3Delight Discussion
Kendall Sears
Posts: 2,995
RAMWolff said:Hmmm, read all the way through this one. Been sort of interested but with DAZ Studio's render gains in the past couple of releases and it's ability to access all cores during the render then comparing that to using Octane, which are you saying for the free version, cuts you down to just using 2 cores to render??
The standalone 3Delight Free version available for download restricts the computer running it to 2 cores and searches for other versions of 3Delight running on the network. If it finds another, it will shut down.
The version that ships with D|S is not core locked, but does have the network abilities removed.
EDIT: The full 3Delight runs on D|S and Maya and Softimage. The cost for an additional dual core license is $400, with an unlimited core license selling for $1250.00. The yearly support cost starts at $190/yr.
EDIT2: The cost to upgrade from the Free Dual-Core to a Quad-core license is $250.
In all cases except for the Free, a license server must be running somewhere on the network and reachable by 3Delight.
Kendall
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Comments
I just happen to remember than the quad core price is $650 since I was looking at that today.
3Delight's pricing page is here
Kendall
If one downloads the Free version, then one can upgrade to a quad-core license for $250.
Kendall
ive been meaning to do some test renders but been busy rendering with other renderers tonight. Thanks for the info, I didn't know there was an upgrade price.
Stand-alone 3Delight pricing is professional-render-house-only pricing. It's out of the realm for hobiests. Dual core machines are ancient, and even quad cores are only mid-level machines now at best. I use Lux with network rendering, and the only quad core is my laptop. All the slaves I use are desktops in the office with 8-12 i7 cores (=16-24 threading contexts with hyperthreading, and Lux scales very well with hyperthreading). To use 3Delight with the same machines would probably cost ten grand and give worse results. (For me, anyway. There are some real masters that make 3Delight look very realistic, but it takes a lot of work. Lux is much easier to construct scenes for, in my opinion.)
But as it stands right now, Lux is significantly more limited than 3Delight. That's to be expected though, Lux is still maturing while Renderman is in its prime.
Kendall
Limited how? It's got a pretty comprehensive set of shader types available. Usually when I see people complain about Lux, it's because they're trying to do things that a physically unbiased renderer can't do, since it's not how an unbiased renderer works. (E.g., processing a render into separate diffuse, specular, etc., passes for merging in post.)
BINGO. There are many applications where one would need to render non-physical (non-nature) light. This would include pretty much all movies as there is significantly more light in a movie scene than exists in nature. Which is why 3Delight has been used in all of the Harry Potter and X-Men movies.
Unbiased rendering, for the time being, is not useful in production.
Kendall
agreed for the most part Its not necessary for a hobbits workflow but when you need to render something without crashing because your running out of RAM with Studio open it's a very viable option,
In that case, it would be cheaper to add more RAM given the current price for RAM than it would be to purchase the stand-alone 3Delight licenses. And the extra RAM would give more overall utility.
Now, usually I'm a big fan of more RAM....but depending on the machine 'cheap' is a relative term. For DDR3 RAM that could be true.
DDR2 RAM has seen and will continue to see a significant increase in price. And a dual or quad core DDR2 motherboard/CPU is more than capable of running Studio and the stand alone 3Delight.
Lets use my current machine for an example. It's a DDR2 dual core machine at 4 GB. If I wanted to double the memory it would cost me $150 to do so. But, with a free 3Delight stand alone license, I'm not losing any 'cores', but am gaining speed/available memory to use for the render. I can close down everything else, log out so I'm not even running X and render from the console (command line for all you Windows folks) and have very close to my full 4 gigs available for the render.
You can't get much cheaper than a free render engine running on a free OS...yes, for those that don't know, I run on Linux, Slackware being my preferred distro.
I just rendered this ...top image: S4.5 at about 4 mins ; bottom image: stand alone 3Delight about 2 mins (that included generating the RIB) for the standalone I didn't close or stop anything. it rendered in the background while everything else was still running and got done about half the time of the Studio render.
It saved that much time? :ohh: Wow. I know what I'm doing next.
Basically, most of the time in the standalone render was the dump to the RIB. It took about 30 to 45 seconds to actually render it. 32.34 seconds to be exact...
And now I can run that RIB any time I want and get the render done that quick.
