Is 3Delight doomed?
vrba79
Posts: 1,398
I keep seeing an increasing number of products that don't even feature 3Delight material presets. Coupled with the fact that much beloved 3Delight shaders like PWtoon have vanished from the store completely, it gives me the uneasy feeling that IRAY is going to be the only rendering engine Daz 5 supports. Can anyone on the inside confirm or deny? Is photorealism really going to be all there is for us?
Post edited by vrba79 on
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Comments
No, Iray won't be the only rendering engine Daz 5 supports.
...
You forgot about Filament, but then don't we all?
Yeah Filament does just kinda exist. I still don't understand what it actually is for. Its absolute pants at transparencies.
I'm hoping Daz3D does keep 3Delight around. For people without a powerful Nvidia card, or those of us who primarily work in NPR renders, Iray just isn't it.
-https://github.com/google/filament
It's basically something Google made for Android phones, and I suspect Daz3D implemented it to have something to compete with Blender's Eevee. If so, uh...Daz3D lost that competition.
Truth be told, I think 3Delight is dead. Their website hasn't been updated since 2018, and I remember hearing the codebase went through major changes that'd render most 3Delight scripts useless if Daz3D upgraded.
If you have no interest in Iray, why not try Blender? Creating NPR shaders is pretty easy with a simple color ramp node in the Shader Editor.
3DL is Not dead:
https://documentation.3delightcloud.com/display/3DSP/Changelog
*The Apple M1 timing was obtained by running the benchmark on a Mac mini through Rosetta 2. A native version of 3Delight will be available sometime in 2021 and one should expect a speed improvement between 20% to 70%. Since the M1 CPU is not sold separately, its cost for comparison was marked at 1/3rd of the price of the Mac mini. For the cost+ table, the actual cost of the Mac mini was used.
The above quote taken from the following page on their website:
https://www.3delight.com/page/features/2020-10-06-CPUbenchmark
- Greg
I didn't realize their newsfeed went from right to left, since the rightmost one dicusses features due at the end of 2018.
I had the same concerns about 3DL in DS going bye-bye back in 2015 after Iray came out, and here we are 6+ years later. There's no guarantee, though.
- Greg
My fears would be lessened if IRAY wasn't just smashed down my throat in all new products. If they ditch 3DL, I'll have no choice but to ditch them for Poser.
For most people, the introduction of Iray in DS has been a game changer. We're not privy to the licensing costs or maintenance costs associated with keeping 3DL in DS. We also don't know how many users actually render in 3DL, either. After all, they are running a business.
With any luck, we'll find out soon enough whether or not 3DL will make it into DS5. AFAIK, current versions of 3DL mean OSL not RSL, too.
In any event, back up those installers!
- Greg
iray was a gamechanger until cryptomining
most people could afford gaming rigs as opposed to the ones with powerful CPU processing needed for 3Delight and most other render engines
iClone users were the only ones who were buying DAZ content that were excited about gaming rigs
the Octane came along and a few more got excited
finally iray arrived and everyone was buying gaming rigs which were readilly available and cheaper due to demand from of course gamers
Then ...Cryptomining ...
Yeah, backing them up is probably a good idea.
If not 3DL, I hope they at least include something for those of us who don't enjoy working with PBR. It just feels reductive to be told "Nah, PBR engines is ALL you get!"
GPU based render engines certainly can be NPR
iClone has those toon filters and Octane does too
is up to Nvidia and subsequently DAZ if iray gets an NPR mode
Oh Cryptomining. If you ever want me to choose violence, tell me you're into cryptomining.
Check out the bottom of the left hand column on page 1, and the line halfway down page 2 in this document:
https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/design-visualization/documents/provis-iray-features-pdf-1148708-final.pdf
Also, there is this back in April of 2020:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5534296/#Comment_5534296
- Greg
Well that's something to look forward too. It's a glimmer of hope at the very least!
I'll be honest, this has really been getting me down.
I dont remember when last time 3Delight in DAZ Studio getting feature updates . Anyone have post link about those update news ?
As fellow DAZ NPR fans , i can feel your concerns . And from my experiences using different Toon Shader from another apps ( MAX- Vue - CInema 4d - Blender) , I can vouch that pwToon and DAZ studio combo is hard to beat in term of easy to use . Especially if we`re dealling with DAZ figures or props which have tons of surfaces/sub materials .
Of course there always tricks to make it work or even give you much more better outcome in another apps, but still... I doubt that will be easy to setup . Poser maybe come close and in some cases offer more features for NPR style but as everyone pointed out using newer Genesis generations in there will be challenge for us .
I can only hope someone develops a feature rich, user-friendly analog of PWToon for Iray. Its a long shot as people seem just fine with the direction this is all going.
