Octane plugin
NW316
Posts: 79
Searching the forum regarding the Octane Render plugin for DAZ and don't find a definitive response. I know it's faster than LUX/Reality but not as quality. My experience with Reality has not been favorable. Curious what others feel about Octane vs. 3Delight as it is a significant investment.
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It IS a lot of money, especially if you add in the additional cost of a plug-in (to allow simple scene transfer into Octane from DS, Poser, Carrara, Maya, etc., (not sure off the top of my head how mnay there are available ... for a price!) but the quality is very good. Additionally you should be aware that you'll need a CUDA-compliant (essentially an nVidia graphics card) and that, for now, you will be limited by how much VRAM that card has.
I feel the quality is better than Luxrender, similar to maxwell and under Vray. with all being unbiased renderers (3delight is biased). As for speed, it's not much faster than luxrender and that is very dependent on hardware since it needs a powerful Nvidia vidcard to work.
If we knew what problems you are having with reality/Lux, we can make a better recommendation. the ease of use, ability to edit shaders/textures and overall scene setup is much more comprehensive with reality to Luxrender than the plugin for Octane IMO.
Thanks for the posts!
Right now the cost is $467.21 US - including the DAZ plugin. My nVidia is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti which I believe has 2GB VRAM. I'm on a Intel Core i5-4430 CPU @ 3.00GHz, 64 bit Operating System, with 28 GB of RAM, using Windows 8.1, 64 bit.
My main problem with Reality was losing file info such as scene objects and assets along with textures which were too confusing to unravel.
Well with that card you can run octane no problem.
I don't know if Octane is for you seeing the issues you had with Reality/Luxrender. I have been using reality and Luxrender for years and don't have the issues you seem to be having. i also know that Octane has some limitations with the amount/textures used and might have some of the same issues you seem to have problems unraveling.
Ok, thanks! I will wait on it for awhile. I've been going back to an older version of 3D Max, Carrara, Poser but think I'll stick with the 3Delight for now.
If i had never discovered reality and Luxrender, i would still be rendering in Carrara, it's lighting is far superior and easier to set up than DS in my experience. I have seen some great renders from DS only, but they are few and far between and have yet to see any 3rd party, out of the box, canned lights that would give those results. I do miss Vray, but just can't justify the price anymore and texture/shader set up was a real pain.
Try the standalone and Poser demos
I did and ended up buying both the DAZ studio with standalone and carrara plugins!!!
Only way I will ever render stuff from DAZ studio as 3Delight was as slow as mollasses for me, Octane I can see right away how it is going to look and for animation often is almost realtime rendering.
No the renderman/3delight shaders useless and on my GTX760 I do have texture limits
but can composite after if needed or resize textures for unimportant things, scene fillers etc
I soon learn which things work or not, Stonemason anything is great Jack Tomalin is induvidual texture map nuts and invaribly need redoing!!!
On JT's sets I end up loading them untextured and using a seamless tile on all the 50 or so induvidually mapped walls!!!
He also has identical shared maps for lights and stuff you can re-use that oddly have diff names so waste space.
A lot of it depends on what you want to do (the type and complexity of your renders), and how comfortable you are with editing shaders (a skill that IMHO is very important in the long run, but that many people avoid).
3Delight is the easiest to use, because most of the products here are set-up to use 3Delight shaders. You can get very good renders with little or no shader modification. But, many things, like trans-mapped textures, can be extremely slow without using special techniques that reduce the quality of the render to incrase the speed (sometimes the render quality is virtually impossible to see, and sometimes very obvious). Also, keep in mind that even though 3Delight comes free with DS, it's a rendering powerhouse that has been used in/on Hollywood productions and is capable of outstanding results with very good render speeds.
