I'm doing my first tests with CC3, IC and iray.
Coming from DazStudio, I usually use iRay for still renders.
With IC I noticed iRay is really slow (and the result is different from the viewport). (the same for CC3 but for a still I can manage to get something good)
What about doing a full clip using iray? Is it used in the community exporting with iRay, or do you export using the IC engine?
I'm on a i5 9600K 6core, 32GB RAM, SSD, RTX2070Super.
Just curious to better uinderstand this plugin.

thanks! :)

I am a big fan of Iray, but at this point I would do neither, specially if you have a lot of characters and closeups.
That is despite the fact that the latest Iray v1.4 for IC and CC took a full advantage of RTX support and renders a lot faster (with RTX GPUs mostly).

Not even mismatch with the real-time is an obstacle (I covered it a bit here: https://forum.reallusion.com/453467/iRay-broken-with-new-CC33-update-dark-red-skin)
1. Current release of Iray does not support DHS (maybe in the future, I do not know)
2. And the biggest of all, Iray does not support particles (and probably never will).
The only chance to have particles over Iray, is to render them separately and compose in NLE, which might be quite cumbersome in some case and impossible in others.

The biggest obstacle to using Iray for animation is the render times.

Waiting a couple minutes for a still image to render is no big deal, but waiting 2 minutes for each frame to render is a killer.  Do the math... how many seconds long is your animation, and assume a minimum of 24 frames for each second, and multiply the render time for each frame.  You quickly run into DAYS of non-stop rendering.  Then you better hope you don't find a reason to have to render it again.

I like Iray.  It's fun.  It can make some really nice still, but even then there are limitations (such as particles as was already pointed out).

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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

Hey Dennis, the render speed has been dramatically improved. RTX 2060 Super outperforms slightly my 2 GTX 1080TI in some cases in cross tests I have done with somebody here on forum.
RTX 2080 TI nowadays might render a mid-complex 2K scene frame in under 30 sec with acceptable quality. This is by far better, than when we have just started with Iray.

Hey, thanks for that reminder.  I forget that I'd seen something about improved performance, but haven't personally tested it yet.  I'll have to give it a whirl.  I doubt I'll suddenly start rendering movies with Iray, but faster is always better.  I've had scenes that took well over 15, and even over 30 seconds per frame to render with the iClone native renderer.  That's not normal, and it was painful, but it does start to make thoughts of Iray interesting to be sure.

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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

As I'm new to iClone and it's iRay plugin, I cannot check the speed improvement. When I bought it I had a GTX970, but after 3 weeks (and no interactions with the app) I bought a RTX2070S.
On DazStudio with Iray I've a 3x or more speed than the GTX970.Here for rendering a scene  with just a woman, it took a lot for every frame (non counted the seconds... I need more testing for that)
Do have I to setting something in the iRay panel for improve the speed?I'm using both the 6 cores and the RTX.

But if rendering a clip with iRay requires days... well, maybe I can survive for now and use it just for stills.

I'm aware about the particles limit. At this "stage" I still have to understand how move everything... particles will be the next big thing :D