does reality 2 make a big difference in the quality of your renders?
tradivoro
Posts: 74
I see that reality 2 is on sale right now. Does using reality make a big difference in the quality of renders? does it make it easier to create quality renders? And does it minimize the time. I'm new to using DAZ Studio (not new to 3D rendering) and I'm just wondering if this program is a positive enhancement to Daz Studio. any info appreciated, thanks.
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Quality - no, realism - yes :-)
Reality 2 is a bridge to LuxRender. LuxRender is a different kind of render engine. It can produce very (almost) photorealistic results, but the render times are much longer. And you need some time to learn how to use it.
There are a couple of threads here about LuxRender and Reality - and Luxus, which is similar to Reality. Just do a forum search and you will find a lot of info.
It's not reality as much as it is Luxrender, the renderer. You have biased renderers (3Delight) and unbiased renderers (Luxrender). Typically unbiased rendering takes much longer die to the calculations needed and gives much more realistic results. It's possible if you know what you are doing to get realistic lighting in biased renders, but is easier with unbiased ones. Quality is totally up to you and the time you want to invest in the render.
I'll answer each question separately, then summarize how I see it. :)
Definitely not! As you can see from the previous answers, you're adding a step of translating/tweaking the Poser/DAZ Studio content for use in Luxrender. That's going to add more time to your workflow. And from what I understand, Luxrender tends to be a bit slower as a rendering engine as well. Technical reasons for that, but as a rule in CG .. More Quality / Realism == More Rendering Time.Likewise, however, there is nothing wrong with DAZ Studio / 3Delight. DS tends to abstract the artist away from the Renderman compliant engine. So getting the MOST out of that tool usually requires getting under the hood and tweaking some things.
Personally, I stick with 3Delight. Luxrender (with Reality) interests me from a technical standpoint, but there is still so much to be accomplished with 3Delight, and the ability to use information from Pixar and other Renderman sources makes it a fun exercise for me to learn with.
First, let me say that I do all my renders with Reality exporting from Studio to LuxRender. Have a look at my dA gallery if you like (see sig).
Using the DRL (DAZ -> Reality -> LuxRender) workflow can give much more realistic results. However, there is a fairly significant learning curve involved. Reality is pretty good about making a best guess at initial conversion of materials from Studio to LuxRender, but to get the best results, you WILL have to tweak. (The same is true for Luxus.) Learning how Lux materials really work will take time and experimentation, and to excell at it requires commitment if only for the render time you will soak in those experiments. Personally, I think it's worth it. But YMMV.
Reality won't necessarily improve the "quality" of your renders. Quality to me is about a lot more than just the "realism" of a render. DRL will help give you some better lighting than the default lights most people use in Studio (or Poser) right from the get-go. But the native render engines can also generate very high quality. After all, 3Delight has been used to render many big-budget movies (such as several of the Harry Potter films, some of the Marvell Comics films, etc). But like everything, quality is really a function of skill and expertise, no matter what render engine you use. You can make some really dreadfully bad renders with the DRL workflow, too. You often see these on dA when someone is first starting with DRL. Stuff like specular being waaaaayyyy too high and other simple mistakes. (My early stuff exhibits a lot of these simple errors, too.) Reality may give you an immediate bump in "quality" simply because light works like real light in LuxRender, and so scenes tend to have much more appealing lighting even in your early renders. (Look at most people's early 3Delight/Firefly renders and the lighting is abysmally bad -- it'd be hard to get that bad with LuxRender.)
Given the unbiased nature of LuxRender, it is pretty slow to render by comparison with biased engines like 3Delight and Firefly. And it will use considerable amounts of RAM, too, especially at higher resolutions. I wouldn't even consider it viable on a machine with less than 8GB of RAM, and really 12GB should be considered the minimum. (This on the assumption you are rendering "real" scenes at respectable resolutions and not simple scenes like the MIT box or LuxBall/Suzanne at postage stamp resolutions.) LuxRender does have built-in network rendering support, however, and it works reasonably well. So if you have access to multiple machines with suitable physical memory, you can always take advantage of that.
For me, I came from a background in photography. So lighting in Lux makes sense to me, since it's the same as you'd use in a real-world photo shoot. Lighting in 3Delight, with all the kludges necessary for a biased renderer, are not intuitive to me at all. So if you consider the time saved with me fussing with scene construction and lighting for 3Delight, the extra render time of LuxRender isn't as big a hit as some might see it. I'm also doing this as a personal hobby; I'd never pick LuxRender as the rendering engine for a commercial/animated project. That really would take too long to hit any kind of deadline... That said, as you come to learn LuxRender, there are things that you can do in scene setup to help improve render speed.
The main support forum for Reality is over at RuntimeDNA now. For more detailed questions, you might consider asking over there. DAZ has deleted Reality threads in the past for being "too support oriented" since Reality is no-longer sold here.
