How to convert existing to Iray
Eamon
Posts: 159
I have some very complex scenes (see my Gatekeeper thread) and though I am happy with the 3D Delight, Iray is clearly better. My scenes contain Urban Future with all the lights and surfaces and none of these seem to render. It also has a mech and 12 figures with their own surfaces.
Is there any way I can easily convert my scene to get the most out of Iray?
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Other than letting Iray auto-convert, or mass applying the base Iray shader to everything -- both leave lots to be desired -- there's no easy way. Ideally, you need to select each surface, and apply a suitable shader to it, adjusting the controls of that shader to suit your tastes and needs.
Before you do that, though, check with Stonemason to see if there's an Iray update for this set.
When you say auto convert, is that just essentially me just switch from 3DDelght to Iray without changing anything?
I was kind of ok with that but this Urban future has lights on poles and neon signs etc. that are not showing up on the render. I will post a comparason image to help give a better idea.
Try applying the Emissive preset to the glowing surfaces (using the Surface Selection tool to seelct them), then adjust the colour and brightness in the Surfaces pane.
I'm sorry Richard but I don't know what you mean by Emissive preset?
Here's a typical scene I am doing and there's like up to 20 images like this.
First is the scene as is in Daz, second is the 3dDelight render which is what I have essentially been doing all along and once I do my post prioduction in Photoshop, I a, pretty happy with it. Third is the Iray render which I really like but it's very dark, grainy and looks like it's lacking the sign posts and street lights.
The last image is a later scene but with all my PS wizardry over it.
Yes, auto conversion occurs for surfaces (but not for lights) when rendering 3DL materials in Iray. It's easy, but inefficient, and the results are often less than satisfactory. It's always better to modify surfaces manually.
A big difference between your 3DL and Iray examples is lighting. If the 3DL scene uses 3DL-based lighting (that is, lights that are geared toward using special functionality in 3DL), none of that will work in Iray. It must all be replaced. Richard already noted that you can exchange any emitting geometry with the Iray equivalent using the Emissive preset, but for a scene this large, relying only on emissive lighting will really bog down the render time. If this set has an open sky, you are better off adding an Iray HDRi image in the environment dome that produces the light quality you want, then supplementing that with individual photometric lights (spots, etc.), and anything emissive you want to either act as a light source, or display as glowing.
This is what I was thinking, could I add a sky dome to all this to to give the lighting I need and the add the bits manually. I am not well up on the skydome stuff but i am learning.
If I can figure it out I will give Richard's Emmisive conversion suggestion a go first just to see as these scenes of mine took a while to put together and its all very slow moving. I just wish my machines were more powerful for this as it's all taking far loinger than 3D Delight but the results are undeniably better.
Iray doesn't need a "skydome" and in any case, they're difficult to use with Iray. Unlike 3DL, physical geometry blocks light in Iray. So you can't have some ambient environment light in addition to the skydome, as the ambient light won't get through. (There are some ways around this, but really, it's just easier to skip it.)
Instead, Iray has a virtual environment dome. You can't see, but it's there. The basic environment dome is Sun/Sky, which simulates the (surprise!) sun and the sky. You can adjust the angle and placement of the sun in the sky.
You can also add an image to this dome, and if it's the right kind of image, it can provide illumination, too. These images are so-called high dynamic range, or HDR. An HDR image is usually referred to as HDRi (or HDRI). When loaded into the environment dome as an environment map, the image can produce a background+lighting, or the background can be hidden and you get a transparency, but you still get the effect of the lighting.
There are numerous free HDRi's, plus many others for sale in the Daz store. I'd recommend experimenting with the freebies first, to learn what you need, and how to use it.
I would recommend removing all 3DL-based lighting from your scene, and just adding the default D|S environment dome and image. There are plenty of threads about this, so I won't repeat the steps here. The lighting you get is unlikely to be what you want for a scene like this, but experiment, and get to know the capabilities. If you set the dome to be a Finite Sphere, you can control proportional sizing and rotations of the dome which alters the direction of the main light.
