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yoyomaster
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yoyomaster
Posted 6 Years Ago
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Group: Forum Members
Last Active: 4 Years Ago
Posts: 272,
Visits: 1.3K
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Hello everyone!
I don't want to ruffle feathers here, but I am looking at the Iray plugin and I am a bit perplex, I get it that RL choose Iray because they want to attract Daz users, I get it, but is choosing Iray really the best solution for the average iClone users?
From my point of vies it is not, there are far better solutions than Iray out there, AMD Pro Render is one of those solutions.
Pro Render is open source, it is faster than Iray, by a long shot, it runs on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs, while Iray runs only on Nvidia GPUs, Pro Render already supports DXR (real-time rendering) and it runs on both AMD and Nvidia cards that supports it, there is no mention of DXR on Iray roadmap, and the list goes on.
I love RL products, but often I question their choices, and spending resources developing an Iray plugin, when Iray gets very little attention from Nvidia, while Pro render is actively developed, is one of these choices!
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jarretttowe
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jarretttowe
Posted 6 Years Ago
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Group: Forum Members
Last Active: 2 Years Ago
Posts: 560,
Visits: 3.0K
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You are technically right...there are other renderers out there. Hopefully the python api is going to result in a whole slew of converters to other render engines. I myself am hoping for a one button convert to Blender solution. The built in Eevee renderer is amazing, and while not technically real time, it gives 4k render results in seconds per frame. And it also runs on both nvidia and amd and CPU only or a mix of all three. That said, Daz/Poser is the biggest base of money-spending 3d users on the planet. To offer a way into iclone from those platforms is a guaranteed money maker. To be honest, I had stiopped using iclone as soon as iRay came out for daz. But now I am back in, and using both tools. They are diversifying their target users between 3d hobbyists and game designers, and that is going to be a smart move for the long haul.
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animagic
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animagic
Posted 6 Years Ago
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Group: Forum Members
Last Active: 9 hours ago
Posts: 15.6K,
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I don't believe Iray was actually chosen to attract DAZ users; as to RL's motivation, as always, we can just speculate... There is a fairly long development cycle with these things, so you will not always see the latest. Also, one question to ask is how easy the interfacing is between iClone and a specific renderer, especially as far as materials go. The relative speed between renderers can only be determined in an actual environment where the same project is rendered. Its value is also determined by how well it supports animation. It has always been the plan that multiple renderers would be supported, so the hopefully the Python API can help with this. I guess many of us have our favorites, so it would be quite a task for RL to make us all happy... Anyway, I was wondering how Pro-Render would actually do on Nvidia GPUs (as I am not willing to switch to AMD), and the result was quite surprising, judging from this test: https://techgage.com/article/amd-radeon-prorender-performance-oct-2018/. Looks like this will not help sell AMD cards...
EDIT: Just thought of something else important and that is support for particles, such as PopcornFX, and things like water, which is currently absent in Iray, but will hopefully be added.
Edited
6 Years Ago by
animagic
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yoyomaster
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yoyomaster
Posted 6 Years Ago
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Group: Forum Members
Last Active: 4 Years Ago
Posts: 272,
Visits: 1.3K
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jarretttowe (12/20/2018) You are technically right...there are other renderers out there. Hopefully the python api is going to result in a whole slew of converters to other render engines. I myself am hoping for a one button convert to Blender solution. The built in Eevee renderer is amazing, and while not technically real time, it gives 4k render results in seconds per frame. And it also runs on both nvidia and amd and CPU only or a mix of all three. That said, Daz/Poser is the biggest base of money-spending 3d users on the planet. To offer a way into iclone from those platforms is a guaranteed money maker. To be honest, I had stiopped using iclone as soon as iRay came out for daz. But now I am back in, and using both tools. They are diversifying their target users between 3d hobbyists and game designers, and that is going to be a smart move for the long haul.
Yes, Eevee is amazing, and it gets better real fast, and like I said, I understand that they want to attract Daz users, but damn, I ray really sucks, even the Daz users bitch it on their forum, it is slow compared to Cycles, Pro Render, and pretty much every render engines out there, DXR is also a big thing, definitely a game changer for game developers and VFX artists as well, to implement Iray when there are way better solutions just doesn't make sense to me, but as you said, maybe the new api will make it easier for developers to integrate new render engines, lets hope that they will take the bate!
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yoyomaster
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yoyomaster
Posted 6 Years Ago
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Group: Forum Members
Last Active: 4 Years Ago
Posts: 272,
Visits: 1.3K
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animagic (12/20/2018)
I don't believe Iray was actually chosen to attract DAZ users; as to RL's motivation, as always, we can just speculate... There is a fairly long development cycle with these things, so you will not always see the latest. Also, one question to ask is how easy the interfacing is between iClone and a specific renderer, especially as far as materials go. The relative speed between renderers can only be determined in an actual environment where the same project is rendered. Its value is also determined by how well it supports animation. It has always been the plan that multiple renderers would be supported, so the hopefully the Python API can help with this. I guess many of us have our favorites, so it would be quite a task for RL to make us all happy... Anyway, I was wondering how Pro-Render would actually do on Nvidia GPUs (as I am not willing to switch to AMD), and the result was quite surprising, judging from this test: https://techgage.com/article/amd-radeon-prorender-performance-oct-2018/. Looks like this will not help sell AMD cards...