I am surprised they removed the PWToon and PW Shader bundles. No one must be buying those products anymore. Given the Filament development efforts they need to do is have iRay autoconverted to PBR like 3DL gets autoconverted to iRay so that works nicely with Filament, at least to EEVEE type realism. I like the new human PBR shaders in DAZ products better than the old iRay shaders. Filament can run on Intel and AMD integrated GPUs which iRay can't do. They could even publish DAZ Studio with relative ease to Macs, Chromebooks, and even the beefier iOS and Android tablets eventually if they wanted.
...I and others hope that won't be the case as 3DL allows for a far more stylistic choices, often "in render" without needing postwork thans to plugins like PW Ghost, PWToon, and others. Filament is limited to the viewport scale whereas 3DL can be set to reader in any size and aspect ratio just like Iray. Yes it's old but it still works and does not need an expensive (particularly these days) GPU to not have to deal with glacial render times. I rendered a reasonably complex scene in 3DL that took about 14 minutes whereas the same one, converted to Iray, took 2 to 3 hours to complete on the CPU (didn't have a GPU that could handle rendering at the time).
I thought I was the last holdout for Iray, I refused to give up Lux. When I did start using Iray and was able to preview using CPU I realized this was the most efficient rendering engine for DS I had ever used. I ended up buying an NVIDA GPU and despite the fact it's not enough to render my scenes on its own because it's a midrange card it does let me preview surfaces before I commit to renders, and the previews are visible in a few seconds. It's a fantastic rendering solution for DS, where the more powerful 3DL features are not available in DS to not overcomplicate rendering. I no longer need 3DL or Lux, even without an Nvidia card Iray integration and the surface library availability from Nvida (free BTW) make it a far superior platform.
You may want to take another peek at Filament, if size was a major factor for you. When you render, you set the drawstyle as "Filament" and in your render options you select "Viewport" but that only tells D|S to use whatever the engine is being used in the Viewport, not the size of your render; you also set your render size, series of images, etc. It scales the same way iRay, 3DL or OpenGL do.
-- Walt Sterdan
Edited to fix a gazillion typos... there's probably more...
....from, what I gathered in discussions, it doesn't render to a separate window. .Also not as impressed with the quality compared to Iray and 3DL. Plus needs a couple plugins to do what the other two are already capable of. If I was into animation I could see using it.
There are at least the RSSY Iray to 3Delight Converter And Merchant Resource and RSSY 3Delight to Iray Converter utilities that are immensely helpful to have on hand.
I've also preferred the 3Delight rendering in that it's so much faster, but there are considerable drawbacks to that engine: it crap for getting glows, illuminations, and objects with their own emissions values, where IRAY gets you that, but at the enormous cost of ultraslow rendering. So, where those glows and emission are important, I have to use IRAY for them. Also, with so many more products are locked into one or the other, depending upon their ages--older stuff are almost exclusively 3DL while the newest products are almost exclusively IRAY, while there was a transistion period where products were supported in both but had substantial and inconsistent labels of which MATS were for which engine. Plus, there's the royal pain in the ass if you make a scene where there's a mix of 3DL & IRAY stuff scattered about.
Those converters have been lifesavers for me as they'll automatically go through, identify whicheverMATs need converting, and BOOM, either everything is 3DL or everything is IRAY, depending on your perference! WELL WORTH THEIR PRICES!!
it most certainly does.
I often accidently do a Filament render to a new window when I forget to check image series
As Wendy's pointed out, it does render to a separate window (it works the same as every other rendering engine in D|S), but as you say, it's not iRay-quality, and it's exceptional for animation. I see it as a "super OpenGL", just as fast, doesn't really uses GPUs so it runs super-fast even on older, low-end machines, and supports transparency and IBL lighting, among other things. I've been testing it on my older, hobby iMac (2012) and for what I like to do, I find it impressive, but I probably won't go whole hog with it until it's available on the Mac.
-- Walt Sterdan
Yeah, I agree Cryptomining has destroyed Iray rendering. I like Iray and I have the hardware to utilize it but how many people can say the same? I'm not bragging! My point is that it makes more business sense to keep multiple rendering avenues open for their (DAZ) customers if they can't afford a $3000 dollar nvidia GPU to create 2D stills. Oh by the way for the animation community iclone 8 is on the way and the animation tools look great! They have a function that has a character just wander in a area that you designate and it looks so easy to animate a crowd with just this tool. I just hate that Iclone too has started leaning towards Iray. As sugested by someone in this post I would give Blender a serious look and use the daz to blender bridge to move you models over to Blender and Render in Cycles or if you like to animate try EVEE. They both work great without a expensive Nvidia GPU.