This is my best work to date in terms of rendering.  The character is Lady Tavia.  I spent many hours understanding various things that can be tweaked in IRAY and how that interacts with the textures...  I decided to go for a hyper rich glossy magazine look.

The avatar was sculpted first in CC3 and then tweaked in CC4. Expressions were modified from Digital Soul. She has an entirely reworked skin texture set made in Skingen.  All in 4k. The hair was from DAZ, but retextured by me.  I usually try to use my own hair, but this fit. I made the dress in Marvelous Designer.  The background is a high resolution architectural photograph.




Playing with DOF and bloom from the ceiling lights washed out some of her features.  I am not certain I like the results as much as in the first shot.  I am also not certain why the dress's mesh went from level three smoothing to no smoothing.



In comparison, this is a native render made without using the IRAY extension, but all the internal bells and whistles turned on.  The only thing different about this vs. the first shot is a change of the necklace.  I didn't feel like spending an extra hour to undistort it from her head movement.

You'll have to forgive me for asking stupid questions, so please correct me if I'm asking this question in the wrong place.

Is the IRay render primarily used for rendering still photos?  The lighting and shading look really good in your scene, but I'm more interested in using it for video purposes.  However, the last time I used the IRay render it took about 12 hours to render 4 frames of video.

Is there a better method for rendering out animations while taking advantage of the great lighting out of IRay?

What's the purpose of making artistic static pictures using an animation program? Photoshop, a static painting program - generic speaking - dwarfs at any time, in terms of quality, time and money spent, any similar creation made by a 3D animation program.

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Software developer. iClone hobbyist since January 11, 2020. Best work so far: Robots among us: The Lab and The sad end of a legend
In progress: Black Mamba
AMD Ryzen 3950X 16C/32T 4.2 GHz, 64GB RAM, RTX2080 11GB, 2TB Samsung 970 Pro SSD, 8TB Seagate BarraCuda HDD, Win11 64-bit, iClone 8.12

RAG DOLL COLLISION ANIMATIONS FOR ICLONE 8 & 7
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Ghost Origins

My latest Feature length film created with Iclone.

My Sci- Fi Graphic Novel on Amazon: https://a.co/d/9k3cwoY

My IMDB listing
Anabran Abdhul Quarnain - IMDb

To make a point here: Iray as a renderer in Reallusion products was never meant to become an alternative to the native renderer for animation.
It was really just a benefit for Daz users who want to transition over to Character Creator and iClone because of reasons.

In the long run, some users were able to render short clips using Iray. But even with an RTX 3090 it takes too much time.
On the other hand it turned out that meanwhile there are better options to get Ray-Tracing / Path-Tracing renders, with acceptable render times.

However, Iray is still a good thing because it allows you to optimize a scene for rendering in such engines.
For example, if you export a scene from iClone, where you have applied .MDLs, they will come through as such in Omniverse automatically.

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Why are Character Creator and iClone separate products? Different creators have different needs, and there's no rule that says you can only use the Reallusion software for animation. Also, not everyone can paint well enough to use Photoshop to similar results (and let's not even start on the benefits regarding lighting, composition, etc. experimentation for non-professional artists). Finally... is it really necessary to pull the superiority card of animator vs. illustrator? Create and let create, mate.

Provided, of course, that you know how to draw from scratch...:P 

I have a project that is taking years to complete and I started to create a comic book based on the iClone scenes I already had. It's sort of an elaborate storyboard.

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In the long run, some users were able to render short clips using Iray. But even with an RTX 3090 it takes too much time.

On the other hand it turned out that meanwhile there are better options to get Ray-Tracing / Path-Tracing renders, with acceptable render times.On the other hand it turned out that meanwhile there are better options to get Ray-Tracing / Path-Tracing renders, with acceptable render times.

RAG DOLL COLLISION ANIMATIONS FOR ICLONE 8 & 7
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghost Origins

My latest Feature length film created with Iclone.

My Sci- Fi Graphic Novel on Amazon: https://a.co/d/9k3cwoY

My IMDB listing
Anabran Abdhul Quarnain - IMDb

With my 3090 I thought I'd try Omniverse and it turned out to be SUCH a PITA just to get my very basic iClone scene in there (over an hour later I was still dealing with errors) that I gave up.

Unless there is a VERY transparent "render now in OV" there's no freaking way I'm leaving the iClone renderer.  Yes, it might look pretty, but I'm into telling stories and THAT doesn't need pretty pictures (they are just a bonus - nice to have but if you don't produce at least three or four minutes of animation a month you're no animator).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Render times are really good. Compared to Iray, they are more than usable.
I could actually make amazing short films using Omniverse.
Unfortunately i am very limited by regular job and the usual things of life.
Animation work needs lots of time (and skills).
But if i were to render my next short, i would use Omniverse.

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