Reality would be the next choice for an almost load and render solution. Paolo has done a lot of work to get very good translations of DS materials to Lux materials, but like using any external render engine, there will be instances when the shaders either can't be converted, or the conversion isn't as good as you would like. So learning how to set up materials can be a big plus. Also, rendering in Lux can be quite slow, but the results are often worth the wait. Experiencing problems like you mentioned with plugins/external render engines are not unheard of, and to be expected (though personally I haven't experienced the issues you mentioned). Reality 4 is new, so there are no doubt some kinks to be worked out, but every plugin/external render application I have ever used has limitations and difficulties that aren't encountered with the internal render engine that ships with the application. So there is always a bit of a learning curve, some trial and error, and some work arounds associated with using external render engines.
Octane is by far my favorite renderer! I have both the Carrara and the DS plugins for Octane. I find it much easier and faster to get renders I'm happy with from Octane than any other render engine I have used. But, IMHO, you will need to learn the shader system to get the most out of Octane. For me, it was actually quite easy to learn, and the LiveDB materials/shaders can help a great deal in getting the results you want. The speed of Octane vs Lux is literally night and day. I'm using a laptop with a Geforec 670M (about the same as a Geforce 560 on a desktop - only a bit slower) and am quite happy with the performance. With only 2Gb of RAM you will be a bit limited on how complex your scenes can be, because all of your data (textures and geometry) will need to fit into the RAM on your GPU. I have 3Gb on my GPU, and most of my renders take between 2-3Gb, but if your careful and manage your textures (do fairly "simple" scenes, ot composite together in post), you could still enjoy Octane a great deal.
I would echo what Wendy suggested, download the demo(s) and give Ocatne a test run. Unfortunately there isn't a demo version available for DS, but there are demo versions for Poser and Carrara 8.x, or you can exprot from DS to .obj, and import that into the stand alone version of Octane. I started with the Poser Demo and was immediately hooked. There is a lot of focus on the render speed of Octane, which compared to LuxRender is quite impressive. For me the greatest advantage is the near real time feedback I get when changing lighting or shaders. This has helped me to improve the quality of my renders a great deal, while greatly reducing the time needed to set up the render. So for me, my improved work flow plus the improved render speed has made Octane one of the best investments I have made in 3D (IMHO), and even with the cost of Octane, I haven't had one bit of buyers remorse.
I do think it is very important to give Octane a test drive before purchasing, because not everyone likes the same things.
One other thing on the horizon that you should be aware of is LuxCore (LuxRender 2?). SphericLabs is developing a plugin for Carrara (LuxusCore) with it (see the thread here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/50130/) and it is significantly faster than LuxRender 1.4. Not only is CPU only rendering significantly faster, but GPU only rendering supports the same materials as the CPU version (unlike SLG in 1.4, which is very limited). Of course this doesn't address the issues your having with Reality 4/Lux, but I would guess that Reality will support LuxCore after it comes out of Beta, and there will probably be a LuxusCore for DS as well.
Note though, even with the speed improvements of LuxCore compared to LuxRender, On my system, Octane still blows the doors off of LuxCore. However the IPR feature of LuxusCore for Carrara brings the same improvement in workflow that Octane does for Carrara. So, IMHO, there is still a big advantage to using LuxusCore compared to Carraras internal renderer.
One final note, you should take a quick look at my galleries (links in my sig line below). This will provide you with some valuable information to help evaluate my comments above much better, such as :
*What type of renders I do (compared to what you like/want to do)
*The quality of my work compared to your work or what you would like to accomplish (maybe my work isn't even close to what you want, possibly making some my statements a bit irrelevant)
*Comparison of renders done by one person using DS/3Delight, DS/Octane. DS/Reality/Lux, DS/Luxus/Lux, Carrara, and Carrara/Octane ( also Poser/Firefly and Poser/Reality/Lux).
I'm a Mac user and I believe there is no Octane plugin for DAZ Studio for OS X. Otherwise, I'd love to try it and compare speeds, quality, etc.
