Yeah I agree, it wasn't that long of a struggle I've thrown away more money on dumber things before, and I had a lot of fun with octane, and the community here.
I don't have the time to dive into the new beta, can you post some screenshots of the node setup of a typical material? As I said I always hated the old DAZ one with 324987 bricks to make a passable material. I hope it's a lot simpler now it's a "proper" shader.
Anyways... I guess Otoy has to decide wheter they want to go all in with the plugin, or just drop it.
GTX 780, 6 gigs of VRAM - Win 7 Home Premium 64 bits
The more I think about it, the more I wonder what this spells for Octane Render's future, and not just the Octane DS plugin. I mean, whether I was already a DAZ user or not, if there is a free unbiased renderer that works this well and fast, what does Octane Standalone offer in comparison? Anyone can import models from other 3D software into DAZ to render them for free now, so in just using DAZ as an unbiased GPU based renderer of projects from other software... it's like working with Octane Standalone but with handy gizmos to move lights around, and other GUI amenities.
Assuming that future products bought from DAZ will come with shaders optimized for Iray, I'm going to be spending a lot less time screwing around with materials and more time simply making art. I'm fantasizing now about a Stonemason Urban Sprawl 3 ready to render in Iray out of the box...
I'm sure after more use, I'll bump into some unforseen limitations of the new DAZ, but for now I feel like I woke up in the damn future.
Yeah, but remember it felt the same, when you first installed this plugin
Yeah, it sure did! And my hat is forever off to Otoy for that, bringing us what they do. I'm not ditching Octane, but I'm excited to see what looks like a whole new wave of technology coming to us. DAZ has a massive userbase, so a lot of incentive for content creators to develop great new tools and content quickly. Unbiased rendering is suddenly not just the cutting edge fringes, but about to be the mainstream.
Personally 50% of the reason I use octane is for node based materials editing etc, Iray has none of that, it's the same crappy DS material interface as always. I'm certainly no expert with Iray, I've spent about 30 minutes with it so far, but I whacked the Iray skin shader on Olympia HD for a comparison against my custom Octane shader and I'm less than impressed, it's really dry, flat and lifeless looking, there's almost no specular highlighting at all. I'm sure Iray can do better, but I have no idea how yet and as an example of a skin shader it sucks.
I tried to make the lighting the same just using the sun in Octane and it's using default OcDS settings for PT.
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I think Iray shows a lot of promise. From the time I got into DAZ and Poser, I always used an external renderer or plugin, because I need unbiased renders. I started with Kerkythea, then Reality, then Octane. Because I never rendered in DAZ, I never actually learned how to use DAZ's Surfaces menu or shaders. So I'm far from an expert on DAZ materials, but in DAZ 4.8 I see a Window Tab for Shader Builder, which looks like a node based material editor. I could be wrong, but it looks like a tool for building materials from scratch.
I played around with the settings of the Iray shader on Stephanie 6 here. Adjusted the specular settings in the "top coat" of the skin layer, bumped up the refraction weight, and a few other tweaks. I think the results look pretty good. At least - it looks promising to me, considering I'm just screwing around with it after having the software for less than a day. There are some effects with skin I can get in Octane that I'm not yet sure how to do here, but I know almost nothing about building DAZ shaders so I have some learning to do.
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Shader Builder requires black magic level knowledge of 3Delight unfortunately. Shader Mixer is the user level/human readable node based material editor, however it doesn't appear to have any Iray stuff in it. I think they're both tied together ( and 3Delight only), as I have a vague memory that shader builder is used to make stuff that can then be used in Shader Mixer, but don't quote me on that.
Basically, from what I can understand octane and iray. Based on the same APIS so more or less still be rendering the same,
I haven't had a lot of time to play with it to be quite honest with you, but I have a bad feeling that it is actually more advanced
Than octane for sss at my initial first tests.
A unlesson octane Dev would like to jump in and tell me otherwise,
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W7 64 bit |I7-3970X | GTX 780 X2(6GB) GTX 780TI X2 | 64 GB DDR3 RAM
Real Skin & real hair for Poser / DAZ Studio OctaneRender/iray - coming soon
SiliconAya wrote:Shader Builder requires black magic level knowledge of 3Delight unfortunately. Shader Mixer is the user level/human readable node based material editor, however it doesn't appear to have any Iray stuff in it. I think they're both tied together ( and 3Delight only), as I have a vague memory that shader builder is used to make stuff that can then be used in Shader Mixer, but don't quote me on that.
Shader Mixer does have Iray in it. (MDL Bricks are available.)
TRRazor wrote:I was also curious about this as the elephant in the room now is - in what respect will OctaneRender be inferior/superior to iRay and Octane use an almost 100% similar approach to rendering things in the GPU.
Out-of-core-rendering is supported as well.
We're already working on a dedicated shader solution for iRay
No... No you're not. You stated you were working on the SSS Hair shaders which still don't work.
I got a mountain of cash here, but not a dime more for you. Your s**t doesn't work.
----------------- Intel i7-4790K, Asus Z97-A, Corsair 32GB DDR3 1866MHz CL9, 2XAsus STRIX GTX980 DirectCU II OC 4GB, 4XSamsung 840 EVO Raid 10, Win 7 x64 Pro.
I've thrown away more money on dumber things before, and I had a lot of fun with octane, and the community here.