From there, you can try adding some photometric lights. Choose Scene Only (ignores the environment dome), and add one light at a time to build up the scene. Once you get these lights set up, switch back to Dome and Scene, and then turn down the environment intensity. This will decrease the ambient light produced by the HDRi, providing a more dramatic scene from your set lights.
One note... if you are using sun-sky, no other lights will be used no matter what you place in there. So if you need scene lights in addition to a skydome, go with HDRI lighting.
ok, been pluggaway here on two different machines trying different things. @Tobor, I actually tried adding a skydome but like you said, it just black eveything out. I will investigate the Sun/Sky thing you mentioned. I do know how to do that but I will read up on how. If upi have any suggested links that would be handy please post them.
@Steven-V, I will do this as suggested of I can figure out how. It's an area of Daz I have never really used.
One of my main problems is that the my Content Library Folder 'Daz Connect' which has the Iray Uber Base was not showing up on Daz on my iMac but was on my desktop for some reason despite borh being DazStudio 4.9. Any idea wht that is? I see it in Content Manager as a folder but not in my Content Library so cannot access it. Any idea what this is?
Ok after doing proper reseach now, it does seem this Iray is geared towards folks who make a lot of money and can afford a crazy high spec computor for their studio. I make an ok living with my illustration work but I don't earn quite enough to get a 4k Mac Pro.
I have looked at MacPro towers but they may not go past El Capitan.
I am getting a hefty paycheck soon but as anybody who is self employed will tell you, you tend to not want to spend too much should there be a drop in work. But then the new MacPros don't use Invidia.
As a book cover illustrator, it's amazingly frustrating knowing I can get far more realistic renders but I'll need to donate vital parts of my anatomy to fund it.
Without an NVidia GPU, you can still render with Iray, but at the expense of time. Whether that is a show-stopper for you depends on your work style, of course.
Without the GPU assist, neither renderer comes out on top in the speed race. Iray will do some things faster, 3DL others. 3DL can do somethings easier than Iray and Iray does others easier. The clear advantage goes to Iray WHEN GPU rendering is enabled...but...and this a big one, only when photorealism is needed. It's much more difficult to 'tune' Iray to NOT be 'photorealistic', Really, what gain is there if you spend 6 hrs 'tuning' the materials for a not photorealistic render if it renders in 20 minutes, but 3DL will render the whole thing, start to finish, including 'tuning' in an hour? Yes, actual render time was 1/3 or so of it would have been, but total time spent is 6x.
I can get over the longer rendertime if things were not so grainy on final render but I know I can play with settings on that.
I have played with the Sun-Sky in Render Settings as some of you have suggested and I can see how that lights the areas and have done a couple of test renders uisng the differnt times of day. As stated already, this does indeed cancel the existing scene lights that I cannot seem to convert so I guess I would have replcae them all as suggested....there's loads of em in Urban Future.
Basics first: Remind us of the technical specs of your rendering rig.
My main machine i work on is an iMac 20inch Early 2009, 2.66Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 8GB memory, Nividia GeForce 9400 256 MB.
I usually lay up my scenes on this and then load them up on my MacBook Pro 15inch mid 2010, 8GB 1067 Mhz, Nvidia GeForce GT 330M 256 MB...which I find a little faster (changed out the hard drive recently).
I don't need the CDdrive in the iMac so I could replace that with another drive perhaps.
Thanks for the specs. So clearly your renders are always CPU. The "grain" you see is unconverged pixels and they're annoying because your system is fairly slow, and rendering takes longer.
There might be some scene adjustments you can make to help convergence go faster, but in the end, you'll only enjoy a limited improvement. Your better bet might be to find a used Windows PC (I've gotten several through local sellers on Craigslist) that lets you install even a modest GTX 740 (or similar) card. These don't have a tone of cores on them, but the ~400 odd are better than nothing. They're a little over $100 on Amazon (less if you're okay buying used on eBay). Be sure to get the 4GB version. The PC you get needs to have a full-size PCIe slot, and its power supply rated at 500 watts or better.
A few months back I bought a Dell Precision T-5400 with 8GB RAM for $225. to replace a used T-5500 with 12GB that burned out. Granted, the $350 for the PC and card is money I could have used for something else, but time (saved) is money, too.