I am comfortable with Reality 2.5 but development has stopped on that and Reality 4 is buggy at the moment. So much so that I have uninstalled R4 and returned to 2.5 until all the kinks are ironed out. Even then, I have discovered that SSS in Luxrender is a sloooow affair - nasty red blotches and fireflies are a feature of my SSS renders (both in R4 and Luxus) and, despite tons of advice on the Reality forum, I have to accept that SSS renders just take longer to cook. Renders taking up to 2 or 3 hours (I often use the Network render feature of Luxrender to speed things up) are all I can tolerate with my workflow so it may be that R2.5 (or R4 with SSS turned off) is my way forward.
As for 3Delight - I'm sorry, I know that it is used in the movie industry to great effect but when I browse through the galleries on DeviantArt I have yet to see any render that matches Luxrender. 3Delight renders shout CGI to me - the skin looks like plastic or the contrast is too sharp or ... well, I don't have a professional eye to determine what the problem is but, subjectively, they just look unnatural.
Another option I have considered is using the mcjTeleblender script to export scenes to Blender and then render using Cycles (or Luxrender) but I an not convinced this will have any advantages over Reality or Luxus. By the way, is SphericLabs developing that LuxCore plugin for DAZ Studio too? That might be my way forward eventually.
I think that's because most DS users are still using the default shaders, which is woefully inadequate. Not to mention, most don't seem to use things like linear workflow and proper materials setup.
The render below is purely done in DS 4.7 and 3delight, though obviously not with the default shaders.
If you want to stay with Lux Render then try out Luxus. The main difference is that Luxus is integrated into the DS UI and it requires some more knowledge of lux materials.
For 3Delight, there are many ways to get good results out of it but it depends on the style you want to achive. I personly use 3Delight cause i can get good results faster then LuxRunder and I am not aiming for realistic everything anyways.
That is certainly better than most that I've seen online. I used 3Delight for a couple of years before discovering Luxrender but, even with purchased lights and shaders, I was never able to get satisfactory results. I would really appreciate a good tutorial but if getting good results means paying for lots of expensive add-ons just to reach something close to Luxrender - I can't really justify the expense.
I have tried Luxus and I still want to do more with it but I find it difficult to get good results without hours of tinkering with the materials. To give Paolo his due, Reality conversions tend to be more accurate, in my experience. I still need to tinker a bit in Reality but not as much as Luxus. Perhaps when I have more experience (or if Spheric gets his Eluxir tool compatible with Mac), I might get better results.
As for the integrated UI - I'm not sure which I prefer. I guess it is what you get used to. Saving material presets in Luxus has a big advantage over the Reality way, though.
All you need is right here in the store.
To enable linear workflow in DAZ Studio, you will need to enable gamma correction in the renderer's options and change the output gamma to 2.2.
You will need omnifreaker's UberSurface2 shaders, which employs Oren Nayar Diffuse and much more robust specular, complete with fresnel attenuation.
http://www.daz3d.com/ubersurface2-layered-shader-for-daz-studio
Then you just need to setup your materials and lights with physically plausible settings in mind.
The hair above is Lumina Hair MATs, which is a freebie MATs using US2 that's was released during the PA Christmas a few weeks ago.
http://www.daz3d.com/lumina-hair-mats
The texture set is V4 Elite Amy, but the MATs comes from Photo Studio Kit 2. I did play with the iris so it's not the default values. The light set is a tweaked version of the lights included in the set, mainly to have a very diffuse light setup because I don't want to use UE2 and HDRI maps.
Again: "physically palusible"??
The texture set is V4 Elite Amy, but the MATs comes from Photo Studio Kit 2. I did play with the iris so it's not the default values. The light set is a tweaked version of the lights included in the set, mainly to have a very diffuse light setup because I don't want to use UE2 and HDRI maps.
I have lots of skins, characters, clothes, etc., but few sets of lights or shaders - not that I would know how to use them.
wowie is on target and along with what Kettu and others have posted in the 3Delight Surface Shader thread that wancow started, there is
much possible in 3Delight. Light and shaders/textures control much of what you render in any program anyway.
