I'm rebelling against Daz Iray... Basic OpenGL baby!

[OhWee]

So, I recently needed to create some die faces for an art project. Specifically, this one:

I rendered the figures featured on the D20 using the Basic OpenGL renderer. Damn that thing is fast sometimes. I'd hit render, and BOOM, done! I mean, literally. Hit render button, get message about not obscuring the viewport, click accept and the 'Render Done' window appeared. It took no time at all to render these, although setting up all of the poses took some time of course.



I rendered the scene above using the basic rendererer as well. It was pretty quick. I don't have a render handy at the moment, though, as I need to address a minor material issue and re-render the scene again. It took less than a minute to render with the Basic Open GL renderer though.

Anyways, I'm getting tired of the tyrrany of Iray. Waiting a long time for some of the more involved renders gets old. I'm really tempted to use the Basic Open GL renderer for one of my next projects, simply because it renders so fast, and it has a cartoon-ey quality.

Spending thousands of dollars on multiple GPUs just so you can render in Iray faster, well not everyone can afford that. Sure, there are other render engines as well, but yeah there's still the time quotient...

I'll be investing in more Nvidia cards soon, I'm sure, once 7nm Threadripper drops. But in the meantime, yeah life is too short!

Edit. This took about 2 seconds to actually render. I needed to apply some 3Delight shaders to the hair and silk cloth, to deal with transparency issues though.



It's not perfect, sure, but for an alternative storytelling art style, I"m REALLY tempted...

I'd need to get the hang of it, of course, and adjust to the rendering engine a bit.

 

[polywog]

 

[OhWee]

There's always this I suppose...

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8 x Titan RTX'es in a mining rig config. 24 GB of VRAM onboard each card.

'Only' $29,990 with free shipping!

 

[darlic]

Yeah that "case" seems to be designed ad hoc, no wonder it costs that much. /s

 

[polywog]

 

[I'm Not Thea Lundgren!]

There's always this I suppose...

View attachment 358697

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8 x Titan RTX'es in a mining rig config. 24 GB of VRAM onboard each card.

'Only' $29,990 with free shipping!

Only 32GB of RAM, I think I'll leave it then; shame I would've taken two of them!

 

[Niteowl]

Anyways, I'm getting tired of the tyrrany of Iray. Waiting a long time for some of the more involved renders gets old. I'm really tempted to use the Basic Open GL renderer for one of my next projects, simply because it renders so fast, and it has a cartoon-ey quality.



It's not perfect, sure, but for an alternative storytelling art style, I"m REALLY tempted...

I'd need to get the hang of it, of course, and adjust to the rendering engine a bit.

I will do my entire project on Intermediate Open GL (occasionally using 3Delight shaders if needed)

I've been experimenting with various rendering engines and trying to get a cartoonish look...and Open GL is perfect for that, and much faster of course. I can also get results that are better than the samples you showed, much better.
The amount of work required on Iray makes it almost impossible, imo, for a single dev to create good content for a game. In many games some images are brutally flawed.... or small in number etc

Truth is, using Iray effectively is an art. Very few amateur devs can do that well. In fact, I cannot think of a single Daz Iray game that I would say looks truly good..... taking good images with Iray just takes too long and it's very hard. Even good games like Desperate Awakenings, overall well done, have scenes that are so poorly done it's brutal

But people are sheep....they think using Iray will make their images better (wrong, since they can't use it, it only makes them worse) and so they all jump on the bandwagon and add more subpar games.
Intermediate Open GL will never look like photos, but neither do crappily made Iray renders, and a good GL render is far better than a poorly made Iray render.....imo. Superior speed also means we can add more content to the games....

SO yay, done with Iray crap, Open GL is my man!

 

[KiaAzad]

I'd say iray makes lighting and shadows much easier in exchange of computing time but it's often not worth the time it takes to render backgrounds with it. for characters with lots of curved surfaces and complex shadows sure, but backgrounds take forever and the result is a noisy mess. I prefer blender's eevee for them. it's real time and looks great

 

[Synx]

What people often forget as well, is that for realistic renders with Iray or Cycles (the similar blender engine) you need perfect skin textures. Subsurface scattering, roughness/glozy, and reflections is what makes a skin texture look realistic. Daz base one, or honestly any skin package I have seen, are far from that. Even in games with good lightning set-up the characters still has a bit of doll like appearance (Lack of imperfections in pretty much any character doesn't help either)

Eevee (And I assume OpenGl as well, but I don't have really any experience with it) 'cheat' on the scattering/glozy/reflect expats, and so your textures have to be less perfect for good results.

Yeah you will never be able to get complete realistic renders, but does a pretty well job on creating semi realistic renders in a fraction of time (on my pretty crap laptop it's around 20-30 times faster then cycles). That said blender released a video of a tiger rendering in eevee which looks pretty much like a real tiger

 

[recreation]

You can get really stunning results in 3DLight as well and it's faster than iRay. Just don't use SSS, bump, normal and displacement maps and you'll render much faster with good quality.

 

[BigBaboon]

Count me in for Iray Rebellion! Viva la Resistance!
Let me show some pics with 3delight:

 

[LenioTG]

OpenGL basically uses your viewport.
3Delight could look "good enough" for some people, but it needs specific materials for that purpose, using MDL ones does not give an acceptable render, IMHO.
There are people who have started this way, made money with their work, and upgraded their rigs, but that was a long time ago.

I have an RTX 2060. The Daz Studio 4.12 Public Build has Iray 2019, which improves by at least 30% the base performance of cards with RT cores.
I render everything when I'm not using my PC with render queue, so it doesn't really matter, but I usually set 1500 iterations or 95% convergence at quality 1, whatever is reached first.
This way, outdoor renders take around 4 minutes, and indoor ones take around 15/20 minutes.

The lighting has a huge impact, but since it's the hardest topic about Daz, I don't think I could summarize it in a forum post!

 

[BigBaboon]

some shots of mine so called "art"
rendered on "calculator" (9800 TI) till i pose and deform new chars. Total render time 25'54" + 2 mins on every pic in PS - stack layers in needed order + filtered color layer in ToonIt.

PS - need feedback on pics

 

[NaillMcDracken]

Count me in for Iray Rebellion! Viva la Resistance!
Let me show some pics with 3delight:

Hey, could you tell me how you managed to render the second image?
I need to create a comic type render, cartoon.

 

[Rich]

The newest version of Daz Studio apparently has a new rendering engine, called Filament. I haven't tried it yet, but it's supposed to give very quick renders, with, apparently some of the "non-photoreal' tradeoffs that 3Delight has.

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So, it might be a reasonable substitute for OpenGL, since (as we pretty much all know) the OpenGL renderer has issues with transparency.

 

[OhWee]

Thanks Rich
Filament does look rather promising, and it'd be nice to have something that's fast that looks somewhat more reasonable than basic Open GL...

There's a thread here where people have been sharing their renders and animations. It's the animation part that may be of the most interest to game developers around here (i.e. fast rendering times).

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