Anyone use Daz3d with Octane or Redshift?

[OneManVN]

My two cents as an Octane user.

Pro: Demonic speed... Here is a quick comparison. I decided to switch over to Octane from DAZ because I had neared suicide with how slow DAZ was with 2x 2080 GPU's. Which means I had to redo my entire update from DAZ to Octane. Rendered all 248 renders in Octane in a weekend.

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[Turitar707]

Are you guys still using octane for rendering? I was thinking about to give it a try

 

[Domiek]

Are you guys still using octane for rendering? I was thinking about to give it a try

It's free for one card so give it a try. Much faster than Iray but will cost you $30 a month if you want to use multiple cards.

 

[Turitar707]

Thanks for your feedback Domiek...
I have one RTX2060...but rendering drives me crazy with daz3d... takes hours...and have to work with backdrops all the time...

 

[Domiek]

Thanks for your feedback Domiek...
I have one RTX2060...but rendering drives me crazy with daz3d... takes hours...and have to work with backdrops all the time...

Even with Iray and a 2060 you shouldn't have to spend hours for rendering. Prob need to look into optimizing your scene better. Octane is a lot faster in general and renders low light conditions *lightspeeds* faster than Iray. However, expect to spend a good month learning how Octane and node systems work.

Another good thing with Octane is that you can non-destructively resize texture resolutions and optimize your scene to fit onto the 2060 memory without actually creating copies of the textures like you would with the Daz optimization plugin.

 

[Turitar707]

Thank you so much for your answer and sharing your experience. I have already the Szene Optimizer for daz3d. Maybe it might be better to learn with what I have now..lighting and shades ......before I will jump to octane..but I have bookmarked all here...for future

 

[Domiek]

Thank you so much for your answer and sharing your experience. I have already the Szene Optimizer for daz3d. Maybe it might be better to learn with what I have now..lighting and shades ......before I will jump to octane..but I have bookmarked all here...for future

Best decide what you want now. Whatever you learn from lighting and shading in Iray is drastically different than Octane. The material system alone is night and day, especially the node system. Octane will be faster in the long run but in terms of immediate use, there's a learning curve and conversion phase that will delay you.

 

[Turitar707]

Thank you so much Domiek. I will stick to your advice until I really understand what are the limits of iray and daz3d and what causes it. Practise...practise...I guess *smirks

 

[lancelotdulak]

I liked some things about octane a lot and kept a subscription for 6 months or so. I think you might be right at the "cutoff point" where it becomes Definitely worth it. It (at least in theory) will use out of core memory which gets to be a big deal. With my 1070.. its nto really worth it to me for multiple reasons. If i only had a 1060 id definitely use octane. You Will have to learn how it does texturing and you'll have to learn its way of texturing and shading. Having said that, its interface makes that transparent.. its not hidden behind 12 layers of menus. Please note though it's not universally better. It does rendering differently (thus the speed boost). Imho irays final renders are usually better. But like the above poster said..internal renders with octane are MUCH faster because of how iray handles lighting

 

[Domiek]

I liked some things about octane a lot and kept a subscription for 6 months or so. I think you might be right at the "cutoff point" where it becomes Definitely worth it. It (at least in theory) will use out of core memory which gets to be a big deal. With my 1070.. its nto really worth it to me for multiple reasons. If i only had a 1060 id definitely use octane. You Will have to learn how it does texturing and you'll have to learn its way of texturing and shading. Having said that, its interface makes that transparent.. its not hidden behind 12 layers of menus. Please note though it's not universally better. It does rendering differently (thus the speed boost). Imho irays final renders are usually better. But like the above poster said..internal renders with octane are MUCH faster because of how iray handles lighting

Iray doesn't have a better final render. None of the engines have inherently better results with the final image. It all comes down to the user choices and engine settings. Iray looks the best with minimal effort because Daz assets were created specifically for Iray. There's very little the user has to do to get a good result. You don't need to understand much about the materials at all, the Daz vendor did all that work for you. Additionally, Iray (at least how it's implemented in Daz) doesn't have a lot of options to change its behavior.

As you mentioned earlier, you can set any of the engines to render for a month straight if you'd like and it would clear up any noise. However, we're making games and speed is king. You'll even see some of the top games here have some noisy renders because they realize that 10 renders at 80% quality are much more important than having 1 perfect final render. Octane has some smart tools that let you get that 80% quality much faster than Iray, which just brute forces everything and takes much longer.

