Reality Plugin End-of-life notice

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Comments

  • pcicconepciccone Posts: 661

     

    Unfortunately, the prebuilt binaries in the archive do not match those used in the last release of Reality. The Qt version was different for both architectures (4.8.4 was in the archive and 4.8.7 was used for released version) and as you saw boost is missing some libraries. I think you'll have to rebuild Boost yourself as I am not aware of a prebuilt version for Mac. IIRC, the one time I built Boost manually it was very simple to do.

    As an aside, I compared the Qt 4.8.4 in the archive to the official Qt 4.8.4 and there were no differences, so if there was any customization it was in a later version we don't have. As my limited testing shows no issues with using the official version, it appears any customizations where cosmetic.

    This might not b useful anymore but if you need, I can look for those precompiled libraries and placed them on a Dropbox folder.

    Cheers

  • danielbui78danielbui78 Posts: 333
    edited January 2022

    pciccone said:

    danielbui78 said:

    Oops -- sorry, the screenshots were taken with the plugin calling the original EXE.  The rebuilt EXE is still not calling luxrender correctly yet.  The EXE is sending "runRenderer" (RealityDataRelay.cpp:line 190) to some kind of server via zmq library, serverCommandInterface->send(message) (RealityDataRelay.cpp: line 230)

    I'll try to clarify. The idea of Reality 4 was to have a single exe for the UI so that it would not be necessary to re-invent the wheel for every host. Remember that Reality works with both DS and Poser. The UI is identical in both versions. I also had plans to port Reality to other hosts like ZBrush, Blender, etc. It made no sense to repeat the same UI with every host.

    So, the UI is a stand-along program. The collection of data from the hosts, the geometry, the conversion of materials, etc. is done by a plugin. The same is for the export. Given that the plugin has access to the native geometry, it makes sense for the plugin to do the export. At the same time, once the scene is exported to the Lux-specific geometry format, the rest of the execution is common for every host. The running of Lux is always the same. 

    So, the UI is a separate process that communicates with the host plugin via ZeroMQ and vice-versa, because you need to do things like loading a new scene in DS and so the Reality UI needs to be told to reset and restart. You need to update a material using the Reality editor and that material definition needs to be sent to the host plugin, because that's where the Reality mats are stored. When you save the DS scene, Reality saves its materials in it, so that they can be easily reloaded the next time. 

    So, there is a lot of bidirectional communication and that's why I used ZeroMQ. The situation is complex enough without using some message-passing layer that required a separate server. 

    But there are a lot of processes that are abstracted because they are the same regardless of the host. The format of Reality mats is the same, the way they are stored is slightly different because of the characteristic of the host.

    Hope this helps

    Yes, thanks very much for the detailed explanation.  I already have that part figured out and have the DRM removed: https://github.com/danielbui78/reality/commits/experimental-vs2022

    However, I am still dealing with crashes related to decoupling the pre-built versions of boost, qt and other libraries from using older VC++ runtime so they don't crash when linked to Visual Studio 2022.  The proper solution is to rebuild all these libraries with Visual Studio 2022 or to install the version of Visual Studio which was used to original build these pre-built dependencies.  I don't have time to do either one right now.  If someone does get around to doing that, then just cherry-pick my Disable DRM commit and ignore all the other changes related to updating the dependency libraries to the latest versions.

    Post edited by danielbui78 on
  • OmnifluxOmniflux Posts: 377

    pciccone said:

    This might not b useful anymore but if you need, I can look for those precompiled libraries and placed them on a Dropbox folder.

    I don't think this is necessary, the concern was just for source changes to Qt and the last official 4.x release appears to work fine.

  • IppotamusIppotamus Posts: 1,579

    Reality was a huge step forward in rendering at the time.

    I also love the fact that it was independently created, supported and loved.

    Kudos to you, Paolo.

    It was a wonderful chapter in 3d art and times.

    Good luck in the future!

  • khorneV2khorneV2 Posts: 147

    Silver Dolphin said:

    Thank you OmniFlux for taking on the server for Reality.

