Any chance for actualy good render engine?

Jaromir Baldrian

Hi there,
this is my first post so i will try to make it as short as possible.
My question is very simple. Is there a chance that we will ever get a hardware asisted render engine for both openCL and/or CUDA similar to 3rd party Lux or Octane? The current software render engine 3Delight (i hope i didnt made a typo there) isnt that bad, but even after hours of work with tons of lights and enviromental mapping, the output looks very very unrealistic. As for the build in hardware renderer, that thing is very bad as it suffers of inability of the hardware to process certain things, doesnt matter whether shadows, lights or textures. Iam wondering whether theres achance that Daz will have own render engine with online content library similar to for example octane live db, so one doesnt need to waste $300 to actually get close to realistic outputs. Thanks in advance for answer

Chohole

Luxus http://www.daz3d.com/luxus is an affordable plug-in for DS that allows the user to take advantage of Luxrender, which is of course a free unbiased render engine

Jaromir Baldrian

chohole said:

Luxus http://www.daz3d.com/luxus is an affordable plug-in for DS that allows the user to take advantage of Luxrender, which is of course a free unbiased render engine

i know about Luxus, i think you got me wrong, Luxus is a plugin, i mean rendering engine just like 3Delight but hardware based directly integrated into Daz studio, not a plug-in to use 3rd party engine

kesh

shamman said:

Hi there,
this is my first post so i will try to make it as short as possible.
My question is very simple. Is there a chance that we will ever get a hardware asisted render engine for both openCL and/or CUDA similar to 3rd party Lux or Octane? The current software render engine 3Delight (i hope i didnt made a typo there) isnt that bad, but even after hours of work with tons of lights and enviromental mapping, the output looks very very unrealistic. As for the build in hardware renderer, that thing is very bad as it suffers of inability of the hardware to process certain things, doesnt matter whether shadows, lights or textures. Iam wondering whether theres achance that Daz will have own render engine with online content library similar to for example octane live db, so one doesnt need to waste $300 to actually get close to realistic outputs. Thanks in advance for answer

http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php As you can appreciate in this page, the rendering engine is indeed quite good. It just does what it's 'asked' to do, so correct use and setup of materials and lights is paramount.
Most of the times, especially for scene lighting, it's not true that 'the more, the best' is a working rule, much likely the opposite. If in a scene you have more than 5 lightsources, then you probably are doing something wrong (unless you are looking for some special effects): for a normal scene, a distant light, a bounce/fill light and a subject dedicated light (spot, point or the like) are generally all you need.
Then the materials: many products (especially regarding skin textures) are really poor-quality: the diffusion channel textures are cut-and-paste works of some hi-def photo reference materials... ahem... they often are very bad regarding scaling, existing shadows and hue uniformity, but that's a single product problem, not a rendering engine issue.
I make also computer music, and there is a very good similarity i could use: pre-made materials are like sampled soundbanks: for a good, real feeling saxophone sound (for exmple) you have to pay some hundreds of dollars!!! Sure there are even free soundbanks, but then your final work will most likely sound like canned ducks instead of real instrument session;)

OpenCL and CUDA are accelerator supports, mostly thought for games, where the first factor is speed of rendering and number of texels managed and supported. They can't do much for realism in se.

Jaromir Baldrian

kesh said:

shamman said:

Hi there,
this is my first post so i will try to make it as short as possible.
My question is very simple. Is there a chance that we will ever get a hardware asisted render engine for both openCL and/or CUDA similar to 3rd party Lux or Octane? The current software render engine 3Delight (i hope i didnt made a typo there) isnt that bad, but even after hours of work with tons of lights and enviromental mapping, the output looks very very unrealistic. As for the build in hardware renderer, that thing is very bad as it suffers of inability of the hardware to process certain things, doesnt matter whether shadows, lights or textures. Iam wondering whether theres achance that Daz will have own render engine with online content library similar to for example octane live db, so one doesnt need to waste $300 to actually get close to realistic outputs. Thanks in advance for answer

http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php As you can appreciate in this page, the rendering engine is indeed quite good. It just does what it's 'asked' to do, so correct use and setup of materials and lights is paramount.
Most of the times, especially for scene lighting, it's not true that 'the more, the best' is a working rule, much likely the opposite. If in a scene you have more than 5 lightsources, then you probably are doing something wrong (unless you are looking for some special effects): for a normal scene, a distant light, a bounce/fill light and a subject dedicated light (spot, point or the like) are generally all you need.
Then the materials: many products (especially regarding skin textures) are really poor-quality: the diffusion channel textures are cut-and-paste works of some hi-def photo reference materials... ahem... they often are very bad regarding scaling, existing shadows and hue uniformity, but that's a single product problem, not a rendering engine issue.
I make also computer music, and there is a very good similarity i could use: pre-made materials are like sampled soundbanks: for a good, real feeling saxophone sound (for exmple) you have to pay some hundreds of dollars!!! Sure there are even free soundbanks, but then your final work will most likely sound like canned ducks instead of real instrument session;)

OpenCL and CUDA are accelerator supports, mostly thought for games, where the first factor is speed of rendering and number of texels managed and supported. They can't do much for realism in se.