At the end of the day, it really comes down to your needs as a dev. Are you just going to make a game as a hobby in Daz for fun, whenever you're in the mood, or will you be really diving into the 3D world? If it's just a casual hobby, there's absolutely no need to ever leave Iray. If you're serious about production, Octane wins hands down in speed in the long run. You will spend a month learning the basics of the node system, then many more months if not over a year learning how materials work (this isn't even Octane specific).

I've now spent over a year in Octane but am no longer using it. I've moved out of Daz into Blender so now there's no reason for me to use Octane since eCycles is just as fast (if not faster) and is already perfectly integrated into Blender. Now I have to learn how Cycles handles materials because the auto-convert from Iray to Cycles doesn't look good without tweaking. Fortunately, that year learning Octane has made it much easier to switch to Cycles since now I don't have to re-learn the basics of how materials work, I only need to learn how Cycles does it.

TLDR: If you're going to just casually play with Daz in your spare time here and there, stick with Iray. If you see yourself really diving into this stuff for the next few years and getting serious with 3D, you're going to have to learn how materials work eventually. Time invested now will save you thousands of render hours in the future once you move out of Iray. I would rather not make games any more than have to use Daz with Iray again, it's just too slow.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Iray doesn't have a better final render. None of the engines have inherently better results with the final image. It all comes down to the user choices and engine settings. Iray looks the best with minimal effort because Daz assets were created specifically for Iray. There's very little the user has to do to get a good result. You don't need to understand much about the materials at all, the Daz vendor did all that work for you. Additionally, Iray (at least how it's implemented in Daz) doesn't have a lot of options to change its behavior.

As you mentioned earlier, you can set any of the engines to render for a month straight if you'd like and it would clear up any noise. However, we're making games and speed is king. You'll even see some of the top games here have some noisy renders because they realize that 10 renders at 80% quality are much more important than having 1 perfect final render. Octane has some smart tools that let you get that 80% quality much faster than Iray, which just brute forces everything and takes much longer.

At the end of the day, it really comes down to your needs as a dev. Are you just going to make a game as a hobby in Daz for fun, whenever you're in the mood, or will you be really diving into the 3D world? If it's just a casual hobby, there's absolutely no need to ever leave Iray. If you're serious about production, Octane wins hands down in speed in the long run. You will spend a month learning the basics of the node system, then many more months if not over a year learning how materials work (this isn't even Octane specific).

I've now spent over a year in Octane but am no longer using it. I've moved out of Daz into Blender so now there's no reason for me to use Octane since eCycles is just as fast (if not faster) and is already perfectly integrated into Blender. Now I have to learn how Cycles handles materials because the auto-convert from Iray to Cycles doesn't look good without tweaking. Fortunately, that year learning Octane has made it much easier to switch to Cycles since now I don't have to re-learn the basics of how materials work, I only need to learn how Cycles does it.

TLDR: If you're going to just casually play with Daz in your spare time here and there, stick with Iray. If you see yourself really diving into this stuff for the next few years and getting serious with 3D, you're going to have to learn how materials work eventually. Time invested now will save you thousands of render hours in the future once you move out of Iray. I would rather not make games any more than have to use Daz with Iray again, it's just too slow.

In defense of Iray, I feel the the whole argument of speed fall kinda flat if you stay out of long animations. If the goal is creating a pron VN (a succession of static scenes), it's not unusual to be several renders above you writing/coding (at least for me ), sometimes hundreds above if you have a good workflow, even with Iray. Today with RTX cards, a simple HD scene render in ~30 min in average if no less, between ~45min and ~1h30min for most complex ones with no tricks. Not sure why some people are so much obsessed with rendering time, especially while most rendering time is done overnight, seems to be like an overblown problem.

The whole point of using Daz & Iray, imo, is that there is very little to no parasitism between a scene idea and it's execution, as you have terrabytes of assets to choose from and a solid engine to render with no in-between. Most time consuming is not rendering the scene itself but finding perfect assets that fit the idea you got, with the back and forth that this involves. I can't even imagine my workflow if I have to prepare every assets for blender/octane I would potentialy use for a scene. I mean you can prepare to some extent, but it's still a severe restrictive barrier for creativity & the ideas you may want to try. Can't count how many time I added last minutes prop/change here and there to make the scene looks nicer if not redone everything.

Sure most people won't touch Iray material, as Daz studio entry barrier is low (which is good), but once you do you can reach great level of photo-realism (I think the work of people like jeff_someone or cwsmlk speak for themselves) and they're mostly the same maps you will use on any PBR engine. I feel that time you could have spend directly on texturing for iray, you instead spend it trying to make an iray-made skin looks at least alright in another engine.