     

    +1

  • pcicconepciccone Posts: 661

    Ippotamus said:

    Reality was a huge step forward in rendering at the time.

    I also love the fact that it was independently created, supported and loved.

    Kudos to you, Paolo.

    It was a wonderful chapter in 3d art and times.

    Good luck in the future!

    Thank you so much, Ippotamus, I really appreciate it.

  • VirgoRivalVirgoRival Posts: 47

    I wanted to share this since the topic of caustics ended up hitting my YouTube recommendations and it got me to think how easily Luxrender actually handles caustics (though CPU only mode)

    Granted rendering glass is expensive to start with but I have been hearing how much a pain in the ass it is to render caustics and it with the early version of Lucre that is part of the last LuxRender build

    just plain doesn't handle caustics

    i felt like Lux render really was way a head of its time

    it now is out dated and out preformed in many areas
    but like a long distance runner, given enough time and the right environment, it out runs the competitions I feel which is why i still use it
    rendered using the The Censor Bar's glass props
    ofcoruse with Reality and with the dispersion option on standard glass setting

    Luxrender effortlessly made the caustic light though the glas but ofcourse took a few hours to clean up

    On a Threadripper 2990wx, 5+ hours got it to 25k+ sample per pixel on CPU only
    only the one light, plane and the two glasses, hardly demanding but a tastefully clean render came out of it

    Glasscastics.png
    1250 x 1000 - 2M
  • PadonePadone Posts: 3,700

    Well I can hardly wait ten minutes for a render, go figure five hours .. This is the kind of thing where some tricks are needed to balance realism and performance. Also blender 3.2 finally comes with some decent caustics at last, always limited but much better than before.

  • VirgoRivalVirgoRival Posts: 47

    Padone said:

    Well I can hardly wait ten minutes for a render, go figure five hours .. This is the kind of thing where some tricks are needed to balance realism and performance. Also blender 3.2 finally comes with some decent caustics at last, always limited but much better than before.


     

    any one of my own renders is given a minimum of 8 hours if it doesn't render fast like this one did
    Mostly because i set my renders to bake eatehr while I'm a sleep or at work

    or both in the case of a larger image, given a total of 16 hours

    longest render i have ever done was 300 hours

    Yea Luxrender is VERY slow, but i feel the results are worth the wait a majority of the time haha

  • I know this is an older post now, so apologies for the necro, but since the folks in this thread are obviously far more knowledgable about Reality than I am, I'm hoping someone may have a clue about an issue. (I have posted in the Technical Forum as well, but no one seems to have an idea for a possible fix).  Reality just seemed to ... disappear on me. When I try to call Reality via DS, nothing happens. Literally nothing. The only clue I have to go on is an "error writing author data" in the DS log file, immediately following the entry for loading the Reality_DS64.dll. I get no other error messages, no crashes, nothing. I've tried reinstalling both DS and Reality to no avail. Currently using DS 4.12.1.117 and Reality 4.3.1.

    Again, apologies for the cross posting, but I'm a little more than vexxed and running up against some deadlines very soon. Thanks in advance.

    Cheers

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,220

    is it still on your computer?

    My antivirus just deleted a program while I was using it so anything is possible 

  • Oh, yeah, it's definitely still there. I had the same thought as well ... which also prompted me to try turning off my anti-virus entirely ... which, of course, did nothing

  • deadgemini_db6f21ea56 said:

    Oh, yeah, it's definitely still there. I had the same thought as well ... which also prompted me to try turning off my anti-virus entirely ... which, of course, did nothing

    Please see my post from December 2021: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7179541/#Comment_7179541

    There's a good chance that your issue is related to installing new GPU drivers that have replaced your systems OpenCL driver with version 3.0 or above.  Follow the 6-step instructions that I listed in that December 2021 to see if that helps.  Good luck.

  • danielbui78 said:

    Please see my post from December 2021: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7179541/#Comment_7179541

    There's a good chance that your issue is related to installing new GPU drivers that have replaced your systems OpenCL driver with version 3.0 or above.  Follow the 6-step instructions that I listed in that December 2021 to see if that helps.  Good luck.

