High quality rendering in Daz3D using an AMD graphics card?
After getting more famliar with the millions of different parts of Daz3D, I'm starting to pay more attention to the render settings. Eventually I'll be making high quality renders for various purposes, and maybe even trying my hand at animating. The quality differences between 3Delight and Iray renders is huge enough, I'm interested in attempting to work with Iray as much as possible.
Unfortunatley my setup has an AMD graphics card, and apparently Iray can't (or won't) utilize my GPU for rendering. Since it relies entirely on my CPU, Iray renders will take WAY longer than I want to wait, and time I spend in prep for rendering will increase substantially. Not the ideal situation for anyone really, much less someone pretty new to working with Daz3D. So my question is this: What's the best work around?
In the store I noticed a couple of products I'm considering purchasing, but wanted to get some informed opinions on the matter at hand first.
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AMD cards don't work with Iray. Iray requires CUDA cores, which can only be found in nVidea cards... so you are out of luck there. (more information here: https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207530513-System-Recommendations-for-DAZ-Studio-4
Other render engines, like LuxRender (via Luxus or Reality Plugins) can use AMD cards, or 3Delight (built into DAZ Studio, CPU only) but might need surface/texture adjustments to rendere properly. Also, Iray lights and shaders won't work in LuxRender or 3Delight.
Thanks for the response BeeMKay. I've been thinkind about gettiing the reality plugin to bridge between Daz and Luxrender, so I can gain use of an unbiased render engine in Daz. Can you explain a bit about what you mean by '...might need surface/texture adjustments to render properly?'. I'm only just now getting into the specifics of surfaces, textures and lighting. I'm a little divided as to how to move forward with learning about rendering - using an unbiased render engine seems much simpler than trying to figure out how to imitate real light using the different light sources in a biased engine system. Sure I'd learn alot about lighting a scene, but if I'm understanding this all correctly, I'd rather be spending my time learning another area of CG, like making my own textures.
So in terms of streamlinig my workflow, making it a little easier on myself - being pretty new to the extensive set of 3DCG skills I'm learning - and upping the potential quality of my renders, is the reality plug-in a game changer for rendering "I-ray-like" quality renders (with the right settings of course) for computer systems without Nvidia cards? I'm thinking it is, but I'm a bit in over my head with all the technical jargon at this point.
If I understand things correctly, even with the best lighting, texturing, shading, and so on, 3Delight renders will almost always have visual properties "different" from those of renders created using an unbiased engine like Iray or Luxus?
First of all, "better renders" are not determined by what render engines you are using. Iray or LuxRender are in no way "superior" in that aspect to 3Delight, or Poser's Firefly Engine. To create "better" renders, you'll have to learn about light setup, scene setup, composition, how to tell a story in your image. Even postwork is a major aspect. That is much more important than having near photorealistic results. So please, don't think just switching from one render engine to another will suddenly make your renders perfect.
LuxRender and 3Delight use different calculations to "make sense" of the input data that they get. Also, they have different "channels" they take data from. In DAZ Studio, you have a built-in conversion from the values that are used in 3Delight-surfaces, to how Iray would interprete the same values. The result might or might not look good. If you are really interested in learning about render engines and surfaces, I can only recommend you try out 3 Delight and Iray surfaces - for example, Genesis 3 comes with both sets of surfaces. Go to Render settings, change to 3Delight, and see what happens. You'll also learn about light, then - Iray ligfhts might not work in 3DL, and the other way around.
To answer your question, yes, 3DL will have a slightly different result from Iray or Luxrender. A lot of it, like in Iray/LuxRender depends on your skills as a 3D artist. 3DL, to me, has a much warmer colouring than Iray. Also, it has fantastic results with things Iray is not very good at, like displacement, and certain volumetric effects that need ages to render in PBR, but go very fast in 3DL. You can tell a light beam where to stop, precisely. In Iray, you can't do that, because real light doesn't simply "stop" unless it his a solid object. You can switch shadows on and off, and tell it how dark the shadow should be. In Iray, you'll need to solve that problem by adding lights.
3Dl is used by many of the large film companies who do animated movies. Not all options of 3Delight are available in DAZ Studio, but it's a very strong render engine. If you want to learn more about it, check out http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php
For Reality, I recommend you take a looik at the homepage of the plugin-Producer. http://preta3d.com/reality/
You will find an explanation of how surfaces work in LuxRender and how to set them up in Realtiy Plugin there, much better than I can explain it. Render times will generally be longer with PBR Render engines; I don't know if they have a trial version that you can check out.
Also, one thing you need to understand. Whatever you learn about lighting in one engine or the other, it doesn't matter if its PBR or non-PBR. The basic principles are the same for all, and if you learn how to light things good in one engine, you will be able to take most of that knowledge over to the other. I learned lights using 3DL, and this knowledge is very valuable to set up light in Iray, because you will still need fill lights, rim lights, spot lights... Only that in Iray, you have a HDRI for fill light, while you you have to use other solutions in 3Delight.
In regards to the concerns mentioned in your intitial post, if you are primarily interested in the quickest renders possible you might want to consider sticking with 3delight. Its a perfectly good renderer, there are definitely people out there who know how to use it to produce quite impressive results. The downside is it pretty much takes over your computer during the render making it tough if not impossible to do anything else until the render is complete. But it is fast.
On the other hand, if you decide to try reality/luxrender, while it is not as fast you will have the option to render using your gpu, cpu or both. However, even using reality you might opt to render with your cpu which leaves your gpu free to continue working in daz while your render runs. So while luxrender is not as fast as 3delight it dfoes allow you to continue working while a render is running. But still not using your AMD GPU.
With reality you will be learning a new materials interface, and using reality mesh lights in your scene, 3delight and iray lighting does not work in reality/lux. But for 30 bucks its imho a way cheaper alternative to something like octane as far as unbiased rendering options go, if iray is not an option at least. Iray did not exist when I started using reality so I cannot comment on it.
While that certainly may be an option, Justin, it is not necessarily a panacea available to everyone. Since the ProRender engine is relatively new, it therefore requires fairly new hardware and/or software - it will not work with any old hardware or software despite the fact it is designed to be an open standard, cross-platform renderer that can be run on any brand of hardware. For example, for Windows users who wish to use Nvidia cards, they must be running Windows 10 in order to do so. I don't know specifically why earlier Windows versions will not work, but apparently they will not with non-AMD brand cards. You also must have a card that supports OpenCL 1.2 at least, which can also limit the models of cards that are capable.
Of course there is also the fact that using Blender for rendering (or one of the other software plugins) may not be something everyone will want to tackle.
Nevertheless, I believe that the approach is a step in the right direction, and certainly worthy of mentioning, so thanks for that.