both have a plethora of - can't be.
Most Iray products don't have a 3DL version included. Finding new relases with 3DL materials included nowadays is actually quite unusual (unfortunately for me and other 3DL users).
Producing multiple versions of the materials takes time, and most vendors seem to think that time will be better used working on other products.
Will some vendors start producing Octane materials? Probably. But I really doubt most will.
I suppose the only way to solve this dilemma is that DAZ would implement a kind of virtual shader, material and light system that can be converted on the fly in whatever render engine is used. But that would mean a high effort system design and programming. I would love to have a decent non NVida rendering option, as Apple does not have any support for whatever type of nvidia card, internally or as eGPU. But I have built my "workaround system" based on Amazon Elastic Cloud, and does it for me even with large renders.
Well, they've sort of done that, but not to/from any render engines -- they've done 3DL > Iray, and (still a WIP) Iray > Filament. It seems unlikely to me that a generic converter would be possible, although PBR engines have a lot in common.
This is the single most powerful reason to use Octane, you can support ANY graphics vendor, not just NVidia:
"Moving to Octane X on macOS Metal has been totally seamless. For the first time, all our GPU rendering in Octane can be done on our MacBook"
...as I last understood they abandoned plans for OpenCL and AMD compatibility.
There was a time when I used to relate to this. I had no idea what Iray's tonemapping settings were for or how to use them. Then, I started a YouTube channel for a writing group and found myself learning a lot about phogoraphy to mprove my video quality. I've since deleted the channel but the next time I started an Iray project everything finally clicked. I was shocked by how well I was able to translate a few months worth of photography lessons into my artwork.
Octane is incredibly powerful and I've been using it since 2013 even after the free iray in daz came along. Does it take time to learn? Or course it does, any new tool is like that. People complain that setting up matierals takes too long, and that is true at first. But once you get down how to create materials in octane, as well as building your own matierals and templates library the workflow becomes much better. Also Otoy is adding lots of cool things to octane, multirender being the most exciting thing, and their own real time renderer.
https://home.otoy.com/octanerender-2021-rndr/
Thanks. Helpful info for sure.
I've decided to not bother with Octane for now... maybe later I may be drawn in by the Sirens to the rocky shores of Octane. :)
In fact, almost wish I had not started this forum topic. It seems to have taken on a life of its own. LOL