    Thank you so much for the reply! I looked over your fix and did as instructed, but that didn't seem to fix the issue. However, it may be user error. Is the "fake" OpenCL.DLL  file that I create supposed to have the .txt extension, or does it need to have just the .dll extension? Would rolling back my graphics drivers and/or windows updates be any sort of potential fix?

    Much appreciative of your input!

    Cheers

  • Just an update to the situation. I've resolved the issue, at least for the time being. After the OpenCL.dll trick didn't work, I did a factory reset of my graphics card and it seems to have done the trick. Big thanks to danielbui78 for pointing me in the right direction. I definitely would not have been able to sniff out the culprit in any reasonable time frame on my own.

    Cheers!

  • danielbui78danielbui78 Posts: 333
    edited October 2022

    deadgemini_db6f21ea56 said:

    danielbui78 said:

    Please see my post from December 2021: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7179541/#Comment_7179541

    There's a good chance that your issue is related to installing new GPU drivers that have replaced your systems OpenCL driver with version 3.0 or above.  Follow the 6-step instructions that I listed in that December 2021 to see if that helps.  Good luck.

    Thank you so much for the reply! I looked over your fix and did as instructed, but that didn't seem to fix the issue. However, it may be user error. Is the "fake" OpenCL.DLL  file that I create supposed to have the .txt extension, or does it need to have just the .dll extension? Would rolling back my graphics drivers and/or windows updates be any sort of potential fix?

    Much appreciative of your input!

    Cheers

    It must have .DLL as the extension (aka, ".DLL" should be the last 4 characters displayed -- assuming that you have File name extensions enabled as per the original instructions.)

    Post edited by danielbui78 on
  • got lost in all the links

    Was there ever a final release of the updated Reality with out the DRM and other fixes if implmented? or am i being stupid and not know what i'm looking at . - .

  • Pavlo68Pavlo68 Posts: 5
    edited February 2023

    How can I activate “Reality 4.3 - DAZ Studio Edition”?

    The website https://preta3d.com/ only the home page works, and therefore it is impossible to activate the program in Manual mode, and in Automatic mode it gives an error message:

    I installed “Reality 4.3 - DAZ Studio Edition” in September 2021 on one computer, but when it crashed, I had to temporarily install “DAZ Studio” along with “Reality 4.3 - DAZ Studio Edition” on another computer January 4, 2022.

    I took the data from the fact that these days I received emails from "Pret-a3D" about successful activation. I don't remember which mode I activated — Automatic or Manual.

    *****************************************************

    Purchase Receipt
    Dear Pavlo,

    Thank you for your purchase XX-XXXXX27. Please click on the link(s) below to download your files.

    Perfect Shot Scene for DAZ Studio – SKU: PSSDS – 
    Perfect Shot for DAZ Studio
    Thank you again for your purchase.

    --
    Pret-a-3D

    http://preta3d.com

    Pret-a-3D

    ****************************************************

     

    Now I bought a relatively powerful computer and reinstalled “DAZ Studio” together with “Reality 4.3 - DAZ Studio Edition”, but the activation of “Reality” does not work.

    Is it possible to somehow activate it, for example by transferring the activation from one computer to another?

    Which files change at the moment of activation, or maybe the activation code of MY "Reality" license is stored somewhere.

    ScreenShot.jpg
    825 x 512 - 67K
    Post edited by Pavlo68 on
  • PlatnumkPlatnumk Posts: 669

    Pavlo68 said:

    How can I activate “Reality 4.3 - DAZ Studio Edition”?

    The website https://preta3d.com/ only the home page works, and therefore it is impossible to activate the program in Manual mode, and in Automatic mode it gives an error message:

    I installed “Reality 4.3 - DAZ Studio Edition” in September 2021 on one computer, but when it crashed, I had to temporarily install “DAZ Studio” along with “Reality 4.3 - DAZ Studio Edition” on another computer January 4, 2022.

