Iray question

Dimeolas

Apologies for a noobish question. I know that Iray is capable of sweet renders, but wondering how they compare to the Octane renderer? Not is the sense of an expert handling them but for an average person who is willing to spend the time to learn. A certain artist on a site I wont name gets really nice renders with Octane. Supposedly theres a workaround to get G3F working in Poser11 but danged if it works for me. Anyway, just wondering, thanks

Richard Haseltine

A lot of the content at Daz, and to a lesser extent at other stores, has Iray material settings. To render in Octane you would in most cases need to set up your own materials. Whether that is an insuperable obstacle only you can judge.

DustRider

I use both, and IMHO basic renders are pretty much the same. For skin, you will typically want to set uo your own shaders in Octane, where with Iray you can get everything pretty much "straight out of the box" (depending on ho picky you are, I almost always have to tweak the shaders to my liking). Where Octane shines is when you start to run out of GPU memory, because it can use system memory to load texture data (it doesn't render with the CPU, only the GPU, but it can use system RAM to suplement GPU memory for textures). With Iray, when you run out of GPU memory, rendering slows down a lot because the scene is sent to the CPU for rendering (but on the upside, Iray can use the CPU to render, Octane can't). Some other pluses to Octane are that it has several more advanced user features than Iray, there are plugins for both Poser and DS (so you can use the same renderer in either application) and an upcomming version will support the use of GPU's other than Nvidea (ATI for example).

There is a thread in the Commons that has a lot more about Octane, and the DS plugin the will probably answer most of your questions here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/94471/your-favorite-cinematic-renderer/p1

If your interest is more for the Poser plugin than the DS plugin, there is a demo version you can try (demos are available for the for DS and Carrara plugins as well). Bottom line, If you don't like adjusting/making shaders, then Octane may not be for you, but if you enjoy or are compeled to tweak/make your on shaders, and/or need some of the features available in Octane that aren't in Iray, Octane may be a perfect fit.

Jim_1831252

I was recently trying out the DS demo plugin and it frequently screwed up my workspace layout and I couldn't even get nodes to drop onto the node editor (select and drag, yes. Place, no) - very skeptical about the plugin. Had no trouble with the Lightwave demo. I would be interested to see how it went with Poser too, but given that Poser and I don't get along too well I haven't tested it out.

The out of core rendering with Octane is a big plus for me, but for now I'm happy with Iray.

Edit: I think the best way to get Genesis 3 to work in Poser would simply to do all your posing and outfitting in DS and export to Poser as .obj for still or FBX for animation.

Edit2: I just found the Genesi 3 Poser Updater. Apparently it works quite well. I don't think I can link to it, but Google is your friend here.

TheKD

I would stick with iray for the reasons mentioned above, but also because of the price tag. I love houdini's render engine, but for images with humans, I always go with iray. Getting good looking skin is tough, but a lot of skin shaders sold for iray look good out of the box for most renders I done so far.