EDIT: Just thought of something else important and that is support for particles, such as PopcornFX, and things like water, which is currently absent in Iray, but will hopefully be added. To be fair, the best AMD card on that chart is 400$, while the Nvidia card is 1350$, the AMD WX 9100, also at 1350$, is as fast as the RTX in Pro render on the charts I saw, sometimes even faster. This said, Pro render is a lot faster than Iray, even when rendering the same scenes, many tests have been posted on the Web, also, as I said, Iray development is basically non existent, or at least very slow, while Pro Render development is very active, and I mentioned Pro Render, but other solutions are out there that are also free to implement, like Blender Cycles, which has been integrated in several commercial package. My post is about pointing out the fact that Iray doesn't get lots of love from Nvidia, they just don't seem to care about it, pretty much all the development seems to go to real-time raytracing at Nvidia, which is exactly what iClone needs IMHO, but not a Nvidia only solution, Pro Render offers it on both Nvidia and AMD GPUs, and it is part of it right now, think of it, real-time transparencies/shadows/reflections, and tell me that iClone would not greatly benefit from it, something that will likely never happen with Iray if we look at the roadmap!
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justaviking
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justaviking
Posted 6 Years Ago
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Group: Forum Members
Last Active: Last Month
Posts: 8.2K,
Visits: 26.5K
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Several people made passionate, and reasonably compelling, arguments for Octane. But as Animagic said, Reallusion's true motivations and reasoning behind their decisions are not shared with us. As for other renders coming soon: a) I had hoped the Indigo plug-in would be followed fairly quickly by a second renderer, since "How" to connect to a 3rd-party renderer had been figured out, but it took a long, long, long time for plug-in #2 to appear. In fact, we're still waiting for the iClone plug-in to be released. b) Based on CC3, the Iray material mapping (also mentioned by Animagic) is far superior to what was done for Indigo. Same statement for lights, too. c) I question anyone's ability to write a rendering plug-in (or export routine) for iClone with Python in the foreseeable future. I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt the hooks will go deep enough into iClone to enable something like that. I would love to be wrong, but I'm skeptical. d) Lastly, some have talked about being able to write a plug-in very quickly. I'm even more skeptical of that happening to the level of quality, reliability, and performance you'd need to consider it a viable *product* as opposed to a rough proof-of-concept. Again, I'd love to be wrong, I really would, but I suspect it's a very difficult thing to do once you start getting into the details and all the exceptions and special cases you encounter when trying to support the variety of projects the iClone user base produces.
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
Edited
6 Years Ago by
justaviking
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jarretttowe
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jarretttowe
Posted 6 Years Ago
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Group: Forum Members
Last Active: 2 Years Ago
Posts: 560,
Visits: 3.0K
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A true and full export to unity and unreal renderers would be a logical step. If they are truly interested in pursuing the game development market, it would be incredibly handy to be able to create all the cut scenes in iclone and render in unity/unreal.
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yoyomaster
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yoyomaster
Posted 6 Years Ago
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Group: Forum Members
Last Active: 4 Years Ago
Posts: 272,
Visits: 1.3K
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jarretttowe (12/21/2018) A true and full export to unity and unreal renderers would be a logical step. If they are truly interested in pursuing the game development market, it would be incredibly handy to be able to create all the cut scenes in iclone and render in unity/unreal.
I agree, setting up a decent hair shader in UE4 is a real pain, a better export is needed, but as with many things with RL, they tend to go half way then jump to a new toy. I said in an earlier post that I was looking at UE4 as my main render engine, I still am, but Eevee looks better and better, especially now that 2.8 is in beta, I am actually looking at ditching RL completely, except maybe for CC3. My gripe with RL is that they get a new piece of software out, then they come up with another one, then another one, and so on, the new scan thingy is an example, who on Earth will use that, except for large studios? Nothing seems to be really finished, only half baked software, and they show no intent in changing that!
Edited
6 Years Ago by
yoyomaster
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animagic
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animagic
Posted 6 Years Ago
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Group: Forum Members
Last Active: 9 hours ago
Posts: 15.6K,
Visits: 30.3K
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I'm probably in the minority in the current climate, but I have been able to use iClone quite fruitfully over the years. So I'm afraid I have to disagree with the half-baked statement. If there was truly an alternative in this price range, it would be very quiet in these forums, because everyone would have gone elsewhere. But the conclusion of my post was actually in support of Pro Render, but maybe that wasn't clear. It's just not in support of AMD GPUs.
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R.Man
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Group: Forum Members
Last Active: 2 Years Ago
Posts: 53,
Visits: 456
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Like the other 3D softwares , iclone will end up supporting a lot of external renderers like Indigo, Iray etc...may be Vray or Octane or Prorender in the future...which is a good thing....The biggest issue is that they ask money for the bridges so the price raise very fast.
https://www.ilema.artstation.com Open for Professional collaboration as a lighting artist.
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