Some wowie tests with area lights that rendered in around a minute
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21611/P600/#655672
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21611/P600/#656503
An experiment using Kettu's 3Delight render script for GI and modified lights for Firery Genesis... Kettu's Radium Fiery Genesis with Gamma set at 2.2… Rendered in 6 minutes 45.19 seconds, AMD 8350 8 core/16GB Ram using Kettu’s lighting setup with Dz Lights, and UE2 Bounce GI and Kettu’s GI sphere. If I had changed the hair and outfit, it probably would look better, but it's good for comparing with the Fiery Genesis everyone has. The skin and eyes to me rival what I've seen out of the Unbiased render engines.
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And here's one using wowie's lights from the first kit here at DAZ also using wowie's SSS shader from that kit and Mec4D's Vampire Huntress on a modified Olympia 6. Rendered in about a minute! AMD 8350 8 core 16 GB Ram This is 3Delight in DAZ Studio, regular REYES render.
And another done in DAZ Studio, rendered in about a minute using the Abandoned Factory and wowie's stuff combined with Aako's lights for Abandoned Factory, along with the above character and Mec4D's Vampire Huntress. Nothing fancy. Just loaded, composed and rendered.
I suppose it is too much to hope for but I'd really like to see a direct comparison of the same scene rendered in 3Delight and Luxrender by someone who knows both products well. I'm guessing that people go off in one direction or the other as I have done with Luxrender.
Your examples are excellent compared to other 3Delight renders I've browsed but I have to say that they still don't look natural to me - they look like 3D graphics. Perhaps that's just my subjectivity. There's an excellent Adult Comic (as in erotic) artist called Erogenesis who does wonders with Poser and hates Luxrender. I think he achieves remarkable quality but he's making comics, not seeking photorealism. That's the point Mattymanx was making earlier, I think - horses for courses, as they say.
Actually, all I'm looking for is that natural look, it doesn't need to be perfect as in a 3-day render in Lux.
Thanks, marble! wowie's area lights might be better for what you want to see. I think that set hasn't been released yet, but wowie was using them in a previous render. You probably are looking for more diffused light. I wasn't as I was going for speed in those renders. I think 3Delight can deliver, though, from what I've seen elsewhere.
Here's some where wowie was testing with fake HDRI and some shaders for the vehicle.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21611/P750/#706767
And a fake sun/sky test:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21611/P750/#710896
The downside for unbiased is animation (I can't afford a bunch of Tesla cards). You can do it using the direct light kernel in Octane, but then it comes out looking like 3Delight anyway.
Basically, they're more accurate models of how surfaces interact with light. The more accurate the model, the closer you can get to real life materials.
Sorry, physically plausible is a general term that means materials should be set up just as they are in real life.
For instance, it has to have energy conservation, which means you can't have materials that reflect more light than it receives. In practice, this means keeping diffuse strength to something like grey (an RGB value of 160,160,160) at 100%. There's some leeway for the value, since textures will dim the brightness a bit, but generally you can never go above 200,200,200. Hacks like using ambient color/strength is a definite no, simply because most things don't actually emit light.
In such a setup, pure white or an RGB value of 255,255,255 is not possible, because at those values you're seeing the light directly - ie. like staring into a camera flash light. Most things we see in real life actually only reflects about 40% light, though some exception does exist (white snow is 80% reflective).
Knowing an objec'ts reflectivity makes it possible to establish a white point. and figure out the maximum intensity for your lights.
You can do this by creating a sphere and change the diffuse to the above settings. Make sure specular, ambient and reflection are disabled. Then create a light and Increase the intensity until the surface has a color of around 240,240,240 (or 255,255,255) when viewed in an image viewer. Thanks to IPR, you can now do this more easily. Just set the background color to the above values and increase the light's intensity until the objec'ts color is very close to the background color.
The final intensity you'll get is the total maximum intensity you can use for lights. Obviously, if you use a spotlight and an ambient light, the total intensity will have to be split between the two (assuming they're the same color).