    I took the data from the fact that these days I received emails from "Pret-a3D" about successful activation. I don't remember which mode I activated — Automatic or Manual.

    *****************************************************

    Purchase Receipt
    Dear Pavlo,

    Thank you for your purchase XX-XXXXX27. Please click on the link(s) below to download your files.

    Perfect Shot Scene for DAZ Studio – SKU: PSSDS – 
    Perfect Shot for DAZ Studio
    Thank you again for your purchase.

    --
    Pret-a-3D

    http://preta3d.com

    Pret-a-3D

    ****************************************************

     

    Now I bought a relatively powerful computer and reinstalled “DAZ Studio” together with “Reality 4.3 - DAZ Studio Edition”, but the activation of “Reality” does not work.

    Is it possible to somehow activate it, for example by transferring the activation from one computer to another?

    Which files change at the moment of activation, or maybe the activation code of MY "Reality" license is stored somewhere.

    The developement of the Reality PlugIn was discontinued a few years ago, and the activation was done server side (which has now been shut down as far as I know). There was someone else p[aying for the server for a while but sadly I think that has finally been shut down as well.

    Reality was made Open Source so if you can find the source code & you know enough of programming then you might be able to remove the Activation Code & re-compile it but nobody to my knowledge has done so yet.

  • Sorry for the necro, yet again, but I'm just wondering if anyone has an update on the potential for a working version of Reality or if it's finally gone the way of the dodo. It seems the activation server has finally gone down as Reality was working fine for me up until yesterday when it suddenly started telling me that I needed to activate the plugin. Which, obviously, doesn't actually work any more because communication with the server just times out.

    If anyone in the know has any information, I would be very grateful.  I'm really not looking forward to the idea of moving away from Lux as getting started with IRay would be mean a substantial investment that I'm just not in a position to make at the moment.

    Cheers

  • deadgemini_db6f21ea56 said:

    Sorry for the necro, yet again, but I'm just wondering if anyone has an update on the potential for a working version of Reality or if it's finally gone the way of the dodo. It seems the activation server has finally gone down as Reality was working fine for me up until yesterday when it suddenly started telling me that I needed to activate the plugin. Which, obviously, doesn't actually work any more because communication with the server just times out.

    If anyone in the know has any information, I would be very grateful.  I'm really not looking forward to the idea of moving away from Lux as getting started with IRay would be mean a substantial investment that I'm just not in a position to make at the moment.

    Cheers

    Was working on a scene tonight and attempted to start Reality and it did the same to me

    was also hoping for an update on the DRM Free Reality Plug in

     

  • Platnumk said:

    Pavlo68 said:

    How can I activate “Reality 4.3 - DAZ Studio Edition”?

    The website https://preta3d.com/ only the home page works, and therefore it is impossible to activate the program in Manual mode, and in Automatic mode it gives an error message:

    I installed “Reality 4.3 - DAZ Studio Edition” in September 2021 on one computer, but when it crashed, I had to temporarily install “DAZ Studio” along with “Reality 4.3 - DAZ Studio Edition” on another computer January 4, 2022.

    I took the data from the fact that these days I received emails from "Pret-a3D" about successful activation. I don't remember which mode I activated — Automatic or Manual.

    *****************************************************

    Purchase Receipt
    Dear Pavlo,

    Thank you for your purchase XX-XXXXX27. Please click on the link(s) below to download your files.

    Perfect Shot Scene for DAZ Studio – SKU: PSSDS – 
    Perfect Shot for DAZ Studio
    Thank you again for your purchase.

    --
    Pret-a-3D

    http://preta3d.com

    Pret-a-3D

    ****************************************************

     

    Now I bought a relatively powerful computer and reinstalled “DAZ Studio” together with “Reality 4.3 - DAZ Studio Edition”, but the activation of “Reality” does not work.

    Is it possible to somehow activate it, for example by transferring the activation from one computer to another?

    Which files change at the moment of activation, or maybe the activation code of MY "Reality" license is stored somewhere.