I like the results I get with it. I can also get decent results with 3Delight. I like the fact that Lux does not bog down my machine while it renders. As for long times I don't see it anymore I do alot of queue rendering which you just let the machine run. I had a 32G monster built with a very good heat sync last spring it never runs hot. I am used to how to set the materials. I just surpassed 500,000 hits on my D/A page (which is also in my sig) and closing on 5000 renders, the majority being done with lux and I don't render farm or anything.
I was an early adopter of the Reality plug-in, and while it has it's uses, it is not a magic solution. There aren't any magic solutions. I use both it and 3Delight. It really depends on the look or effect I am trying to accomplish.
One of the things that has driven me nuts over the years is that people bad mouth 3Delight, when for most of DS history, the portions of it that were exposed were only a fraction of it's capabilities. The default DS shaders were NOT the limit of the capabilities of 3Delight. Only a handful of PAs ever really did anything with it, Omnifreaker, Arthur Heinz and the fellow who did PW surface and a few others. Lately people like Age of Armor have been stepping up and digging deeper. We are still not really stretching the renderer. It is a professional renderer suitable for film use, usually with artists writing and tweaking shaders for scenes, or even shots, the one size fits many type of shaders that you need for general use in something like DS by definition can't be as optimized or as powerful.
Luxrender is a strange animal if you have never used it before. Renders are never "done". You let it go till you are happy with it, and then stop it, if you do not stop it, it will keep rendering, calculating more and more virtual photons or light paths for better accuracy. That's the important bit, it is tracing those paths, which will let you adjust the intensity of the light, so, if you think one of your lights was not bright enough, you can raise the intensity without having to redo the render. You would only have to redo it if you wanted to MOVE a light. It also has it's own quirks, there is always a frustrating learning curve while you learn to deal with or minimize "fireflies", though that is less of a problem than it used to be.
There are a couple of things the Lux dev team are experimenting with, speed ups that come at the cost of adding a little bit of bias, that may speed things up a great deal.
Luxrender itself is free, try downloading it and some sample scenes that are available and play around with it. It's not for everybody, but it is interesting.
Boy, I see that was kind of a Pandora's box question... :) First thank you all for your detailed replies, it gives me a very good understanding of how Reality works and what it does. I haven't done 3D work in many years, and in the old days, my experience was with Bryce and Vue D'Esprit, so I'm not a stranger to experimenting and positioning lights until I got something I liked or renders that took a couple of days. However, due to other things going on in my life, I stopped doing the 3D art and I'm now getting back into it by exploring doing human figures.
I tried Daz Studio in early 2012 and the first thing that surprised me was how quickly you could render something and get a decent resolution render, as opposed to the time in the past when I was using Bryce and Vue. I also like the way I could maneuver the lights in Daz Studio, unlike Poser, where you basically have this dial and a circle. I'm using an earlier version of Poser, so maybe things have changed.
All that being said, before I was educated by you guys, my understanding was that Reality was some kind of plugin that worked in addition to Daz Studio or Poser, to give you better lighting capabilities, not unlike when you get morphs++ for V 4.2 or additional head morphs the Genesis 2 models, you're still using the program, it just enhances what's already there. I wasn't looking for a magic button, just something that would take what already exists and give you more control, while still in the same program. This whole migration to Luxrender does not interest me, now that I know what it is.
So in light of your replies, I will stick with 3Delight and Firefly. I was getting decent results, which will improve with time as I practice using the program. I'm still using Poser 7, which is ok for my purposes, (meaning, I don't use it much nor do I know it very well) any more up to date stuff I would do in Daz Studio.
However, as an aside to those of you that use Poser, did they ever change the interface for the lights in the later versions or is it still the same old dial? Can you just add lights and move them with the mouse in the environment, a la Daz Studio, without using circle and controlling everything from there? Just wondering.
...While I have Reality/Luxrender I still primarily use 3Delight. Learning more about shaders and surfaces is the real key to working with 3DL. I have come pretty close to photo quality (particularly with UberEnvironment) and am now learning how to do the the same with AoA's Advanced lights and surface/shader tools.
For me though, photo real is not necessarily the "be all and end all" of 3D rendering. There are times I like to strive for a more illustrative or "painterly" appearance. Again this has a lot to do with tweaking lighting and shaders as well as with postwork.
In the end it's all about what you want out of your renders. I'd like grain ultra-realistic renders every now and then, but my main usage of DS doesn't really make sense to add any more time to. For me, ray-traced shadows and an intelligent use of shaders creates enough realism for me.
I don't see much difference between Reality 2 and Luxus other than their interfaces. ;) I do not think that Luxrender does not ease the creation of a scene. Luxrender, as it name implies, takes the geometry data and texture data and creates an image from it. You, the artist, setup the scene by posing, setting the lights and adjusting the shades.
With Reality and Luxus, you do need to manually add shaders and setup the lights (again) in order for the scene to look good. As others have sugested, you may want to post your queries in other threads about Reality and/or Luxrender.