So far, if the goal is making a succession of static scenes with great waifus, I don't really see the point of switching from Iray, outside wanting/need well-paced long animations or wanting to do/learn more 3D wise, even more if your only point is "I render this in 30min instead of 45". Or you have really planned everthing from A to Z and locked yourself into that. Creativity and workflow wise I'll take Daz/Iray flexibility over faster render. My 2 cents.

 

[Domiek]

Not sure why some people are so much obsessed with rendering time, especially while most rendering time is done overnight, seems to be like an overblown problem.

I can't even imagine my workflow if I have to prepare every assets for blender/octane I would potentialy use for a scene. I mean you can prepare to some extent, but it's still a severe restrictive barrier for creativity & the ideas you may want to try. Can't count how many time I added last minutes prop/change here and there to make the scene looks nicer if not redone everything.

If the way your workflow has no dependency on render time, then that's great. You will save a lot of money on never having to buy another card again. Although it's a unique situation as I've never heard of someone saying they're happy with their render time.

It doesn't make sense to call having more options as restrictive. As I mentioned earlier, casually using Daz as a hobby makes Iray ideal. Anything more than that and frustrations will develop. Spending 18 hours to render a 30 frame animation and you're pulling all of your hair out.

 

[FranceToast]

I've now spent over a year in Octane but am no longer using it. I've moved out of Daz into Blender so now there's no reason for me to use Octane since eCycles is just as fast (if not faster) and is already perfectly integrated into Blender. Now I have to learn how Cycles handles materials because the auto-convert from Iray to Cycles doesn't look good without tweaking. Fortunately, that year learning Octane has made it much easier to switch to Cycles since now I don't have to re-learn the basics of how materials work, I only need to learn how Cycles does it.

I am seriously impressed you went from Daz/Iray to Daz/Octane and now to Blender all while keeping your game going-I really need to get my shit together, lol.

 

[Domiek]

I am seriously impressed you went from Daz/Iray to Daz/Octane and now to Blender all while keeping your game going-I really need to get my shit together, lol.

Thanks for the kind words! Switching to Octane wasn't that bad because there are great devs here who were very helpful with the process like Philly and Cardinal.

Daz to Blender was much harder to solve and only possible because Oz went along on that journey and we split the workload on figuring out the workflow. Otherwise it would have taken months to do by yourself. F95 really is a good community for collaborating and learning.

 

[badsantagirl]

If speed is important, than Prorender 2.2 has a baised photorealism mode now. It's like a combination of Eevee and Cycles. Super fast even on a lower end GPU while the result is really good.

 

[Erogrey]

I've moved out of Daz into Blender so now there's no reason for me to use Octane since eCycles is just as fast (if not faster) and is already perfectly integrated into Blender.

Hi there!
Are you using Blender for heavy animations (24-30 frames)?
Importing whole scene/asset from Daz and setup materials? Hmm. Can say Blender now is very powerful tool, but... How much time you need to setup complicated scene from 0 to final acceptable render?

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

If the way your workflow has no dependency on render time, then that's great. You will save a lot of money on never having to buy another card again. Although it's a unique situation as I've never heard of someone saying they're happy with their render time.

It doesn't make sense to call having more options as restrictive. As I mentioned earlier, casually using Daz as a hobby makes Iray ideal. Anything more than that and frustrations will develop. Spending 18 hours to render a 30 frame animation and you're pulling all of your hair out.

There is no real mystery on workflow: like mostly everyone I guess, one instance that render, one other to create scene, heavy lifting overnight. If I want to Nvlink another card it's more for the shared VRAM pool than necessarily render time (even I would be quite happy with). I don't say it can't be a problem, I'm sayin it's an overblown one, especially if you don't make much animations like the vast majority of porn VN. And they're not really option if that imply putting extra-effort on every assets, more like another layer of work (that could be spent elsewhere like texturing or postprocess).

 

[eric78]

Hi there

Where to start there, I personally use like Octane, Redshift, Cycles(E-Cycles) and Poser SuperFly or Corona Renderer amd in some cases I use V-RAY Next in 3DS Max

I don't render in DS at all, not sure why, but I just hate DS UI, usually I export everything from DS and start to render in Blender or Poser or 3DS Max or Cinema4D, I tried several times IRAY with which I'm still unimpressed

When it comes to speed, Redshift hands down is fastest renderer, E-Cycles is in my view second, Octane third, Cycles/V-RAY Next is 4th, IRAY/SuperFly is 5th and Corona is last but you need take to account, Corona is CPU based renderer, bit still is quite good and usually on 5930k render at 1440p takes me 45 minutes to 1 hour

I tried Arnold Renderer and I quite like it, just is way to slow if you are comparing Arnold Renderer to other render engines

