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Iray versus Luxrender

HornetBoyHornetBoy Posts: 40
edited December 1969 in Daz Studio Discussion

As a very happy user of Luxrender for the past year (in conjunction with DS3), I thought I'd give Iray a try. Well done DAZ for including a physically based render engine, I was never particularly happy with my results using 3Delight.

I'm very impressed by the level of control afforded by Daz's implementation of Iray, but do have one initial concern in that it doesn't seem to be possible to vary individual light (or light group) intensity whilst the render is taking place. This is a feature that I use a great deal with Luxrender, allowing me to immediately see the impact of changing the balance of lighting within a scene without having to restart the render - this fine-tuning in real-time is very useful. The fact that Iray renders most scenes more quickly than Luxrender is some compensation.

Comments

  • evilded777evilded777 Posts: 2,465
    edited December 1969

    Well, you can always use the Iray draw style in the main viewport or the Aux viewport... these are live, interactive previews that you can use to tune those lights before starting a final render.

  • bobbbjmbnklbhjklbgjkhbobbbjmbnklbhjklbgjkh Posts: 41
    edited December 1969

    My experience with Luxrender/Reality 4 in both Daz and poser was much different from yours. I got few successful renders from it as it loved to lock-up and stop responding on both of my graphics workstations. While I miss the ability to fiddle with the lights while it's running, IRay is at least stable for me. It's also free. That counts for a lot. Now, if it only had a decent and comprehensive manual.

  • DrNewcensteinDrNewcenstein Posts: 816
    edited December 1969

    Pose2Lux is a free alternative to Reality (hey, a free Poser interface for a free renderer), and accesses the same features in Luxrender (real-time tweaking, etc). It's also quite stable, in my experience.

    Is there no documentation on Iray at Nvidia? I thought I saw some links there.

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,249
    edited December 1969

    bobbbjmbnklbhjklbgjkh said:
    My experience with Luxrender/Reality 4 in both Daz and poser was much different from yours. I got few successful renders from it as it loved to lock-up and stop responding on both of my graphics workstations. While I miss the ability to fiddle with the lights while it's running, IRay is at least stable for me. It's also free. That counts for a lot. Now, if it only had a decent and comprehensive manual.

    i've run LuxRender in WinXp, OS 10.6 - 10.10, Windows 7 on all different HW and not had a problem with even massive renders.
    It will work on processors that are 10 years old.
    Iray simply wont run on some early CUDA cards and even as ATI makes better cards for cheaper right now it's not an option for ATI users either.

  • BeeMKayBeeMKay Posts: 7,019
    edited December 1969

    Iray also runs on CPU just fine. I have a small graphiccard that gets knocked out by most scenes I try to render, but it works great with the CPU.

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,249
    edited December 1969

    lee_lhs said:
    Iray also runs on CPU just fine. I have a small graphiccard that gets knocked out by most scenes I try to render, but it works great with the CPU.

    I should have rephrased: Older CUDA GPU's, ATI cards users will not get to take advantage of speed gains anywhere near what the newer CUDA Nvidia cards can. All that aside I'm looking to drop a new GPU in my old rig to use this engine.

  • DrNewcensteinDrNewcenstein Posts: 816
    edited December 1969

    Is ATI not working on this type of feature for their own cards? Certainly not a freely-included rendering engine for DS, but are they even working on a similar API that can generate plugins, or even a standalone renderer that utilizes their proprietary card structure?
    They might want to explore that field.

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,249
    edited December 1969

    Newc said:
    Is ATI not working on this type of feature for their own cards? Certainly not a freely-included rendering engine for DS, but are they even working on a similar API that can generate plugins, or even a standalone renderer that utilizes their proprietary card structure?
    They might want to explore that field.

    Iray is proprietary to Nvidia, they make the rendering engine, Daz just integrates it into Studio.
    There are many 3rd party rendering solutions that already take advantage of AMD/ATI but Iray is not one of them.

  • DrNewcensteinDrNewcenstein Posts: 816
    edited December 1969

    I'm aware that Iray is Nvidia's creation. I was asking if ATI was doing something similar.

  • 0oseven0oseven Posts: 626
    edited December 1969

    Just bought Luxus for Carrara and need some pointers as its not working for me.

    I have installed LuxRender_1.4_x64_OpenCL release 31 Jan 2015

    I have "LuxRender for Carrara" pointed to the folder where LuxRender is installed.

    When I render - the render window is the Lux Render one - not the one as seen in the demo video, which is a Carrara window.
    therefore there is no real time render as the scene is changed.

    Demo Video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNJoPLQ2QNE

    Any Suggestions ?

    My system with latest nvidea drivers.
    Intel I7-4700MQ 2.4ghz -2.8ghz 8 threads
    16gb Ram
    GeForceGTX 780M

    Thanks

  • stem_athomestem_athome Posts: 518
    edited June 2015

    0oseven said:
    Any Suggestions ?

    The demo vid you link to is for "Luxcore"

    To use that, you will need to use Carrara Luxcore beta. The new / latest build can be found here:- http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/50130/P315/ (see post from SphericLabs, 10th post down on that thread)

    Post edited by stem_athome on
  • prixatprixat Posts: 1,590
    edited December 1969

    Newc said:
    Is ATI not working on this type of feature for their own cards? Certainly not a freely-included rendering engine for DS, but are they even working on a similar API that can generate plugins, or even a standalone renderer that utilizes their proprietary card structure?
    They might want to explore that field.

    That would be OpenCL.

    In terms of GPU Compute 'bang per buck' AMD is far ahead, almost twice the compute speed at half the cost of an equivalent CUDA card.
    It was the reason the bitcoin miners grabbed all the AMD 290's when they first came out.