    The developement of the Reality PlugIn was discontinued a few years ago, and the activation was done server side (which has now been shut down as far as I know). There was someone else p[aying for the server for a while but sadly I think that has finally been shut down as well.

    Reality was made Open Source so if you can find the source code & you know enough of programming then you might be able to remove the Activation Code & re-compile it but nobody to my knowledge has done so yet.

    in this very thread was few gentlemen was attempting to remove the DRM

    I think they did so, as i mange to find their test version and i have got it working, but its alil unstable Daz wise as a few things causes the DRM Free Reality to crash
    That is goign to severly handycap my work flow

    But so far, i loaded a scene i was working on and got it to render 
    however i think it just exported over the wrong dementions

    which i can manually fix but still, alot of workflow issues

  • ok scratch that
    I don't know if its this scene I opened


    But the plugin in border line unsuable with >> https://github.com/danielbui78/reality/releases/tag/v0.0-alpha-test-1 <<

    as there appears to be something wrong with the surface selection feature
    any time you select a surface, weather its with the surface Selection tool or just clicking a surface on the suface tab
    Reality crashes

    and it is Stuck on the first object on the list
    you click on anything and it snaps to the top of the list

    but the scene goes to render, so it works, but its unsuable at the moment

    I am not confident that anyone is seriously going to get Reality back up and running to 100% or better with the fixes i had asked for
    might be time to pack it up and finally learn Iray

    not looking foward to unlearning years of habits tho

    I hae scene files streaching back to 2016
    with some editing of scene files i can get to rerender no problem

    Not having that flexabilty that Reality/Luxrender had dispite its limitations is going to really hurt 

  • danielbui78danielbui78 Posts: 333
    edited August 2023

    VirgoRival said:

    ok scratch that
    I don't know if its this scene I opened


    But the plugin in border line unsuable with >> https://github.com/danielbui78/reality/releases/tag/v0.0-alpha-test-1 <<

     

    Sorry, I have been very busy with work for the past 2 years and just completely drained of energy to do more programming during my times off.  I think the least effort to get a De-DRM version working is to:

    1. gather all the pre-built dependency files
    2. then install the exact version of Visual Studio and SDK that those files were built on and
    3. then apply the De-DRM patch from my repository by cherry-picking this commit: https://github.com/danielbui78/reality/commit/2f8ceb4e02438f1ae4f1e5f7d696977f446e36e6
    4. into a clone of Omniflux's version: https://github.com/Omniflux/reality
    5. then build the executable. 

    The instabilities in my version are all related to my attempt to update the source code to work with VS 2022 without building new dependency libraries that were built on older Visual Studio SDK's.  As long as you work with only the binary compatible dependencies using the correct binary compatible version of Visual Studio and SDK, it should be stable.  Good luck, everyone!

     

    Post edited by danielbui78 on
  • danielbui78 said:

    VirgoRival said:

    ok scratch that
    I don't know if its this scene I opened


    But the plugin in border line unsuable with >> https://github.com/danielbui78/reality/releases/tag/v0.0-alpha-test-1 <<

     

    Sorry, I have been very busy with work for the past 2 years and just completely drained of energy to do more programming during my times off.  I think the least effort to get a De-DRM version working is to:

    1. gather all the pre-built dependency files
    2. then install the exact version of Visual Studio and SDK that those files were built on and
    3. then apply the De-DRM patch from my repository by cherry-picking this commit: https://github.com/danielbui78/reality/commit/2f8ceb4e02438f1ae4f1e5f7d696977f446e36e6
    4. into a clone of Omniflux's version: https://github.com/Omniflux/reality
    5. then build the executable. 

    The instabilities in my version are all related to my attempt to update the source code to work with VS 2022 without building new dependency libraries that were built on older Visual Studio SDK's.  As long as you work with only the binary compatible dependencies using the correct binary compatible version of Visual Studio and SDK, it should be stable.  Good luck, everyone!

