Daz 3Delight materials (RSL) sometimes look better than Iray (MDL) materials in Iray engine

[lawfullame]

For some products, it happens to me that 3Delight (RSL) materials look better in Iray renders than Iray (MDL) materials.
And rendering is not noticeably slower.
One such example is Audrina 2 hair.

Is there a problem with the use of RSL materials in Iray engine?

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Thats quite debatable to say at least



Rendering is faster because there is way less to render. That being said, that's an old asset, most up-to-date iray hair shader use a custom baked iray shader and do not use any pre made PBR model. That's why Out-Of-Touch hair are so good.

No problem using 3DL surface in Iray, iirc, it will just render diffuse & specular map, and bump/gloss if any. I used to cheat with it for very large scene and switch some hard surface to Daz Default shader (3DL default shader) to crank rendering time a bit, especially if you use some DoF. I will avoid for 'organic' surfaces or anything that need any kind of details tho.

 

[lawfullame]

Maybe it's setting the light in my scene. But some iray hair colors require many more iterations to look decent compared to their 3Delight counterpart.

 

[Rich]

If you do an iRay render of an object with 3Delight materials on it, Daz Studio attempts to do a conversion from 3Delight to iRay. (Maybe you know this.) How successful this is depends on the specific material. But I'm not surprised that the render time isn't much different, because there's probably not a huge difference between the "real" iRay material and the "converted 3Delight" material from a rendering complexity point of view. Oh, there will be some differences, and that probably accounts for your "RSL looks better" - it may be that the converted material is just better to your eye than the iRay-native one.

 

[lawfullame]

It also happened to me that the Iray version of some hair did not match their image at all in the preview, for example, that the hair, which should be black with a little purple, looks completely purple.
Probably some error in the setting of weights, or something like that.