Daz to Maya Workflow (and apparently Dev Log now)
- Thread starter nillamello
- Start date
I would also love for you to elaborate. There is still quite a lot I do not know about Daz's capabilities, but I'd like to hear more about how it is a complete modeling tool, so I can avoid having to use blender or maya for modeling tasks I would otherwise just do in Daz. Primitives, geometry editor, and morphs, sure, I'm well aware of those, but I don't know about anything that would make me consider it to be anything close to a complete modeling tool.
- May 3, 2018
- 1,403
- 1,013
yall talking about the daz limitation, meanwhile I'm more caught up on this,
Iray, is relatively 'modern' and new (anything post 2008 silicon slowdown), and for film makers, Iray is not considered 'good' at least when compared to other rendering engines, but that's because Iray was developed for a particular reason. Iray, was made for 2 reasons. First, it was Nvidia's first major dive into understanding how such render technology worked, and how they could improve their graphics cards so that they are more optimized as rendering cards, so that they could dominate the growing GPU compute boom happening around 2013 to 2015 when neural networks also started to switch to GPU computing as well. The second reasoning for developing Iray, was Nvidia expanding their software tools and trying to develop more content that was Nvidia GPU exclusive, so that again they can sell more GPU's. They've done the same with trying to develop their own game engines and what not, things to try to dominate the market so that everyone would be forced to use their GPU's and not AMD's GPU's.
Because Nvidia wanted Iray to dominate the market, the design of Iray followed 2 Key ideas. 1 to lock in a 'standard' for the rapidly increasing popularity of Physics Based Rendering technique or PBR pipeline that started to show up more publicly in programs post 2008. They saw PBR as the future and wanted to understand it and standardize it so that it can be used all across the board for different tools and projects, just like how unity HDRP and unreal engine utilize PBR materials but aren't using ray tracing or path tracing engines. When I say Iray is modern, it is because of trying to lock in this standard for PBR that other earlier engines didn't have at the time, now all engines uses PBR to some degree. When I'm saying its new, however, I'm only pointing it out as 'modern' when compared to the older programs, but people still use the old engines and even newer engines, Iray was more like that transition point.
The second major design choice and why it is perfectly fine to dislike Iray is that Iray prioritized speed. Which, if you've rendered with daz, doesn't actually seem that fast. But the point is, Iray focuses on speed while trying not to impact quality. So while Iray doesn't have the simplest model, it was designed with Nvidia GPU's in mind, and how to best leverage their GPU architecture. The fundamental concept of light transport is usually the same engine to engine, and while the implementation can be wildly different, it can still be surprising how different engines can feel. Iray, because it was designed to dominate the market, it needed to be popular. Nvidia couldn't expect to make the best engine, so they proritize speed, because what they thought would happen is that ray tracing would start to be put into everything, and they wanted that engine to be their engine (such as with substance painter, it uses Iray, which I think substance painter may also be an Nvidia program, i think? idk i never researched that bit of detail), And if they could get it looking good and still be the fastest, they thought they would win.
For the most part, Iray was a success. Since about 2018 however, render speeds started to improve all across the board as neural network denoiser software allowed for better denoising and sample approximation, but despite this, I haven't really seen any major changes in the industry demanding a need for render engines. It may be because Nvidia was just getting started with making ray trace GPU's, it may be because people having found raytrace games to be good enough yet to actually be a perk, its still too much of a performance hit, and dispite improvments with GPU's Nvidia hasn't really been able to release anything due to the pandemic and then sudden supply chain failure.
If i had to source any of this information, I'd probably have to look at my own posts from long ago just to remember the links, but as you may have guess, I had an interest in engine development for a good while. I don't make movies so I don't have an opinion on other render engines, no clue how they make different scenes 'feel.' I use blender and cycle (I make characters in daz, but don't actually make art), and just like with iray, if you toy with the settings you can really increases the speed of a render without impacting the quality too much. I like cycles because every now and then I like switching to branch path rendering (considered superior quality to ray/single-path tracing but slower), I like to toy with custom shaders for more exotic things (stylized characters, because I'm to lazy and unskilled to texture paint characters, I'll texture bake in the shading from light simulation), and when I can switch over to the EEVEE render instead because its so much faster and can be previewed in real time.
I know from past arguments, I can't actually expect anyone on this site the be light transport researcher or someone who develops render engines, so I'm just digging my own grave if I say this, but I'd never miss the chance.
Iray, is relatively 'modern' and new (anything post 2008 silicon slowdown), and for film makers, Iray is not considered 'good' at least when compared to other rendering engines, but that's because Iray was developed for a particular reason. Iray, was made for 2 reasons. First, it was Nvidia's first major dive into understanding how such render technology worked, and how they could improve their graphics cards so that they are more optimized as rendering cards, so that they could dominate the growing GPU compute boom happening around 2013 to 2015 when neural networks also started to switch to GPU computing as well. The second reasoning for developing Iray, was Nvidia expanding their software tools and trying to develop more content that was Nvidia GPU exclusive, so that again they can sell more GPU's. They've done the same with trying to develop their own game engines and what not, things to try to dominate the market so that everyone would be forced to use their GPU's and not AMD's GPU's.
Because Nvidia wanted Iray to dominate the market, the design of Iray followed 2 Key ideas. 1 to lock in a 'standard' for the rapidly increasing popularity of Physics Based Rendering technique or PBR pipeline that started to show up more publicly in programs post 2008. They saw PBR as the future and wanted to understand it and standardize it so that it can be used all across the board for different tools and projects, just like how unity HDRP and unreal engine utilize PBR materials but aren't using ray tracing or path tracing engines. When I say Iray is modern, it is because of trying to lock in this standard for PBR that other earlier engines didn't have at the time, now all engines uses PBR to some degree. When I'm saying its new, however, I'm only pointing it out as 'modern' when compared to the older programs, but people still use the old engines and even newer engines, Iray was more like that transition point.