Tis very much appreciated you taking the time to explain all this me Tobor, thank you.
Ok so essentially, I will stick with 3Delight as I just don't have the juice right now. Time still well spent though and maybe I can squeeze out some good character renders if I play about.
While i am not familiar with Windows I would entertain the notion of doing what you suggest if I can run it all smoothly with the Macs. I have some savvy friends here that can help with that. As long as I can get the PC on the network and have my Daz Library accessable, I should be ok? Or will I have to go back and download all my stuff (which is a lot and some very old Poser formats) to use on the PC?
Saying all that, I do need a new Mac and I was considering in getting another big screened iMac, if I knew I the Mac Pro could it, perhaps it would be a wise investment. I do a lot of book covers using DazStudio so maybe it would be worth the 4k.
My last qeustions to you I promise. :)
That's just it — when you're working in Iray, "final render" is not a concept. In 3Delight, the render runs until it is finished, but an Iray render runs until it hits one of the three "stop" conditions. Only one of these conditions has anything to do with "finished-ness", and even then you must know what you're doing with Iray surfaces parameters and lighting and rendering settings, otherwise you'll end up with at least some grain no matter what else you do.
Thanks Spottedkitty. I will play about with the settings and see.
However, there is this:
https://bizon-tech.com ...this may be the problem solver.
So I may either get the Bizon and an new iMac or just get a PC as a renderinmg machine. But I worry about all my Daz files being able to work on the PC.
Buying a Bizon box won't help if the problem is you need to adjust your render settings — all it will do is produce exactly the same grainy render much more quickly.
A more powerful and capable graphics card doesn't improve render quality, it improves render speed and lets you render larger scenes without Iray falling back to the much slower CPU mode.
It turns out that you cannot us eteh Bizon on the new iMac so it seems then I am just out gunned on using Iray.
But I am still getting a new iMac and I have bummped up the specs to as much as I can. 4.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.2GHz, 32gb Ram. I opted for the AMD Radeon R9 M395X with 4GB video memory. How do you think this will fair with Iray do you think?
Still going to be a CPU only render...so while it won't be slower than a snail, stuck in molasses, it won't be winning and Sprint Cups, either...
Don't forget Iray is an NVidia technology, so it only works on NVidia graphics cards — AMD cards will never render anything in Iray. Also, the card should have enough CUDA cores to give you a good render speed, and enough VRAM to let you use larger scenes (your entire scene must fit into the card's VRAM).
One other gotcha, the shiniest-latest-greatest (and most expen$$$ive) 10-series cards are not yet supported in the full release of D|S, they'll only work right now in the beta.
There isn't an Nvidia option for a Mac...
There is, if you use an old pre 2013 MacPro or a thunderbolt II GPU expansion box
So what will happen if I try to render in Iray on this new iMac I am getting? Will it just not do it or will I get something?
It's just not practical to be buying an 2013 MacPro as in a few more year it will be obsolete and they are still very expensive.
The Bizon extention pack I posted will not work with the new iMac either. But I can add it to my MacBook or I will buy a PC laptop at some stage and put in the neccessary power.
It really annoying to know that I can make my book covers or my movie pitch to look much more great but as I choose to use a Mac, I cannot. I hate that kinda crap and I know Apple are the main culprits here.
I am happy with 3Ddelight but when you know you can get much better, it's depressing. Here's a page from my movie pitch, which after much Photoshop loving, I can get to look kinda cinematic.
If this is 3DL keep it. It's commercial-grade, and doesn't look like you made it in Poser or D|S (yes, it looks like digital art vs drawn art, but that's okay if it's done well). The publishing world is awash in graphic novels and other books obviously created in a consumer-level 3D program. It often takes "much Photoshop" to stand out. I wouldn't call it a negative.
You'll get a render, no doubt...but it won't be any faster than doing it in 3DL, that's all. With that CPU/RAM setup up, neither 3DL or Iray will be on the century time scale, but they won't be mere minutes, either...
That's reassuring dude, thank you! :)
As long as I can get a render in Iray, I will be happy. I will try Iray rendering on a desert sequence so the difference in rendering style will be less noticible.
Thanks for all the help and advise guys! :)