OTOY Forums

TRRazor wrote:3.09 seems to just be around the corner with AI-based desnoising functions.
I don't have the facebook link here atm, but when this feature does what first tests suggest it should be doing, then Iray can certainly pack up shop, since it is already much slower atm than Octane.

In most cases, I lose as much or more time to material tweaking as I save from Octanes speed. For me, Iray isn't going anywhere until Octane offers MDL reading / conversion that has visual fidelity with what Iray produces. I'd rather start an Iray render and walk away knowing the Iray render is faithful to the material designer's intent than sit endlessly tweaking hoping to get close.

Perhaps my case is special. Most renders I make take 45 minutes to an hour. Maybe even two hours if I go really high res. Octane might cut that by 30, 40, even 50%, but I'll spend so much of that "saved" time tweaking materials that it ends up being even or a net loss.

Don't get me wrong: I love Octane and what they are doing with the product. I also own the Modo plugin. That said, a denoiser doesn't solve MY problem nor render Iray obsolete. Proper MDL support and integration with Daz Studio or lack of it in the Octane 3.x series will decide if Octane 4 has a place in my workflow. There are a number of other options to consider if Octane ends up only being useful for me in Modo.

On another note, TRRazor: I really love your Redspec textures for Daz/Octane! I can always count on those looking superb with a minimum of tweaking.

In most cases, I lose as much or more time to material tweaking as I save from Octanes speed. For me, Iray isn't going anywhere until Octane offers MDL reading / conversion that has visual fidelity with what Iray produces. I'd rather start an Iray render and walk away knowing the Iray render is faithful to the material designer's intent than sit endlessly tweaking hoping to get close.

Perhaps my case is special. Most renders I make take 45 minutes to an hour. Maybe even two hours if I go really high res. Octane might cut that by 30, 40, even 50%, but I'll spend so much of that "saved" time tweaking materials that it ends up being even or a net loss.

Likewise. Octane is certainly faster once I'm able to render. But to set up the materials takes a long time. If one is only doing portraits, I supposed that isn't an issue since we have Redspec's fantastic shaders. But for everything else it's a crap shoot.

My 2 cents here... but iRay is just the render flavor of the day.

When I started in Daz studio, nothing was compatible with Daz. Everything was poser, and I have a lot of poser content. (I still buy and use a fair bit of it). So, for me I started having to edit everything to make it work. It wasn't much of a leap to get into Reality for rendering, but computation time was a big concern, but the renders were phenomenal. (Under the hood, I didn't have a lot of control over Reality Shaders, so it was still an effort to get the effects I wanted.)

I switched to Octane not just because it was fast, but because I find the Node Graph Editor intuitive and easy to work with. Probably the only thing I'm annoyed with is my own lack of understanding with specular materials.

As I said, iRay is just flavor of the day, it could be replaced, or, *gasp*, get updated. This already happened, rendering older iRay shaders problematic.

I did a few renders for my daughter last night, and I put about 2 hours into texture work before I was happy. I then did 3 variant renders. As luck would have it nothing I used was iRay compatible, so I'm not sure how using it would improve my life.

I think one of the big barriers for me and anything Daz, is that I just can't find documentation which seems to get me going.

I'll definitely buy this plugin once MDL is supported - it would take too much time right now to convert an 'optimized for iray' scene to 3Delight and then have to transfer to Octane, but I do love
the stereo 360 rendering options in Octane, so I'm really looking forward to the update

I don't do that. Octane understands iRay well enough it seems. I just start working on Octane Materials right away.

I don't do that. Octane understands iRay well enough it seems. I just start working on Octane Materials right away.

That hasn't been my experience. But to each their own!