    

    as a Not programmer, Don't know what Any of that means beyond some compatibly issues 

    surprising enough Omniflux github build is showing movement and edits as of the removal of the DRM server a few days ago
    So not sure if he is working on it himself or whats happening there

    all in all to say, the De-DRM build you have worked, it loads up and works fine, only up until you try to edit any surfaces, basically use it

    So you did great, it works, proof of concept
    just needs someone to just pluck the DRM out without interfering with how it works
    asking again for bug fixes beyond that might not be worth  it

    . - . almost ready to offer a bounty 

  • PadonePadone Posts: 3,700
    edited August 2023

    Personally I don't understand all of this. I mean, lux made sense with G1 G2 when there wasn't iray, and it was an amazing feature back then. Now all daz materials are for iray or automatically converted to iray in G1 G2. Why on earth anyone would still want to use lux ? I'm just asking, honestly curious.

    p.s. Unless it's for AMD cards, but you can export to blender then use cycles, that apart supporting AMD has other advantages.

    Post edited by Padone on
  • Padone said:

    Personally I don't understand all of this. I mean, lux made sense with G1 G2 when there wasn't iray, and it was an amazing feature back then. Now all daz materials are for iray or automatically converted to iray in G1 G2. Why on earth anyone would still want to use lux ? I'm just asking, honestly curious.

    p.s. Unless it's for AMD cards, but you can export to blender then use cycles, that apart supporting AMD has other advantages.

    

    stubbornness i suppose
    Luxrender is slow, i understand that since i use the CPU only renderer in it
    found the GPU depend modes to be lacking just as in Iray and some features don't seem to work properly that was never addressed before they move to LuxCoreRender
    Lux has its own issues but i have mostly figured out a way around these issues


    My issue with Iray is memory restrictions, how it handles tiling, the overall 'depth' of the images
    as i feel they look rather Dull and plasticine


    I'm not sure if i'm explaining that right

    i'm sure i explained this before, but this is this scene just loaded into Daz with Iray

    and this is my edits (replace the sand texture during my process of editing)
    since you basically have to remake materal settings thro Reality

    i'm sure with some proper adjustments to matearls in Iray, you can get similar results but this is the quality and feel of the renders i am use of seeing out of my work

  • PadonePadone Posts: 3,700
    edited August 2023

    The difference in your comparison pictures seems mostly related to tone mapping, if you look at the table it is completely overexposed in iray that means tone mapping is bad. You can go in render settings > tone mapping > exposure to fix that. You can also enable spectral rendering to get a more natural light transport model in iray, that's render settings > spectral rendering. But yes I understand that lux may have some advantages as for realism since it is very precise in its light transport model, especially with caustics thus water and glass, so if you're looking for extreme realism lux may make sense.

    Personally I can't wait more than some minutes max for a single rendering, so a slow cpu renderer is out of the question for my needs. But I'm not after extreme realism either. Thank you for your reply.

    Post edited by Padone on
  • marblemarble Posts: 7,500
    edited August 2023

    Padone said:

    Personally I can't wait more than some minutes max for a single rendering, so a slow cpu renderer is out of the question for my needs. But I'm not after extreme realism either. Thank you for your reply.

    That's precisely why I switched from Reality/Lux to IRay when I sold my iMac and bought a PC with a GPU. One thing Lux had that I took advantage of was the ability to render on more than one (network-linked) computer so I had my iMac and an old PC running Linux both contributing to the render. That was much quicker than trying to render in Iray on my iMac CPU.

    Now I have a PC with a RTX 4080 and  even then I get imaptient for the render to finish. 

    Post edited by marble on
  • PadonePadone Posts: 3,700

    It is always a tradeoff between quality and speed. Personally I care more about "aesthetic" than "realism", what makes the big difference is the use of lights and camera angle, focal length and dof to render a scene, then of course tone mapping if we don't save exr for composition. I'm not after extreme details or realism so I mostly rely on the denoiser for speed, that is, the rendering engine is only needed to draw a "draft" then the denoiser "interpolates" the rendering. Among other reasons, that's also why I export to blender since cycles gets a much better denoiser.

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