reality
chris_settlemoir
Posts: 362
is it any good is it worth the buy/ is it worth owning what exactly it do
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Yes, it's good, and what it does is act as a bridge between your scene in Daz Studio and the freeware LuxRender render engine (which is a physical-based render engine). LuxRender can produce some very good results, but it can take a while (talking hours not "I'll go make a cup of tea while I wait").
Your middle question, "is it worth it?" is harder to answer: your mileage may vary. With the latest Daz Studio you have Iray which is also a PBR engine. I will admit to having had Reality from almost day one. It's had it's niggles and faults, but is generally a very good product. In my (very personal) opinion it's a very hand tool to have to hand. I don't use it all the time, not even often, but it's nice to know I can call upon it when I want/need it.
At least with conventional hardware, I found LuxRender's render times completely absurdly long. I owned Reality very briefly before taking 13 hours to get a really noisy terrible render, and then returned it.
Your mileage may vary.
its just i never know if those products are worth the money due to not seeing alot of people talk about the product
I would say its not a beginner type of purchase. If you are not comfortable with the concept of external rendering engines and translating from one platform to another, I would say wait on Reality. Its not likely to go anywhere... it'll still be here when your ready.
Personally, I'm not a fan. I prefer Luxus to Reality, but Luxus' creator declared it "future proof" shortly after release and has not revisited it. I think his prediction was less than accurate and that it could use an update. I probably still wouldn't use it, because I have I have access to Iray and it works for me.
Reality/Lux rocks!!!!
Lux is also a PB render engine, so the results are very similar to Iray. Also the workflow with lighning is pretty much the same. On the other hand, Reality has some big advantages over Iray that make it more powerful (in my eyes):
- Lurender does not block your PC while rendering.
- You can stop your render, close the program, shut down your PC and continue rendering the scene at any time.
- Reality/Lux uses a new render mode called OpenCL rendering. This works with ans brand of GPU (that supports OpenCL), is amazingly fast and it shares GPU Ram and System RAM. So if your scene does not fit into video RAM it is no Problem, the GPU and CPU always render together
- materials are much simpler to set up and tweak in Reality.
- Luxrender lets you adjust your light intensities on the fly while rendering.
- In Lux you can save the individual lights of your render as seperate images. Perfect for composing.
These are just a few points that makes Reality/Lux much more powerful than Iray - for me of course. Different people hafe different opinions, workflows and goals.
I love the Reality/Daz/Luxrender workflow but it does have some long render times depending on your HW and having a good understanding of DS before you get started and you start small is a good approach. Reality has astoundingly great documentation and an excellent support forum over at RuntimeDNA. I don't have Luxus so I can not say one is better/worse than the other.
Newer CPU's (past 4 - 5 years) may see a speed benefit if you use Reality 4.2 and LuxRender 1.5 over the older CPU's but it's a CPU+RAM affair so having those two in abundance is your best bet, Intel or AMD you can use either its not platform specific. There is a GPU version but I'm not versed in it. Additionally you can connect it to multiple computers and "farm" out renders to other systems provided they have enough RAM to render the scene as if they were rendering by themselves but it's built into Lux and it's free, this can speed things up considerably if you have a gaming laptop laying around or pick up a cpu monster with no GPU on ebay for 1/2 the cost of a bottom of the line Iray recommended GPU it wil make a huge difference.
The results are better for me than what I see out of Iray but I'm far more flexible in Lux and I use it for Blender as well, and the lights on the fly (you can assign multiple lights and change them individually which is insanely awesome) is something Iray does not allow at this time.
FWIW, IMO if you're having trrouble rendering in Iray, Reality will be an order of magnitude more trouble for you.
I did a quick example to compare Iray and Reality/Lux. I used a G3F figure with the V7 skin and I have applied he default Iray materials to everything (skin, hair, clothes). Everything else is the same, same lights, same camera. All settings are default, so no tweaking was done.
Since I am using Iray materials, this should be a big advantage for Iray, but it is not. Looking at the images you can see that both need to be tweaked. The Iray render looks dull and lifeless,especially the skin is too flat. Reality looks a bit too glossy and on the clothes the bump/displacement is not transfered well. This needs to be corrcted. Hair looks ok on both.
The biggest differnce was render time. 10 minutes for Iray (CPU only) and 2 minutes for Reality/Lux (OpenCL mode).
I don't see that connection.
Also you realize there an extensive users guide for Reality and DS from the vendor you can read now
http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/preta3d-products/reality/docs/R4/Reality_Users_Guide.pdf
I'd post the same thing for Iray integration into DS but there apparently is none.
Here is another test. Again a G3F figute with V7 skin. But this time I used 3Delight materials for everything! And again, everything with default settings, no tweaking.
Again, in both versions the materials need to be tweaked to look good. Except the hair in the Realiy/Lux render. Reality transfers it very weel. Skin is again dull in Iray, everything else is a matter of taste.
Render times: 6 Minutes in Iray CPU only(seems that Iray renders faster with 3Delight materials, than with its own Iray materials - funny, isn´t it? :-) ), 3 minutes in Reality/Lux OpenCL.
Sadly I think it's gone to the dogs. I used it for a few years. The recent version is full of bugs and takes longer the Reality 2. The blame was due to using SSS on skin which is Horse sh*t since even with SSS turned off I have seen longer times then with R2. I have newer powerful GTX980 & 980m cards in 32 and 24 G machines. The one item we had to cut down on noise was the refine brush but decided to do away in what was suppose to be faster render modes...I have to admit that I did like some results over iray in some cases but not worth putting up with the times IMO..
Can I ask if I were to build a PC out of my parts for network rendering with Reality...
Would the GPU in my main PC and my network PC need to be the same or same memory.
I have 4GB on my main PC, so would I have to match that on the server ?
Thanks.
For Luxrender as long as the hardware can run the current version (or every machine in the network can run the SAME version number) it can be used as a render slave.
Cool, thanks a lot.
I've used 3 different laptops and 3 desktops...one of the laptops was an old single core PIII machine running XP and 2 GB of RAM...it still rendered some.
I have a spare PC I was using for Linux and then for Kodi, but I hardly ever use it, so I thought I might put it to some use - might pick up a cheap GPU on eBay to put in it and try it.
That is the same version number...so it can also be a mix of operating systems.
That render above was runnning on 4 Win7 machines, an XP one and my Linux machine...1 six core, 2 4 core, 2 dual core and the single core PIII.
The Linux native version of Luxrender, on a 'bare bones'/'lite' desktop machine renders a bit faster than the Windows (less OS overhead getting in the way) and makes a great 'slave'/node setup for rendering.