I think part of the time used in Studio is that every time you render, it goes through and generates new shadowmaps, runs tdlmake on the textures and so on...(not 100% about tdlmake, but I am on the shadowmaps). It probably generates fresh point clouds if using them, too.
I just noticed one odd thing...the shadows in the stand alone render seem to be a bit 'softer'...now I'm not sure if that is because of jpg compression on the Studio render or if it is something 'real'. My first guess is compression .
EDIT to add:
Thinking about it a bit more, Studio treats every render as something 'new', where as, if you've got a rib and all the files needed, the stand alone uses them instead of caching them. That refreshing of the cache takes both memory and time. The standalone will read them from the hard drive, while Studio has to generate them, dump them to a temp folder and then read/use them.
Holy Friggen CRAP!!! I just tried it for myself.
You could knock me over with a feather right now.
It renders raytraced transparent hair like its nothing!!!
And something else...
You could set up a computer with just the 3Delight stand alone on it, on your network and dump the RIBs from Studio to it...and then run them on that machine, freeing up the machine with Studio on it. (But the same can be said for using any external renderer.)
Well, while this is the only computer I have on my network that I can use for rendering, I greatly appreciate you sharing that bit about the render speed difference.
And here are two done in Luxrender...top at two minutes, bottom at 4 minutes. I'm using a tweaked SPPM setting that I like a lot. As can be seen the Lux can stand to run a lot longer...and have the lighting tweaked.
This also sheds like on my PWtoon problem. Its a Studio Issue, because it renders as it should when I use 3Delight externally.
That's interesting.
Since the stand alone is just recompiling the actual shader, I wonder if something in Studio is coming into play to either prevent a recompile or some scripting change/error is preventing it...if you wanted to play around, you could check the sdl for it in the RIB folder and compare it to the one in Studio (if you can find it...they can be hard to find, without doing a complete system search)
Definitely true.
Welcome to the club. Want to go faster? Take Windows out of the equation. 3DL under Linux just FLIES!
EDIT: If you don't use the interactive viewer, the speed doubles over using the viewer. There's an issue with the TCP communications between renderdl and the i-display, especially if one is using firewalls.
Kendall
Definitely true.
Hey Alex!
Do we need to mention the extreme speed "some certain person" gets using the RiCurves? :-)
Kendall
Hey Alex!
Do we need to mention the extreme speed "some certain person" gets using the RiCurves? :-)
Kendall
No...
But under certain circumstances, I think it actually finishes rendering BEFORE you finish typing in the command to start it...:cheese:
Sometimes the disparity in the times isn't so great, but most of the time the stand alone is considerably faster. I'm using the latest stand alone version and I think it is even faster than any of the earlier 10.x versions. I'd like to try a stand alone 10.62, but it isn't out yet (or any other 10.6x version, for that matter), as it's the same version in the latest Studio beta release.
Ehm... mmmhhhh.... who that might be? :roll: ;-P
Nah! I tried Linux. Wasn't for me.
It isn't for everyone, that's true. But it does give you access to utilize a machine's full power. Boot into level 3. No GUI to get in the way, download the RIB/data, shut down the ethernet link, "nice" the 3delight render to ridiculous levels and watch 'er go! For the few seconds she runs at anyway :-).
Set up a bash script and queue up a lot of renders at those speeds...
-- example script to transfer 5 renders and render them and transfer back the results. can be done more efficiently.
#! /bin/bash
a = render1 render2 render3 render4 render5
for f in $a; do
scp -rp server:$f*; \
ifdown eth0; \
renderdl -q $f.rib; \
ifup eth0; \
scp render.tiff server:$f_collected/; \
done;
-- end script
Kendall
...that's only a viable solution if you are working in 64 bit. In 32 bit you are stuck to 2G so being able to render outside of the Studio application is a real plus.
If you are still using a 32-bit derelict, then you'd be better off putting your money towards a machine made in the last five years.
This depends on what you're trying to do. 32 bit machines make fine rendering boxes, and excellent NAS frames. Depending on the OS, they can make good 3D machines as well. There are a crap-ton (emphasis on crap) of 32bit DeLL machines running around. I even had a Rambus DeLL in for repair not too long ago.
Kendall
...a lot easier said than done at times.