Sorry for the short comment but I need to fix Windows... again.
edit: smilies aren't working right for me. Must be a greasemonkey script blocking the smilies.
I've used Reality/LUXRender since it first released and still have reality 1.25 plugin on my DAZStudio3.1A
installation. It delivered excellent realism and its mesh lights control gives amazing lighting control. I still
use that version, but I haven't upgraded to latest version of either reality or LuxRender for DS4.6 because DAZ
has really up the quality of studio renders lately with Advanced AoA lights so there's no need for an external renderer
anymore. The one thing LuxRender does still do amazingly well is realistic water.
realistic water would be nice...
VUE does particularly realistic water too
If I'm in a hurry I use 3Delight, if I want my render to shine I use Reality2 to LuxRender but there is a slight learning curve at first. One thing that did make perfect sense is lights in your scene behave like lights in real life so the tricks and troubles I have with lighting a scene in 3Delight don't apply to Reality>LuxRender since they are based on actual lighting. Additionally any tutorial I read on lighting a scene for a photographer that tells me the size, placement, wattage and camera settings can be easily translated to Reality>LuxRender, I simply can not do that with 3Delight and I personally have never gotten great lighting out of a 3Delight scene without dozens of test renders but it's obvious others have an easier time with it.
Right now Reality 2 is on sale and IHMO if your looking to boost the quality of your renders this is the best investment you canl make.
That being said you would do well to have some pretty beefy components inside your computer to make it an effective LuxRender system. LuxRender thrives in a muti-core CPU's copious RAM environment but you can still run it on less powerful systems, if you don't expect lightening fast results. I would also recommend you start small projects and work with them to get used to it but since I started using it which was the week it came out I have never stopped using it and the quality with what I can produce out of 3Delight vs Reality>LuxRender is total night and day for me.
Unfortunately, no they are still the same. I got Reality 3 because Poser lights/lighting and I have never gotten along. Reality is a great tool, and produces awesome renders with Lux, but 3Delight in DS does quite well now, it just depends on what you're after.
I was pricing Advanced AoA lights and at this time they are more expensive than buying Reality 2 which is currently on sale, but I still may pick them up and see for myself.
One thing about branching out and finding out about things like LuxRender sparked my interest in getting out of my Daz Studio comfort zone and diving into things like Blender. BTW you can DL a free script to render your DS images in Blenders Cycles engine but I recommend you have a some conceptual control of Blenders interface before you click once and make art. Blender is fairly impossible to learn without a few hours of youtube tutorials, again this was my experience with it but Blender is just an amazing app and it still blows my mind it's free.
the link is here:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/2877/
One other sweet thing you can do with LuxRender is change your film ISO, Shutter Speed, Gamma and film development process while you render so while you can't adjust the lights you can adjust the exposure, or turn your render into a Kodachrome II or Agfa BW Process or 100 other film types while your render is refining.
I think this is key to growing as an artist. You have to be open to investigate and experiment so your craft and available tool sets can evolve and deliver your vision. That's what leads to outstanding art.
...again I come from a theatrical stage lighting background and Reality/Luxrender s a bit more "foreign" to me as lighting is more based on photo studio standards rather than stage lighting.
Daz's universal tool marks the spot nicely, and the light 'camera' view makes positioning far easier than dragging circles on a rotating sphere. Unfortunately, Poser's interface hasn't changed much at all over the years, which is a real shame because it otherwise has countless features which I would love to include in my workflow (not least of all proper cloth dynamics). As it stands, I've been having to swap between the two to squeeze what function I can out of Poser and drag it into Daz Studio to render.
Maybe in Poser 2015 they'll update the UI to make it a bit friendlier.
Yeah, that was my fear about Poser, that they never changed the lighting format, and you can't position them as you could other objects on the stage. Well, I'm glad I still have Poser 7 and upgraded to DAZ Studio instead.
This was really the main reason I was never able to get the results I wanted out of Poser. It just never felt like I had much control over the lighting in a scene. Point lights in particular were tiny circles nearly invisible to the eye, leaving you the bothersome task of trying to locate where they were to position them correctly.Daz's universal tool marks the spot nicely, and the light 'camera' view makes positioning far easier than dragging circles on a rotating sphere. Unfortunately, Poser's interface hasn't changed much at all over the years, which is a real shame because it otherwise has countless features which I would love to include in my workflow (not least of all proper cloth dynamics). As it stands, I've been having to swap between the two to squeeze what function I can out of Poser and drag it into Daz Studio to render.
Maybe in Poser 2015 they'll update the UI to make it a bit friendlier.
That's a shame about Poser never changing their ilghting interface. I think for the time being I'm going to stick with 3delight and make the best of that with the tools available. Inasmuch as Poser does have it's good points, the lighting has always been a sticking point for me.
Unfortunately, no they are still the same. I got Reality 3 because Poser lights/lighting and I have never gotten along. Reality is a great tool, and produces awesome renders with Lux, but 3Delight in DS does quite well now, it just depends on what you're after.