Is 3Delight dead for G3? G8?
Drogo Nazhur
Posts: 1,155
in The Commons
G2 and earlier renders really quickly in 3Delight. But I tried rendering one G3M character in 3Delight and after 3 hours of rendering, all I saw was one eye and part of the forehead. With Iray, the entire image was done in less than ten minutes.
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The speed of 3Delight is going to vary widely depending on your lighting, the render size, sample size and so on. If you have a very low shading rate, for example, this will greatly slow render speed since it has to do more work. If you can post details of your render settings and light setup, it might help us figure out what the issue could be.
For what it's worth, out of the box render with G3F using a simple directional light took less than a minute to complete at 2000x1400 size in 3DL with a GeForce 1060.
Did the scene use 3DL textures and lighting, or were either iRay? I'm not noticing any slowdown with G3 or G8 characters in 3Delight when ;nothing is optimized for iRay.
-- Walt Sterdan
The first character is G2M and rendered in 3Delight in a few short minutes. The second character is G3M and after 3 hours of rendering in 3Delight, I saw ONE eyeball and part of the forehead. But in Iray he rendered in about ten minutes as you see in the image. I had no lighting or background. I went with the defaults.
As a character maker.....for me 3 delight is dead.
It wont give near as nice results as Iray, and there are enough converters in the marketplace to appease those who really want 3Delight
I think 3DL for photorealistic(ish) renders is pretty dead.
But I kinda wish creators would rediscover it for cell-shading and other non-photorealistic rendering.
3Delight slowing to a stop around the head and Iray taking a few minutes sounds a lot like high resolution transparency maps for the hair and eyelashes, and raytraced shadows. I'd check the size of the image files. Also possible that the iray materials are defaulting with things like raytraced reflections, which also tends to slow down 3delight.
More likely, if it's on first hitting part of the HD figure, it's calculating the SSS volume the first time it is needed. Test by starting from the bottom, or turning the figure on its head.
As much as I love 3Delight, I prefer the Reality engine. Hair doesn't seem to be a pain in the butt in Reality, like it is in 3Delight.
...indeed there are a number of factors. Transmaps (like hair or foliage) involved affects render speed. As mentioned SSS affects render speed. Reflections affect render speed. Uber Environment affects render speed. CPU core count and clock affects render speed, Available memory, memory channels, and memory clock can also affect render speed.
The one component that doesn't come into play during 3DL rendering is the GPU.
The scene below with three G3 and one G2 figure, with SSS, lots of transmaps, reflections, and GI (using IBL Master instead of UE) took about 14 min to render in 3DL at 1,500 x 1,125 on a 4 core/8 thread 2.9 GHz i7.
I find you have to convert the Iray shaders to RSL. And not just the figure, but the eyelashes, eyebrows if you're using fibermesh, and the hair. If that's too slow, I'll strip out reflection maps, displacement maps, bump maps, etc, since I'm not doing photo realism.
I'm suprised that nobody has asked this yet but... which version of DAZ Studio are you using? It's not uncommon for older features to stop or lessen support of older features as new versions of the software introduced, even if there was an established base of products. In fact, this is pretty much the entire model that the evil empire that is Apple is now built on, to the point where they've been proven to be intentionally making their older products less effective to encourage their customers to upgrade to the new models and buy new accessories. Given that the changes and slowdowns in Iray have been well documented in these forums, at least in part due to changes in Iray itself, and that DAZ did that whole really bizarre thing where they introduced their own render engine (even though that was probably the one thing that no one was asking for,) it wouldn't surprise me to learn that studio's integration of 3DL is encountering similar issues. I can't check that for myself, as I stopped upgrading with DS 4.12 and have yet to see anything introduced since that makes me want to risk a smoothly running system. Also, since you didn't mention, which lighting system are you using? Are seeing the same issues with Age Of Armor Advanced Lights as with the default Uberenvironment stuff? Or are you using one of the aftermarket systems that lets you use HDRs? I can easily see one of those having issues given the mess with the Lightdome products that occured when DS switched from the 3.0s to the 4s, and DAZ may not even be aware of it yet.
I'm running DAZ 4.16 and as far as lighting, I'm going with whatever the default is. I just added the characters and did nothing with the lights.
Okay. So you're lighting it with the lights that come on by default and nothing else? That could be the problem. The default light in 4.12 is an HDRI, which 3DL doesn't use except with an aftermarket product, and I would assume that 4.16 is probably the same, so 3DL could be struggling to get enough light. Are you monitoring in NVDIA Iray or Texture Shaded mode, and if the latter are you seeing any white arrows indicating lighting direction? If not, try going up to CREATE, open the column and then click ADD DISTANT LIGHT and see if that speeds things up.
At this point, hopefully, someone who's using/has used your DS version can step in and add advice, as I'm guestimating all this.
...I would run a test with the same scene in 4.16 but the file was lost a coupler years ago when the HDD died.
It originally was rendered in Daz 4.10.