The second major design choice and why it is perfectly fine to dislike Iray is that Iray prioritized speed. Which, if you've rendered with daz, doesn't actually seem that fast. But the point is, Iray focuses on speed while trying not to impact quality. So while Iray doesn't have the simplest model, it was designed with Nvidia GPU's in mind, and how to best leverage their GPU architecture. The fundamental concept of light transport is usually the same engine to engine, and while the implementation can be wildly different, it can still be surprising how different engines can feel. Iray, because it was designed to dominate the market, it needed to be popular. Nvidia couldn't expect to make the best engine, so they proritize speed, because what they thought would happen is that ray tracing would start to be put into everything, and they wanted that engine to be their engine (such as with substance painter, it uses Iray, which I think substance painter may also be an Nvidia program, i think? idk i never researched that bit of detail), And if they could get it looking good and still be the fastest, they thought they would win.
For the most part, Iray was a success. Since about 2018 however, render speeds started to improve all across the board as neural network denoiser software allowed for better denoising and sample approximation, but despite this, I haven't really seen any major changes in the industry demanding a need for render engines. It may be because Nvidia was just getting started with making ray trace GPU's, it may be because people having found raytrace games to be good enough yet to actually be a perk, its still too much of a performance hit, and dispite improvments with GPU's Nvidia hasn't really been able to release anything due to the pandemic and then sudden supply chain failure.
If i had to source any of this information, I'd probably have to look at my own posts from long ago just to remember the links, but as you may have guess, I had an interest in engine development for a good while. I don't make movies so I don't have an opinion on other render engines, no clue how they make different scenes 'feel.' I use blender and cycle (I make characters in daz, but don't actually make art), and just like with iray, if you toy with the settings you can really increases the speed of a render without impacting the quality too much. I like cycles because every now and then I like switching to branch path rendering (considered superior quality to ray/single-path tracing but slower), I like to toy with custom shaders for more exotic things (stylized characters, because I'm to lazy and unskilled to texture paint characters, I'll texture bake in the shading from light simulation), and when I can switch over to the EEVEE render instead because its so much faster and can be previewed in real time.
Some loose observations o/
Substance painter is an Adobe product now (never been under nvidia umbrella).
Lot of people conflate Daz/Uber shader for Iray itself, which make things difficult so to speak. You forgot that Iray is also a real-time engine (license I guess cost an arm).
I think the sole reason Nvidia bought Mental Ray (CPU based) - and therefor creation of Iray (GPU based), was to help the pivotal between CPU & GPU rendering (both engines shared a lot of similarities). I not sure I'm following you on the part Iray was designed for speed alone, nor they wanted it to make it a popular mastodonte, I think they wanted foremost their own internal engine for R&D.
I may be wrong but UE with lumens, use hybrid ray tracing (no more light baking!).
Industry wise, Cycle or Iray (or even UE for VFX) are imho still completely anecdoctical, 95% big prod using Autodesk pipeline with Renderman/Guerilla render for animation (Disney, DW & co), Arnold for the rest; imho trend is collaborative & real time framework to flatten (huge) budgets.
You could make some exotic shader within Daz with Iray if shader mixer was not such an abomination of an interface.
Unrelated but wanted to post that for while, some Unity guru with HDRP:
View attachment E3NcE_uUUAIogGA.mp4
Last edited:
- May 3, 2018
- 1,403
- 1,013
perhaps speed wasn't a priority, I may be remembering things wrong, but I do remember that compared to the other engines at the time I was looking into this kind of stuff, Iray was rather light weight compared to the rest. I'm not sure if 'lightweight' was referring to file size, computation size, and or speed, but that the common argument against iray was it was designed more for computers than it was for the eye (issues such as its render buffer limiting it to 8 f-Stops (a similar issue blender used to have before the usage of Filmic) while others had f-stop closer to 20 (with the human eye being 24) ). I just know that when I used to talk about iray more it was a common thing I came across and it kinda stuck to my mind.
I think hair is still a challenge for both unity HDRP and UE, I mean I have seen good examples, but what ever engine COD Infinite warfare is build on, they got hair perfected and I'd really like to see how they did it.
It's possible, from 2013 to today, engine itself changed a lot. I may be wrong but what I mean is Iray was more a bridge than the end game imho, whether it be to optimise their cards (cuda/rtx, mostly every no real-time engine followed), or you could also look at how Nvidia MDL spread after Iray creation. I remember first time I used Vray (also in unreal/megascan now), I was like wait a minute, I've already seen those bricks in my favorite pin-up simulator?!
lol, hair is why I switched from Unity to UE, I could get decent result with HDRP except for those hair, and god know I tried but I suck. You can 'make' already crazy good hair/eyes cannibalising MetaHuman with UE (When UE5 doesn't crash lol).
Last edited:
While it may not apply to all daz hair assets, I actually thought 3delight (daz version) was doing a better (but slower) job than iray.
Hmm debatable, debatable. I also tend to use only a very small fraction of cool quality assets when using Daz/Iray. But I agree 3DL got a lot of pointing finger because it's old, but it's quite a fun engine to use, way funnier than Daz/Iray imho (you can get also some correct result with a bit of love).
Last edited:
- Sep 5, 2017
- 122
- 370
Decided to instead do maya -> blender (eevee)
Using Maya for animation and using blender to render the final scene
Anyone know why blender messes up her right arm?
Using Maya for animation and using blender to render the final scene
Anyone know why blender messes up her right arm?