With regard to speed comparisons, while the render time might be shorter for 3Delight, I wonder how much time is taken setting up lights, shaders, etc. At least with Luxrender, you can see any obvious problems after only a couple of minutes. The grainy image is good enough to show what needs tweaking. And generally, setting up lights just means adding a couple of mesh lights and pointing them at your subject. Tweaking of camera and light settings can be done in real time, while the render is happening.
But with 3Delight, you have to wait for the render to finish before deciding whether something needs to be changed. A few of these trials and errors will make the total time at least as slow as Luxrender and probably a lot more frustrating. Again, with Luxrender, I can start working on the next scene in DAZ Studio while the render continues in another window. I'm not sure whether the standalone 3Delight engine allows a render to continue as a separate process from DAZ Studio.
That may be true pre 4.7, but with interactive preview render you can actually preview a lot of stuff. In fact, the render I posted before is actually an IPR render. Takes about 2 minutes to finish and you can preview stuff in about 30 seconds (since SSS is still precomputed). Once we moved to raytraced SSS, there's should be no more time spent on precompute.
Thanks for reminding me ... not being a regular user of 3Delight I had forgotten about IPR. :)
marble, pre-IPR, the old way to see what you were getting was to render a smaller size image with lower quality settings. It would render fairly fast. Then came Progressive which was faster, and now IPR. I have to say I have not tweaked a lot other than when I get noise in a render and then it's just experimenting with settings. I have to install 4.7 yet and hope to give it a whirl this week as I have some time coming.
3Delight did some good speed tweaks with its ray tracer a few versions back and we have had the more recent versions of 3Delight, with more tweaks, since DAZ Studio 4.6.
Could anyone point me to a decent tutorial? It is a long time (several years) since I rendered anything (except for toon renders) in 3Delight. Luxrender is not without its problems and the same goes for Reality (especially the new Reality 4). So it is good to have an alternative toolbox. I have an idea that some renders would be more suited to 3Delight but I have no clue as to how to get the best out of it.
Also, does anyone use the standalone 3Delight engine which is free from the developer?
HOW to use 3Delight Stand Alone Render Engine (tutorial) by wancow (it's a couple years old so there could be changes)
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/17016/
Learning UberEnvironment 2 Return To Topic by adamr001 (important if you want to do more realistic style renders - it's older but I think should still be fine for UE2)
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/5320/
Render Profiles for DAZ Studio 4.5 by adamr001
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/16085/ (some render setting tips - again some may have changed, but still mostly the same)
Snow's Tips #1 - DAZ Studio Render Settings
http://snowsultan.deviantart.com/art/Snow-s-Tips-1-DAZ-Studio-Render-Settings-425479044 (only a year old tute)
The main reason even beginning Lux and Octane renders tend to look better is that, as unbiased renderers, they automatically simulate light bouncing. Poser also has an option to simulate it that is very easy to use. Studio has one, but it is A: hard to find, and B: in decided need of an update. It is in UberEnironment 2 under the option GI.
Below are 2 renders. The V4 one uses the Daz Default shader and this http://www.sharecg.com/v/78049/view/21/DAZ-Studio/GI-Lighting lighting setup exactly. The Mei Lin one uses her default textures and a slightly tweaked version of the same light setup (I added a rim light and lowered the values of the lights to make up for the extra light bouncing around).
*edit* The main difference between Unbiased renderers and this option is consevation of energy/light decay. In daz the light that bounces off is the same strength it hits, which is not how physical light works.
I would say that's incorrect. Energy conservation isn't related to biased or unbiased. A lot of biased renderers employ energy conservation BRDFs. Put another way, if you use Octane's direct lighting and AO, which is clearly biased, the materials will still honor energy conservation.
I should've been clearer that I was specifying Studio (uberEnvironment's) GI. Where the light definitely bounces off at the same strength it enters whatever the shader. In studio if you set the bounces to more than one, the scene gets significantly brighter, you set it to something like 8 and its just white. In Lux (as far as I remember) bounces are counted until the photon has no strength left. Blender operates the same, but you can set a max limit on how many bounces to calculate. I've tested with multiple shaders, and as far as I can tell none of them take how much light is absorbed into account.