So, What's The Big Deal?
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Well, basically, I finally did it. Or, rather, I'm finally doing it: The above image, as well as yesterday's, is Paula as rendered in RenderMan, inside Maya.
That's right: no more DAZ and it's horrible limitations and extreme slowness; no more iRay and it's... well, horrible limitations and extreme slowness.
I decided to do this after beginning to work on Paula's bath masturbation animation, in which I found myself reaching murderous levels of annoyance, thinking about killing myself - or killing
someone, at least.
The process was painstakingly slow, with me not managing to pose the character intuitively, and then produced horrible animation because, well, I couldn't watch what I was doing in real time.
And then there was the render time... Seriously? 20-30 minutes per frame on my machine?!
So I've had it, and decided to make the move to Maya - which I always promised, anyway - much sooner than planned.
And after trying the Maya native Arnold renderer, I've decided to stick with RenderMan.
The process does take time for each character, and I know that there are many assets of DAZ that I'll miss and will have to create by myself, but here are just three benefits that I've already noticed:
1) The images look freaking awesome!
2) My work, especially regarding animation and posing, is faster and more accurate in orders of magnitude - not to mention
fun!
3) The renders are
FAST. How fast? Well, the basic single-layered TIFF images from iRay in the last update, which was more or less the highest quality it could give, took me 20-30 minutes.
The above original multi-layered EXR took the same machine 1:46. Yap, that's less than two minutes.
On average, renders are 10-20 times (!!!) faster.
And they rock!
So, now the updates will be quicker.
And will look much better, and with tons of animation.
Cheers,
Mark,
Team XTZ