Alternatives to iRay in 2024
Gen3dx
Posts: 21
Hi, I have been using DS now for just over a year and have created some very nice results with Genesis 8 figures using the in-built iRay renderer with my RTX3090.
I recently began looking at alternatives to iRay for either improved realism, or for more artistic or cartoony type renders.
My first stop was Octane Render, but after 2 hours of frustration have given up as it doesn't seem to install easily/properly and the textures look a mess. A look at their message boards seem to indicate that the plugin for Daz isn't getting much love either.
Can anyone point me to some other renderers? I'd prefer if they could be rendered in DS directly, but I'm open to exporting to blender and then rendering there. If you can provide images that show off the qualities of these alternative rendering schemes, then that would be useful also.
Hopefully this thread will be of benefit to the community in general in getting an up-to-date assessment of what rendering engine options are available.
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Comments
Well, a few years back, before iRay, there was LuxRender, which had a very popular PlugIn for DAZ Studio called 'Reality' (made by Pret-A-3D I think).
I don't know if that still works and if it does, if LuxRender ist still a viable option, but i remember it being pretty good.
It was my main render option for a long time until the PlugIn developer updated to Reality 2 which had so many problems i switched to the then new iRay.
There's no other better render engine other than iRay if you still wanna go for rendering in DS for improving realism. As for cartoon style, 3DL could be an option. Besides, a new feature of Toon Canvas is provided in the latest DS Public Build...
If you don't mind a longer pipeline to Blender, with Diffeomorphic Daz Importer add-on + Blender Cycles engine can be a good choice. For cartoony type, another renderer for Blender is pixar Renderman engine which now supports Blender 3.6 LTS...
However, if you just want to make static render rather than animation, I personally don't think it's really necessary to go for Blender pipeline... DS + Iray engine is good enough with lots of potentials...
Whatever program and renderer one uses, there's always a learning curve. There are no shortcuts.
Some amazing Iray renders can be found in this thread;
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/313401/iray-photorealism/p1
There were two plugins for Daz Studio that let you use LuxRender for rendering. They were Luxus and Reality. I don't think Reality works anymore. It used DRM that connected to a server to validate the licence, I think that when the developer stopped supporting it the licence server was switched off so the plugin fails the licence check.
I bought Luxus a long time ago and it still works on Studio 4.22. I don't know if Daz still sells it, I can find it in my library but not in the store. If they do still sell it you could try it and return it if you don't like it.
There was a plugin for 3Delight called pwToon for toon style rendering. I don't know if Daz still sell it, if they do you could try it with the 30 day money back option.
Another render engine to look at is Filament which is included with Daz Studio, It can't match Iray for realism but it is very fast. Daz Studio 4.22 has added a lot of new options in Filment's draw settongs.
Agreed, if you are not doing animatiion
Daz studio with Native Iray materials is your best option.
Still not working on MacOS though...
AFAIK one of the requirements to get it to work on MacOS is the Qt framework upgrade, so that means waiting for DS5.
As I am a realism purist, I don't see any other way, than sticking with IRAY.
You _might_ be successful with Octane Render, but rather using the Plug In as a bridge to the main software and go the long way to have the correct Octane skin shaders with your models.
Same, if you dicide to bring your models to Blender.
If you like to stay in DAZ Studio, than IRAY is the way to go, with all its flaws.
My Gallery represents, what I could get out of IRAY. Every image there is rendered in Iray with some Photoshop color grading or exposure settings.
Just here to point out the octane render for daz is a viable option still. My daz gallery contains only images I've done in octane if you want to see what I've achieved with it (I've never used iray). The plugin is not perfect, and that is in part daz's fault. The old dated qt libraries have been troublesome for the developers but they have managed to get us most of the features the other plugins have. I imagine when we eventually get daz studio 5 (if ever) the plugin's development should become even better.
It's also important to note that, while Iray can be accelerated by an NVidia GPU, Octane literally will not work without one. And yes, the implementation of Octane into DS is maddening.
There are no real viable alternatives that don't require radically altering your workflow.
I don't use Octane Render much anymore (I've gotten lazy because Iray in DS is just too simple). However before DAZ3d implemented Iray in DS, and DAZ3d quit developing Carrara, I used Octane Render a lot. I can understand your frustration, as Octane isn't even close to as easy to use as Iray is in DS. Shaders and materials don't translate as well as you would hope. This means that the user will need to do a lot of their own work to fix them. The user interface is complicated and somewhat confusing for a new user. The original developer of the plugin wanted to implement everything available in Octane to ensure it was all available in the plugin. The unfortunate downside to this is that it is not as easy to use as Iray, the upside is that you can have very fine control over almost all of Octanes functions and capabilities (you can really go crazy making complicated node structures for your shaders).
