bleumune wrote: ↑Wed Jun 01, 2022 10:53 am
I know you do your modelling with Poser, but what rendering engine do you use that gets the results you mention with CPU rendering?
I use Daz Studio with Iray doing the rendering. Iray was developed by Nvidia and is designed to make use of Nvidia GPU units which do the heavy lifting. If the scene gets too large however, Daz defaults to CPU rendering, which is what takes so long. But Iray-rendered images are so much better than anything I was ever able to produce with the old 3Delight renderer, which used the CPU.
However, I always considered the Poser renders using Firefly to be about equivalent to 3Delight. Now, after what you are saying, I wonder if I haven't kept up with progress. So please educate me.
That was true till Poser 11, some 6 years ago. Firefly is an old school renderer with so-so results. After DAZ added physically based renderer Iray in 4.20 (i believe), Poser had to come with their own equivalent of physics based material shaders and the solution was SuperFly, from Cycles, a very powerfull open source solution from Blender community (and because of that free of any entanglement with NVidia's GPUs).
Similar with Iray, it produces best results when surfaces are optimized for Superfly but much more mediocre if old legacy skins/props are used and not adapted (I'm in the process of learning how to do that, you might notice some of my surfaces are great, some are terrible, in the same rendering, lol).
As for hobbling on CPU in the case of Iray, it's not me saying it but people in the know, and it is explained by the partnership between NVidia and DAZ as DAZ didn't put any development effort into Iray, they just took the whole package from NVidia who want to sell cards). While a GPU is vastly superior to any generic CPU, no matter how overclocked, it's easily beaten by performance rigs using Xenon CPUs or even consumer CPU with large number of cores (rendering is an activity where the paralel processing of them is put to good use).
For some good reading, much more in detail, but skip the comparision Iray vs Firefly, jump directly to the part of Iray vs Superfly(or Cycles, same thing). It explains also some frustration of the community for the opaqueness of NVidia in documenting their solution in comparison with Blender where everything is neatly explained and with plenty of resources.
Basically a proprietary technology vs. open source choice.
https://www.deviantart.com/ken1171/jour ... -677295307
Here's a render where I was able to convert all the materials to Cycles nodes*, it took some 11 minutes for full render, DOF, SSS (well exaggerated, I know, I like the glowing of the skin, at the cost of details, blemishes). I had to re-render it again to be precise about rendering time.
JD
* except the wood in the yoke, that one is still old Firefly material