DAZ Studio Pro BETA - version 4.8.0.4! IRAY

[gaazsi]

what about the most interesting part, renderspeed?

[Hydra]

My bet is that it will be stable in 6 months.

It feels quite stable to me right now. I've playing with it since yesterday, and had only one crash (actually it wasn't a crash, but a long hangup, so I just quit and rebooted it). That is much better than the stability of the Octane DS plugin, where I have to save my project before copy/pasting a material because copying or pasting a material seems to crash it about 25% of the time. And Iray has many of the missing features I've been wishing would come for the Octane plugin.

Given that they are still changing it...

I'm actually talking about getting all 'other' features in there, besides basic shaders. I'm a tad jealous if it has a decent skin shader for Daz though. How's falloff shading working? Does it do any post work? How are the emission textures? How's their SSS?

[Squirtle]

what about the most interesting part, renderspeed?

I haven't done any sort of scientific test, but the speed feels basically like what we're used to with Octane. Iray uses your graphics card and your CPU, so that might give it an edge in horsepower. The attached image rendered for two minutes, lit by an HDRI and a spotlight. Check out another cool feature - a shadow catcher, so that my figure looks like it's standing on the sidewalk of this HDRI background, not just floating in midair.

I'm actually talking about getting all 'other' features in there, besides basic shaders. I'm a tad jealous if it has a decent skin shader for Daz though. How's falloff shading working? Does it do any post work? How are the emission textures? How's their SSS?

I haven't gotten to try everything out yet, such as emission textures, or falloff shading. It has settings for IOR, which is related to falloff, so hopefully we can do things with falloff in it. The only SSS I've played with so far is on the skin shader, and it looks good. I haven't actually played with it yet, just left it at the default settings. But there are a lot of intriguing sounding SSS parameters I've never seen before, so it'll be fun to try them out.

edit - oh yeah, and postwork - it doesn't have camera profiles or glare and bloom like Octane does. However it does have gamma, exposure, saturation, vignetting, and some others. (I'll post a screengrab of the options) Also there is something called the Render Editor, which looks like an interesting gadget for mixing renders together in post. Looks like it is meant to do a lot of the post-processing and layering that is usually done in 2D programs like Photoshop.

[wendyluvscatz]

well I have not found it anywhere near as fast as Octane so not going to be abandoning OR4DS anytime soon

[ch0pper]

iray has render passes also. but on first beta release its great.
i give it 6 months. then it will be stable

[garand3d]

So happy to see this sudden burst of energy from everyone over DS+IRay.
More shaders, more post-process effect settings, render passes, and for me most importantly is the prospect of finally be able to render out my animations using a fast unbiased renderer. It was a task I reserved for OcDS to do the honor but alas look at the state of it now. I've waited long, too long.
I would imagine since IRay is fully integrated into DS it won't suffer from the same problem with animation that OcDS currently is... right?
I'm cautiously optimistic about it but I'm going to wait until the general public release to test it out.

[gold]

but alas look at the state of it now


what is the state of it now? My last post notes that I couldn't update version 1 - the update
failed.

I have refused to go to version 2!

[ch0pper]

No one at otoy has confirm this but I would say pretty much because of IRAY. This plug-in will not see any more updates.
(Again, unless a developer from otoy) would like to jump in and say otherwise

[3dmania]

Just made a few test renders and I am impressed. Sure its not on par with Octane yet, but its FREE!!

Also the new layout and design of Daz 4.8 is really nice. I still have not found where all the shaders are made for Iray but think that DAZ will deliver these asap.

I also fear that this release marks the end of the Daz3d plugin...

[asennov]

Spent a night testing.

• failed to crash it single time
• ported one of my characters to Iray materials and I have to say it looks better (SSS is definetly better) but it took TIME to test and understand (hopefully ) DAZ material options
• materials by themselves give much more options. They are based on Iray .MDL format, which is plain text file with shaders, currently DAZ Uber material is hard-coded but there is announce from DAZ that there will be tools to allow to integrate user-defined .MDLs. Being a programmer I always prefer text-based shaders over nets of nodes
• no statistics about used VRAM yet so if there are too many textures it smoothly falls off to CPU-only rendering (instead of crashing again )
• clipping planes work! So now you can shoot in small rooms without tricks and with correct lighting
• IES lights are much more straightforward than in Octane
• no more missing white materials, ever!
• longer warmup time before render due to texture compression I guess, there are settings in render options that affect it. Currently you cannot manually select level of compression for individual textures like in Octane, so some materials may look less detailed
• ANIMATION WORKS!
• GEOGRAFTING WORKS! Even in most tricky combinations. You have to manually setup materials for geografted parts thou
• speed-wise they are more or less the same if you configure Iray to perform set amount of iterations, but Iray has so called 'Quality' mode where it checks how image is converged and may stop render earlier, also it seems that Iray has better pixel filter so image looks less noisy (on my personal view). But I suspect that for animation this 'Quality' mode has to be turned off or it will differentiate between the frames (need more investigations in this).
• finally I can return to workflow where all my computers render in parallel (even if machine doesn't have NVidia card it still can render using CPU), and there is no need to buy costly licenses for that
• Maxwell cards are supported, 780 GTX also rock
• cannot yet decide if motion blur works right or not, currently there is only one option for it in render settings, maybe there will be more later, it's BETA after all
• integration is done the right way. No invisible extra nodes, no cryptic material data in .DUF files, geometry piped into renderer using legal mechanisms, IPR is where it should be (not in separate window). The only wish is ability to directly reference .MDL but they will solve it one way or another if they want to sell shader packs for Iray

DS Octane plugin is in big, big trouble. At least on my boxes