If you are going for realistic look then shaders will play big part of the render, lighting as well and then props, I usually pay more attention to props and textures and usually I prefer to use non DS or Poser props like environments etc, usually I use Evermotion or any other good props which are highly detailed or are just better but there are cases where I rather use props from Poser or DS which looks OK just I rework materials, use different textures and add bump maps etc

With skin shaders that's difficult to recommend, in Poser I use EZSkin which does great job for me, bit still there are few tweaks needed to have nice materials, in Octane I use Mix material for skin which does work but still not very happy with skin, Redshift that's different and there I still can't get good looking skin because of DS or Poser textures are not the best and you are really need to edit them in Photoshop but they're usable just they don't look good, but that's my view on this, Blender E-Cycles or Cycles to you can try few free plugins like mcjTeleBlender which I use and works for me there, Corona Renderer its quite easy to use and usually I can get out of box nice renders and skin SSS is quite nice there

 

[Domiek]

Hi there!
Are you using Blender for heavy animations (24-30 frames)?
Importing whole scene/asset from Daz and setup materials? Hmm. Can say Blender now is very powerful tool, but... How much time you need to setup complicated scene from 0 to final acceptable render?

I wasn't able to figure out a way to animate in blender and bring it back to daz. What I'm doing is a full blown migration to blender and only using Daz for exporting figures/props. So setup time is however long the initial workflow will take figuring out and preparing your environments/char. For me it was 2 months total but that work was split between 2 people. After that, it's straightforward like Daz.

There is no real mystery on workflow: like mostly everyone I guess, one instance that render, one other to create scene, heavy lifting overnight. If I want to Nvlink another card it's more for the shared VRAM pool than necessarily render time (even I would be quite happy with). I don't say it can't be a problem, I'm sayin it's an overblown one, especially if you don't make much animations like the vast majority of porn VN. And they're not really option if that imply putting extra-effort on every assets, more like another layer of work (that could be spent elsewhere like texturing or postprocess).

It's not overblown, it depends on your use case. Octane has a near instant live viewer. You unpause the render and instantly see how your scene will look. You can move the camera and lights in real time. This is a huge time saver when working with lights and reflections or to just to check to see that everything is rendering correctly. With Iray, it takes a while for a render preview to occur. Idk how much Iray has improved over the past year, but for me it would take over a minute just to launch a preview in the Viewport, which was very laggy. Octane also handles low light conditions much better than Iray. A night time scene took me over an hour to render in Iray. That same scene took less than 10 mins in Octane. The difference can be huge.

Adding extra effort on every asset is a non-issue. It takes seconds to quickly adjust the parameters as Octane auto converts Iray material. The main effort is the initial investment of learning how it works. Additionally, Octane has its own database of materials that you can apply on any surface. Plus, this sort of initial tweaking is usually done once since most games set up environments once and then reuse them throughout the story.

Again, Iray is not bad. It's the ideal engine in Daz because all of the assets are created specifically for it. That's why I keep stressing that if you wish to continue using Daz as a hobby on the side, there's no point in switching to Octane or any other engine. If you wish to continue growing and advancing in the 3D world, you will hit some obstacles (like ridiculously long animation render times). Everything can be done in Daz that can be done everywhere else. The only thing other tools will solve is speed, efficiency and ease of use.

Quick example would be cloth sim. Dforce can accomplish some amazing things but it's slow and takes a lot of time to figure out the correct settings to get great results. Marvelous Designer cloth sims are real time and don't explode. It takes me less time to export into MD, simulate and import back into Daz than it would to do it all with Dforce. Depending on your goals however, it may not be worth the $500 cost of MD.

I'm simply explaining the pros/cons and effort required for the goals since Turitar asked about Octane specifically and mentioned that render times are a huge issue for him currently.

 

[lancelotdulak]

If the way your workflow has no dependency on render time, then that's great. You will save a lot of money on never having to buy another card again. Although it's a unique situation as I've never heard of someone saying they're happy with their render time.

It doesn't make sense to call having more options as restrictive. As I mentioned earlier, casually using Daz as a hobby makes Iray ideal. Anything more than that and frustrations will develop. Spending 18 hours to render a 30 frame animation and you're pulling all of your hair out.

Ive been quiet because i dont feel like arguing. But your saying cycles is faster than iray..or other renderers etc blows my mind. About half of what you posted in your original post is utter bullshit. Ive used about 6 renderers.. and know the difference between them. And i actually know why octane is faster in some situations... just a tip it involves a pretty big compromise. Another tip what MD and Dforce do is radically different.