I was spending some time this morning looking into render engines.

Nvidia Iray indicates their connections with Daz3d, which any daz user has knowledge of.  That doesn't mean they are using it, but it is built into Daz3d studio.

Separate and apart from Daz3d there is mention of it's use with Substance Designer... Hmmmm
I am very curious about this, especially since I was looking into purchasing the Substance Designer pack offered by RL.
Iray may not be the best compared to some renderi engines, but nVidia is the creator of some of the best Graphic cards.
So, I would naturally think they had some real clever hooks built into the Iray for use with the Nvidia hardware and GPU memory.

Here is link to the nVidia page   Nvidia Iray Link

The workhorse render engine of all time = Octane.
I found this

Link to Octane purchase - Select Plugins to view

These render engines us GPU memory very efficient is my understanding. 
Any use of these render engines possible in the future with Iclone is my question.

Allegorithmic's recent Substance Designer "Procedural Material" contest was sponsored by Nvidia.  All renderings of the substances submitted to the contest had to be rendered using the new Iray plug-in to Substance Designer.

It's worth noting that Iray does not require an Nvidia card.  It will run also on the CPU (fully functional, I believe, just more slowly).

Nvidia really provided some sweet prizes.  The 1st-place prize was a $5,000 Quadro M6000 video card.  :w00t:

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

I appreciate your comments.

Yet, I'm lost about how Substance Designer/Iray fit into Iclone rendering.
Does this mean if you have Substance Designer you can render your iclone projects with Iray in some way?
Substance Designer is on sale RL- Cyber Monday so now would be a good time for some solid information for buying the Substance Designer.
I own Genetica Pro version so I can do pretty well all I want with textures and materials.
Being able to use IRAY would be a reason to look serious at Substance Designer.

Substance Designer uses iray in its own 3d viewport much the same way that it is implemented in the Daz Studio viewport.  Really has nothing to do with the 3d viewport in iClone which doesn't use iray (yet).  I could be totally wrong, but that's the way I understand it.

Yeah nothing iray from the substance designer.   What we get from that is the texturing abilities tailored to iclone if you own iclone 6 load one of the free substances from the thread where a few of us did conversions.    
https://forum.reallusion.com/261137/Substance-Outputs

I also think we got some free substances from iclone its under materials there is some 3Dblocks that use substances.  I purchased the substance package early on so i dont remember if we got any freebies without it.. I think we did but they were very basic anyhow that is substances though.  

The character creator is also using substances .. substances are procedural textures (more or less) 

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"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Dr. Seuss

Maybe a better question should be. 

Is it worth it to buy it?

Cyber Monday on sale $109.

Here is link... http://www.reallusion.com/store/product.html?p=ic#substance

I like it, but the actual tool is quite complicated however the 200 substances alone is a good value.  Plus with minimal effort you can learn to convert substances that others make to make them iclone friendly.    It also bakes and combines normal maps and displacement maps etc for models.     

It really depends would you use the tool? at that price its good just for the textures you get and the tool is almost you know free.      However learning to use the designer properly it takes time and its basically for the creation of procedural textures with a few added utilities that would help you if you are a modeller.   

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"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Dr. Seuss

Hell yeah,  Substance Designer is worth every nickel (we don't have pennies anymore).  Especially if your using iClone and/or Character Creator, both of which use Substances. 

Just to add, Substance designer is used in Unity and Unreal Engine as well

You got me with the "Hell Yeah".  I plan to use CC alot in the next couple months, hopefuly years.  It may not work for my specific need at this time, but Vidi pretty convinced me the 3dcoat academic version will do all I need.  So, I guess I will make both a priority purchase.

I do wish RL would stay on track for referrals and product offerrs.  I bought the Genetica Pro awhile back and it is never mentioned any longer on IClone forums with B2M and Substance.