I dont ment to say hardware based rendering for the "looks" of the image, OpenCL nor CUDA has anything to do with visual part of the work. Let me explain what i mean, lets say i have a scene, one girl (as iam not realy into guys) with Norma based model, clothes (x-dress), glossy hair, glossy nails, glossy teeths, and 27 lights, no enviroment, structures, natures, etc. When i use 3Delight its "sort of" fast, about 7 minutes, but no offense it looks like a**, then theres another option, LuxRender 1.2.1 (currently), when usinng LuxRender on my machine which consist of 24GB of RAM, Core i7 and 2xGTX480 in SLi (iam working primarily with Adobe Premiere which has native CUDA/Fermi support), Lux needs about 7 days and 16 hours to render this picture using just the CPU as nVidia OpenCL drivers are borked. Now theres Octane Render 1.20 Demo, same setup, same scene + HDR shaders took about 2 minutes 48 seconds to render. The Delight render cannot be compared to neither Lux nor Octane no matter what, its just not possible, its like comparing old Renault 21 to newest model of Ferarri, you can paint the Renault with Red color, but its gonna be still just a Renault.
Hardware assisted rendering makes a monstrous difference and i mean realy realy monstrous.

kesh

I am really curious to see those 2 renders (delight and octane) - could you post here the images you made?

Luxrender is definitely slow at hi settings, but 7 days vs 2 minutes really seems too much. There must be some setup problem somewhere (possibly too deep raytracing parametes, where less would be enough) - but anyway the octane render compared to 3delight would be quite interesting to have a look at, if you can post them.

PS: 27 lights? are you kidding? What do you need all those lights for? Besides, if those are all luxrender compatible lights, then luxrender will create 27 layers of rendered pictures! That means 27 times the work. In luxrender GUI you can indeed change lights parameters while the image is being rendered, but that only because you are modifying the mixing of the layers.

Dream Cutter

Professional rendering systems are all CPU based bacause its possible to achieve near linear scalablity. A GPU based rendering system cannot. I render on a network farm of 24 CPU's. Some animations (E-On Vue) render still take 3-4 houre PER FRAME! Its not cheap, as you need to procure a rendering license for each discrete system in the Farm. However performance scales linearly with each added render cow(CPU).
How could I take advantage of a GPU rendering system like this - You are limited by the system and maxed out with 1-4 GPU's. (Crossfire or interleaved). And those do not scale performance like massively parallel CPU networks which in effect a render farm is.

Jaromir Baldrian

kesh said:

I am really curious to see those 2 renders (delight and octane) - could you post here the images you made?

Luxrender is definitely slow at hi settings, but 7 days vs 2 minutes really seems too much. There must be some setup problem somewhere (possibly too deep raytracing parametes, where less would be enough) - but anyway the octane render compared to 3delight would be quite interesting to have a look at, if you can post them.

unfortunately i cant, well, i can, once i re-render the scene, so see you in 7 days :D and i dont have octane full version so its gonna be print screen of the end result in renderer window

Edit: I've put together quickly a scene with 1 linear light, 1 spotlight and Genesis2 clothed and with default textures, no tweaks, nothing done at all besides some morphs, so its prety much "as it is"

Time: 10m 11s | Delight: http://3d.webillusion.cz/delight.png

Time: Still Rendering | Lux: http://3d.webillusion.cz/lux.jpg

Time: 1m 27s | very limited Octane Demo : http://3d.webillusion.cz/octane.jpg

Renpatsu

Sorry, I am still not over that 27 lights thing ... what for? For a portrait render I usually use three area lights or something in 3Delight. LuxRender can cope with the same amount or less lights than 3Delight in general, but also depends on what kind of lights you are using.

And as for quality of the render engine, you can do photo realistic renders in 3Delight, but you'll certainly have to learn how surfaces, light, and render engine interact. Octane and Lux are usually easier to set-up from the get-a-go, though sometimes the automatic material translation is awful (depends on plugin).

