Hello everyone, here are some information to help you evaluate the Iray Plugin before the official launch date.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment in this thread.
CompatibilityThe Iray plugin supports both Character Creator 3 and iClone 7.
*Iray ready iClone 7 will be made available in the final quarter of 2018.
Hardware Support- Iray supports any number or combination of NVIDIA CUDA GPUs and CPUs running within the same machine and gives you control over which are being used for rendering.
- AMD graphics card is not supported in this architecture.
- NVIDIA CUDA GPUs System requirements
- GPUs of CUDA compute capability 3.0 and higher are supported
- The drivers needs to support CUDA 9.0
- Reference: NVIDIA Render Performance Benchmark
Example: a system with two NVIDIA GTX-1080 graphic cards can almost double the render speed.
PerformanceRendering speed for the Iray Plugin is on par with NVidia Iray. We will perform more tests and provide users a reference report by the time of the official launch.
Animation Sequence RenderingMultiple frame rendering is available for iClone's Iray plugin, while Character Creator will only offer single frame rendering.
Lighting and ShadowiClone provides fine-grain control over real-time lighting and shadows which allow it to bend reality with the likes of Shadow Caster and shadowless lighting.
Iray is a raytracing system with physically based rendering wherefore any type of light source and emissive mesh must cast shadows.
Example: iClone can support shadowless lighting while Iray can not.
Example: iClone can cast shadows without a light source while Iray can not. This explains why there is a difference in the shadows for the WIP 1 video.
Supported iClone Post EffectsIn the the first Iray PlugIn release, we will focus on Iray’s photorealistic rendering, iClone camera and light mapping, as well as the full MDL material support. We do hope we can deal with other post effects like LUT, HDR, or NPR in the near future.
Compatibility to the Existing iClone FunctionsOnly the incompatible ones are listed:
- Heightmap Terrain -- will be supported in the next official release
- SpeedTree -- will be supported in the next official release
- Water
- Particle (e.g. PopcornFX)
Indigo Comparison
The implementation of Iray has superceded the feature sets of the legacy Indigo render system.
| | Iray | Indigo |
| Company | Nvidia | Glare Technologies |
| Available Render Modes | Interactive & Photoreal | Photoreal |
| Supports CPU Rendering | Yes | Yes |
| Support GPU Rendering | Yes | Yes |
| Render Speed | Fast | Slow |
| Supports Disney PBR Workflow | Yes | No |
| Supports Multi-passes | Yes | No |
| Material Format | MDL (Exchangeable) | IGM |
Iray Batch RenderiClone and CC will export and pass the scene to Iray Batch Render, which implies that users are allowed to render without iClone and CC running in the background.
*The Development Team is looking into cloud-based rendering service, but we can't promise anything at this moment.