Unfortunately, unless you have used similar professional level render engines like Octane, two hours simply isn't even close to enough time to come to grips with Octane Render (IIRC it took me about two weeks). DAZ has made using Iray very simple and straight forward. I get the general feeling that most users never even modify and materials or shader settings because they look good enough straight out of the box. This is great for ease of use, but it also creates an expectation that everything should be just as simple it other applications. In my experience, getting the same quality images from another render engine will always need a fair amount of additional work, and a lot of learning along the way.
I'm not trying to convince you to use Octane, in fact, unless Octane Render provides specific features the you really need that aren't available in DS, I would recommend against it. One of the big reasons to use it would be because you don't have enough GPU memory to do what you want with Iray, and you don't want to buy another graphics card. Clearly Octane is ideal for this with it's out of core memory capabilities (you can use system RAM in addition to your GPU memory). It's a great choice for other things as well, like a faster render view port, faster rendering, advanced lighting, etc.
If your still somewhat interested in Octane Render, in addition to the outstanding work done by Sorel, I think most of the work done by Valzheimer (https://www.artstation.com/valzheimer/albums/82201) was done with Octane Render.
IMHO you will have a similar experience with any other possible options. Exporting to Blender might be your best option, though it will have it's own learning curve. Blender also opens up the possibility of using a long list of external render engines (Pixar Renderman can be used for free and it's not just for cartoons, here are movies it has been used on https://renderman.pixar.com/movies). If all you want to do is produce single image renders (not animations), as others have already mentioned, probably your best option is Iray.
tldr;
As far as I know right know, unfortunately your experience with Octane Render will be somewhat similar with any other available options. It's typically a lot of additional work to use any render engine that isn't heavily supported by content creators at DAZ3D.
...I've been working with with Ire since it's introduction and am ,still learning new tricks and things over 8 years later.
I also had Reality (which uses LuxRender) and I also had to convert materials from (then) 3DL to Lux before rendering. The plugin had included that capability but you still has to sometimes make adjustments. The one big downside it was CPU based and excruciatingly so. I had render jobs which measured in days, not hours or minutes as I only had a quad core i7. Getting a faster higher core count CPU was the only solution to increasing rendering speed, which at the time was a pretty expensive option. The last update of Reality introduced a software based bump in speed but it was at the expense of render quality as it optimised them. for speed (nothing in life is ever truly "free").
I also have Renderman but have only experimented with it. here and there. Using the in programme 3DL or Renderman may also require converting Iray materials to RSL (Renderman shading Language). on products whihc come wiht only are shaders. There is a shader converter by Riversoft Art/Sickleyield available in the store here.
https://www.daz3d.com/rssy-iray-to-3delight-converter-and-merchant-resource
Wowie's AweShader system opens up more capabilities of 3Delight which can approach photo real quality within Daz Studio without having to export the scene. Like anything it does have a learning curve, While you don't need a fast high VRAM GPU for rendering it still is best to have a CPU with as high a core count as possible, Ryzen preferable as Intel has moved to a split core configuration using what are referred to as" Performance" and "Economy" cores which reduces the total thread count ("Economy Cores" are not hyperthreaded so a 12 core CPU will have 18 instead of 24 processor threads)..The more system memory tyou have the better as well so it will not drop to the virtual memory partition on your HDD or SSD. .
Thanks very much for all your contributions and viewpoint on this.
My main focus is photoreal stills, so the Blender route sounds like it's just not worth the effort. However, when I'm feeling motivated to try some more cartoony effects, or try my hand at animation in Blender (I found animation in Daz very hard work), then I'll explore that.
In regard to Octane, after 2 hours I couldn't even get it to install properly such that the textures, lights etc. were coming through on the content panel. So if it's this difficult to even setup then I don't think I'd have the patience to work through its other issues. However @Sorel's renders in Octane looked utterly gorgeous... and different to Iray in some subtle way, which intrigued me.
I have delved deeper into customising surfaces, and also hand painting UV maps, but the great thing about iRay with DS is that you can get near-instant results as a beginner, and this was a massive thrill in the first hours of using Daz for the first time.