3Delight or Iray? And why?

bleybourne_772d5802c5

Hi all,

 

I'm pretty confused about iray, as there isn;t a lot of help in Daz when you're trying to learn new stuff. I'm not very good, but I have done a few renders now which I don't completely hate, and have kind of got the hang of rendering in 3delight. What is the reason to switch to iray? And is there a noticable increase in quality?

 

I assume also that in iray there are new lioghts I have to use, and I see some figures have 3delight and iray materials - does that mean I will HAVE to use iray materials, and any figure wthout them wont render properly? Really, I would love it if there was a reasonably easy to follow primer somewhere with an FAQ section.....?

Knittingmommy

Iray approaches lighting and rendering in a real world sense using real world physics.  Lights are photometric and you can apply real world lighting emission profiles to the emission channel and get lights that act just like lights in the physical world.  In most cases, the rendering is more photorealistic although I think some people don't like that term.  I find Iray easier to use than 3Delight.  I seem to understand it better.  I struggled with 3Delight when I first started using DS and I still don't understand a lot of the lighting concepts.  It is easier to do tricks and fool the camera in 3Delight.

I think both tools have their purposes and they approach the rendering in completely different styles.  There are a few threads that talk about Iray extensively and a few good tutorials out there.  Definitely check out Sickleyield's Youtube channel as she has some very good Iray tutorials there.  There is the Show Us Your Iray Renders in the forums.  They are up to 5 and if you go to the first page of each thread, it will link to the previous one.  It is definitely worth it to check out if you are interested in learning Iray.  The people in there did a lot of playing around and figuring out how to use the rendering engine.  Their research will save you some work.

There are some people on the boards who strongly resist Iray and only use 3Delight.  There are some here who now like using only Iray and a lot of us in the middle who tend to try using both programs.  It all depends on your style and how you approach learning to use the two rendering engines.  There are a lot more tutorials for 3Delight, but then it has been around a lot longer.  Iray in DS is relatively new and people are still testing out what they can and can't do with it.

If you are unsure, give them both a try on the same scene.  Set up a simple scene in 3Delight and render it out.  Then try to do the same with Iray.  See which workflow and result you like better.  I tend to use Iray more, right now, because, as I said, I understand it better intuitively.  I have a harder time with 3Delight.  However, I still want to learn how to use 3Delight.  There are some creative advantages to some of the things that 3Delight just seems to do better.

Hope this helps.

Ati

I think it really depends on what you're trying to do. I found that Iray gives more realistic results, yet I personally like the style of 3Delight better for what I do.

Then there's the question of speed. You can only use CPU power to speed up 3Delight, and after a while that becomes an issue. You can use multiple videocards to speed Iray up (even cloud rendering at some point in the future), and as I understand it (I may be wrong, as I'm not too much into Iray) these can give you great speed improvements -- with enough budget for hardware.

Johanna

I personally use 3Delight for cartoon style arts and iRay for photo realistic works.

alexhcowley

Ati said:

Then there's the question of speed. You can only use CPU power to speed up 3Delight, and after a while that becomes an issue. You can use multiple videocards to speed Iray up (even cloud rendering at some point in the future), and as I understand it (I may be wrong, as I'm not too much into Iray) these can give you great speed improvements -- with enough budget for hardware.

This is correct. I used to render on a 3.5 ghz I5 but now I use a 4.00 ghz I7 with an MSI Nvidia 970 GPU.  On the old machine, one render took 15 hours to reach an acceptable quality. On the new one, it  took just over an hour.  Most of the speed improvement comes from the 970 GPU.

Cheers,

Alex.

SpottedKitty

Don't forget, there is no "must" — the new Iray renderer is only the new default setting, the old 3Delight renderer is still there if you switch back to it. If you're happy with 3Delight, keep using it. If you want to experiment with Iray to get your feet wet with the new options, you can do that.

fixmypcmike

DS will convert 3DL materials to Iray when you start a render, so they'll still work, although render time will be less if you apply the Iray base shader before rendering, and then you can also tweak the materials.

If you have any familiarity with real-world lighting (photography, cinematography, stage lighting, etc,) then Iray lighting will probably be more intuitive, and the real-world tricks you're familiar with are mostly transferable.  Personally, I find 3DL lighting more intuitive, and when I've tried to use Iray for situations in which the lighting effects I want should be easier in Iray, I often spend ages trying to get it to work and eventually give up and go back to 3DL.  So try both and see what works for you.

DDCreate

How does one apply the Iray Base Shader? So many different menus and places for things to hide.

Richard Haseltine

Use the Surface selection Tool, or the list in the Surfaces pane Editor tab, to pick one or more surfaces on a model then in Smart Content go to Shaders>Iray>!Iray Uber Base or in the Content Library pane DAZ Studio Formats>My DAZ 3D Library>Shader Presets>Iray>DAZ Uber>!Iray Uber Base and double-click the file.