Reality 2 questions

spswafford

For anyone interested Reality 2 for DAZ is on sale at Renderosity.

Commercial link removed

Now for my questions.

I have heard of Reality and Reality 2, but know little about them beyond they are render engines.

The promo pics look impressive. What is the learning curve for this?

From some of the things I've read this thing can run render times up to get those images. How much difference vs 3Delight?

I'm sure I'll have more questions based on responses.

Chohole

DAZ 3D sell Luxus http://www.daz3d.com/luxus which is somewhat similar. http://www.daz3d.com/luxus

There are threads about this one in the forums here. http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21492/

spswafford

Is one better than the other or does it depend on what you're rendering (and one does better with some things and the other with other things)?

Totte

Basically, Luxus is easier to use, Reality gives you more options and flexibility at the price of more complexity, I hope this answers your question.

mark128

Both Reality and Luxus are plugins that use the LuxRender (www.luxrender.net). LuxRender is a free, open source unbiased render engine.

3Delight is a Renderman compliant render engine. Renderman is a standard for interfacing between graphics programs and render engines that was developed by Pixar. 3Delight is a robust commercial render engine that has been used in a number of Hollywood movies. DAZ has negotiated a license that allows them to distribute the full featured 3Delight modified so it cannot be used for network or batch rendering.

3Delight and all Renderman render engines are so called biased render engines. They do ray tracing, but they take short cuts to speed up the rendering. Those short cuts require you to compensate in how you do your lighting.

LuxRender is a open source (ie free), unbiased render engine. It use a Monte Carlo algorithm to generate light rays based on your light sources and then ray traces them until they are no longer in the scene.

LuxRender has a different way of describing material and how it interacts with light than 3Delight. Almost all the products in the DAZ store come with material set up for 3Delight. Both Reality and Luxus attempt to automatically translate DAZ material to LuxRender material for you. They both have different mechanisms to allow you to tweak the translation or throw it out and do your own from scratch.

The way you do lighting of LuxRender is different than the way you do lighting for 3Delight.. Luxus can translate a few of the basic DAZ lightings, but it also comes with its own lights which translate better. I don't own Reality, but I believe you do the lighting for Reality in the plugin outside of DAZ.

Because of the unbiased ray tracing, you can get more realistic renders with LuxRender, but you have to have realistic material descriptions and that takes some tweaking. To get a high quality render, LuxRender is usually much slower. LuxRenders actually don't finish. The longer you run them, the better the signal to noise. Most people run them until they look good enough. Overnight or longer is pretty normal with LuxRender. LuxRender is rendering the whole scene at once. Even though it might take 8 hours to get to a good signal to noise, you can usually tell after 10 minutes if you have completely screwed up the lighting.

One other note, there is a Reality 3 plugin for Poser, but the 3.0 version is not available yet for DAZ.

XoechZ

Totte said:

Basically, Luxus is easier to use, Reality gives you more options and flexibility at the price of more complexity, I hope this answers your question.

In my opinion it is exactly vice versa :-)

Luxus has more options and is therefore a bit harder to use (especially for beginners).

The biggest advantage of Luxus in my opinion is that it is fully embedded in the DAZ interface. Once you have turned a light or a surface into a Lux light or material, you can access all the settings in the Parameters tab without having to open an additional interface.

The biggest advantage of Reality is (again in my opinion) the material window. There you can see a preview of all the materials how they will look when rendered, without actually having to render the scene. Thats a very nice and handy feature, because when you change some settings you see how it affects the look of the material.

But as said above, both plugins do the same - they "just" prepare your scene for being rendered in Luxrender, which is a seperate render engine, available for free.

spswafford

This has been very helpful. Thanks all.