Jaromir Baldrian

Renpatsu said:

Sorry, I am still not over that 27 lights thing ... what for?

client of mine requested 3 "people" sort of "writing on your screen with finger with a light beam" the scene had about 4-5 lights on the actual model, rest was just for the fighers to reflect the light they are writing with from all angles.

you can do photo realistic renders in 3Delight,

maby you are right but i havent seen any since 2008

Renpatsu

shamman said:

maby you are right but i havent seen any since 2008

Well, I am not doing much photorealistic myself, more artistic/illustrative renders, but perhaps have a look on DeviantArt, for example Laticis comes to my mind - both Octane and 3Delight renders are in the gallery.

http://laticis.deviantart.com/

HellboySoto does great work with LuxRender.

http://hellboysoto.deviantart.com/

Jaromir Baldrian

Renpatsu said:

shamman said:

maby you are right but i havent seen any since 2008

Well, I am not doing much photorealistic myself, more artistic/illustrative renders, but perhaps have a look on DeviantArt, for example Laticis comes to my mind - both Octane and 3Delight renders are in the gallery.

http://laticis.deviantart.com/

HellboySoto does great work with LuxRender.

http://hellboysoto.deviantart.com/

i know Laticis i have used his organic SSS skining tips iirc, but he renders 95% of his work in Octane

Renpatsu

shamman said:

i know Laticis i have used his organic SSS skining tips iirc, but he renders 95% of his work in Octane

Well, he got some good pure DS ones certainly.

http://laticis.deviantart.com/art/SSS-Bree-Nichole-07-1-377240363

http://laticis.deviantart.com/art/Another-Old-Man-RENDER-379075786

Jaromir Baldrian

Renpatsu said:

shamman said:

i know Laticis i have used his organic SSS skining tips iirc, but he renders 95% of his work in Octane

Well, he got some good pure DS ones certainly.

http://laticis.deviantart.com/art/SSS-Bree-Nichole-07-1-377240363

http://laticis.deviantart.com/art/Another-Old-Man-RENDER-379075786
oh i see - and now with all honesty, does it look real? The skin tones yes, very good one, also the ears, the light and thats all. It looks all just so much .... well .... DAZ-ish :D
Delight has one "feature" i dont know whether it was intention or not, but its simply so, you can always say "that was rendered using 3Delight" but .. you cant tell whether picture was rendered in Octane or Lux.

http://render.otoy.com/newsblog/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/hair12.jpg

kesh

ok octane is just a preview screen so i can't say anything about it.

Delight is the classic 3delight render with no light tweaking, so i agree with you it's far from realistic (but with a proper HDRI lighting you can achieve nice renders)

About lux: 1- forget the auto linear, preserve lumi clamping! use instead the linear manual (you can play with those settings from the GUI while rendering), and throw in an auto guess for parameters; from that you can easily change lens aperture, ISO and time stop settings til you get the optimal impression of it; after that step, enable film response (open the 3rd tab) and search for a nice looking film bias setting. For the example subject, even kodakgold 200 can give you good tones; browse and try all you have in there, many are a bit 'extreme' with a strong magenta dominant, but others are definitely nice for skin/people.

You can then go to the next page and if the lights you used are luxrender compatible, you can tweak em separately as well.

Luxrender imo is a great renderer, but also an annoying one to get the grip on, though it deserves a bit of time-investing looking for tutorials and tips.

Renpatsu

shamman said:

oh i see - and now with all honesty, does it look real? The skin tones yes, very good one, also the ears, the light and thats all. It looks all just so much .... well .... DAZ-ish :D
Delight has one "feature" i dont know whether it was intention or not, but its simply so, you can always say "that was rendered using 3Delight" but .. you cant tell whether picture was rendered in Octane or Lux.

http://render.otoy.com/newsblog/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/hair12.jpg

For me they are real enough and I don't see them as "DAZ-ish" really. Also keep in mind that Octane and LuxRender are very similar concerning the concepts and very different compared to 3Delight. In essence though, if you learn how to properly handle shaders/materials/lights and the render settings then you can achieve similar, realistic results in each of these 3 rendering engines - after all 3Delight is a render engine that is used in current cinematic feature movies. Each rendering engine got different kind of drawbacks and advantages of course and it really depends on what you are easiest able to work with. I for one will never ever touch Octane, as it purely relies on NVidia graphics chip rendering.

Dream Cutter

Hate to use the old cliche but I will: "Its a poor workman who blames his tools" . The 3Delight rendering is very powerful in the hands of talented users. Here is a list of professional productions developed with the engine: http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php/projects

Might want to look into some of the lighting tutorials as its the key to great renders.

Here are some tips for optimal; 3delight configuration:

http://rubicondigital.host22.com/index.php/articles/poserdazstudio/4-optimising-render-settings-in-daz-studio

and learn about stand alone option http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/17016/