    Adobe switched its products to OpenCL a couple of versions ago. As StratDragon says, there are plenty of renderers that use OpenCL.
    nVidia cards can run OpenCL but I wouldn't expect any nVidia software to encourage it, yet! :)

    Having got in early and established a userbase invested in the CUDA API, there's no way nVidia is going to open up that captive market till they have cards to match AMD's price/performance.

    ...even though nVidia is one of the founding members of the OpenCL initiative!

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,249
    edited December 1969

    prixat said:
    Newc said:
    Is ATI not working on this type of feature for their own cards? Certainly not a freely-included rendering engine for DS, but are they even working on a similar API that can generate plugins, or even a standalone renderer that utilizes their proprietary card structure?
    They might want to explore that field.

    That would be OpenCL.

    In terms of GPU Compute 'bang per buck' AMD is far ahead, almost twice the compute speed at half the cost of an equivalent CUDA card.
    It was the reason the bitcoin miners grabbed all the AMD 290's when they first came out.

    Adobe switched its products to OpenCL a couple of versions ago. As StratDragon says, there are plenty of renderers that use OpenCL.
    nVidia cards can run OpenCL but I wouldn't expect any nVidia software to encourage it, yet! :)

    Having got in early and established a userbase invested in the CUDA API, there's no way nVidia is going to open up that captive market till they have cards to match AMD's price/performance.

    ...even though nVidia is one of the founding members of the OpenCL initiative!

    and OpenCL is apparently FUBAR on Yosemite since Apple decided they don't want ATI or Nvidia writing code for their OS
    http://preta3d.com/os-x-users-unite/
    http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2015-May/045367.html

  • prixatprixat Posts: 1,590
    edited December 1969

    StratDragon said:
    and OpenCL is apparently FUBAR on Yosemite since Apple decided they don't want ATI or Nvidia writing code for their OS

    ...so technically, isn't it Apple that is FUBAR? ;-P

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,249
    edited December 1969

    prixat said:
    StratDragon said:
    and OpenCL is apparently FUBAR on Yosemite since Apple decided they don't want ATI or Nvidia writing code for their OS

    ...so technically, isn't it Apple that is FUBAR? ;-P

    Yes, everyone elses tools are fine until Yosemite comes into the mix.

  • cain-xcain-x Posts: 195
    edited December 1969

    What Iray is missing is a standalone render engine like 3Delight and LuxRender standalone. At least I can offload my rendering to my beefy servers. Right now I have a shared NAS with all of my content and my server is running DAZ Studio only for Iray rendering while I work on my workstation. Not very efficient but it gets the job done.

    I have access to tens of supermicro servers with dual K20 and K80 Tesla cards in the cloud... if only Iray had a standalone renderer...

    The hope is to be able to export animations from DAZ and have it render on the networked machines. I have a script which exports RIB files frame by frame and is put into a drop folder which "ingests" these RIB files and pumps out rendered images on my server running 3Delight standalone via batch script. Its based off of mcasual's script but highly customized for my setup.

  • 0oseven0oseven Posts: 626
    edited December 1969

    Steve athome said:
    0oseven said:
    Any Suggestions ?

    The demo vid you link to is for "Luxcore"

    To use that, you will need to use Carrara Luxcore beta. The new / latest build can be found here:- http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/50130/P315/ (see post from SphericLabs, 10th post down on that thread)

    Thanks for the pointer which I downloaded and being .dat .mcx files I copied to Carrara/extensions . Right ?
    Unfortunately still not getting that real time render window.
    Any more pointers ?

    Thanks again

  • stem_athomestem_athome Posts: 518
    edited December 1969

    0oseven said:
    Thanks for the pointer which I downloaded and being .dat .mcx files I copied to Carrara/extensions . Right ?
    Unfortunately still not getting that real time render window.

    Did you first uninstall "Luxus"?

    After copy Luxuscore files to Carrara extensions folder.
    In Carrara Assemble room, use "Edit > Luxcore Config" to select Lux render engine and devices(hardware) to use.
    Use "Edit > Luxcore IPR" for real-time render window.

  • stem_athomestem_athome Posts: 518
    edited December 1969

    ffzero58 said:
    What Iray is missing is a standalone render engine like 3Delight and LuxRender standalone.

    Mental Ray standalone. (which includes iray)

  • solarviewsolarview Posts: 272
    edited December 1969

    evilded777 said:
    Well, you can always use the Iray draw style in the main viewport or the Aux viewport... these are live, interactive previews that you can use to tune those lights before starting a final render.

    I've been using Reality/Lux, and really like the same feature mention by the OP. Where is this "draw style" you've mentioned. And does it work with spot rendering?

  • evilded777evilded777 Posts: 2,465
    edited December 1969

    Draw Style is at the top of your Viewport... Its one of the drop down boxes, where you can choose from Texture Shaded, Lit Wireframe, etc. its right near the Camera drop down.

    The last one in the list should be Nvidia Iray.

  • 0oseven0oseven Posts: 626
    edited December 1969

    Steve Acorn said " Did you first uninstall “Luxus”?

    After copy Luxuscore files to Carrara extensions folder.
    In Carrara Assemble room, use “Edit > Luxcore Config” to select Lux render engine and devices(hardware) to use.
    Use “Edit > Luxcore IPR” for real-time render window.

    Thanks Steve - no I hadn't uninstalled Luxus. Followed your advice with some limited success and will persist.
    Really think the PDF guide that comes with the Carrara Plugin should be updated.
    Thanks again - appreciate your input.

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