Luxrender/Daz3d reality

TL;DR - I got it on sale, so I think it is worth the money. The results are fantastic, but it takes some getting used to. If you can stick with it passed relearning some things, its wonderful.


I've got it. Use it occasionally here and there. It is superb at realistic lightning, especially sunlight. It has its own DA group if you want to see some examples of what it tends to come out as.

http://reality-plug-in.deviantart.com/

I've got quite a few in my gallery that I've used it with. Its quite a neat little plugin that can do some amazing things (especially with materials). I find that it is a Godsend for images that have tons and tons of transparency (grass, hair, etc).

Luxrender/Reality is pretty different than what you may be used to in DS. Lighting is different (to get better effects) and the material settings sometimes come out differently in it.

The very basics of it is as simple as putting in a light and hitting Reality Render then Render Frame. However, setting up the materials can sometimes be very time consuming depending on your scene. Usually the Reality plugin sets almost everything to glossy which gives a sort of sheen to everything. Again, depending on your scene, this might be perfect. If its not, you'll have to go in manually and change the materials.

There are some amazing things to Lux/Reality like being able to edit lighting (color/intensity/etc not really direction) without having to rerender. This in itself is aaaamazing! Being able to convert props into lights is also a very neat feature.

Lux also renders very differently. It starts off with the entire thing rendered (very grainy) and slowly passes over it to refine, refine, refine. You can see immediately if something needs to be fixed. Lux renders normally take longer than normal , but you can't really get the results as easily.

Oh gosh I wrote a book x_x That's just SOME information on it, please feel free to ask anything else!

I'm wanting to buy it, but I'm just cheap =/

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not good at using daz to its fullest as it is. I mess around with material settings right now, trying to make things look more realistic, and less crappy, but I have to admit I'm horrible at learning things, stubborn as can be, and the shader system has left me confused. I would really like skins to look more realistic, that's my main priority. Renders taking a long time, well, mine are taking about 25 hours right now for simple stuff, so that's not too big of a deal I guess. The idea that I can see it fairly early on as to how it will look is a huge bonus for me. There is nothing more frustrating than rendering for 15 hours before you notice a major peak through, etc.

maybe it will come down inprice soon. I hope. I see peoples work and it just completely blows me away. Of course, they are all really great to begin with (like you guys) so maybe I should focus on not sucking at normal stuff, first lol

You must have yourself confused with someone else! You have great stuff! The only thing I suggest would be to add a little specular either in the lights or in the materials itself. Other than that, I love your art. Great lighting, scene set up, and framing.

As for Reality, yeah it is really pricey when it's not on sale x_x If you are unsure, yeah, wait for a price drop or vouchers. It's got a lot of great features, indeed. But like with anything, it takes a little learning and getting used to. I still haven't explored all its possibilities and I've had it since it came out.

But, if you ever need help with any kind of rendering/tips/questions/whatever, that's what we're here for!

Ok going to use this thread for tutorials and questions about the program. I just recently bought it so I'm finding all the tutorials and links for it.

http://preta3d.com/wp/reality-documentation - User guides

http://preta3d.com/ - creator site

Wow, your computer really has to have a set of balls to actually render a scene. I'm probably not going to be able to use it until I upgrade. =/

Roz, can you post your computer specs for me, please, so I know whether or not to buy it now or later lol And thanks for the links!!

I only have 4 gigs of memory and that's not enough =/ Vex runs 8, but her computer is built kick ass because it's her job. I'm going to ask for a refund and then wait until I can bump up my memory to at least 8 before buying it again.

Man. :/ I had no idea it took so much. It didn't seem sluggish on my system. Roz, does it hang/not load when Reality is called up? or when you click on Render Frame? If its the latter, it looks like your comp is having issues with LuxRender.

There FAQ (on their wiki) is here: http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions

This is maybe what you should look for when upgrading your comp (from the FAQ):

"The number of processor cores, CPU clock speed, and L2/L3 CPU cache size -- get the maximum of these for your budget. Please take into account that rendering of images in high resolution with LuxRender requires very large amounts of physical (unswapped) memory; if you wish to produce such renderings, equip your machine with at least 4Gb of RAM. If you are planning to use the Hybrid rendering mode in LuxRender, a powerful graphics card will also be beneficial. More features for Hybrid are planned for future releases, so it may be useful to keep an upgrade path open for a faster card."

It'll probably be months before I upgrade. I pretty much wait for my dad to satisfy his nerd needs and upgrade his computer and then usually he'll upgrade mine with his old parts (which are still infinitely better than what I run). I'll talk to him about the min requirements. Blergh.

lol that sounds familiar! My hubby was going to make me a rendering farm for Christmas, but I put a stop to that! (cause we soo don't have the money! silly man) but that'd be nice. I'd probablyw ork on things a lot more and get better at it if I had the patience to give up my computer, or not have to give up my computer as it would be, to render something.

This is on sale till 8/19 for 39.99, 50% off. Dude said he is making a Daz4 version and it'll be at a 'reasonable' upgrade (whatever that means).

Daz4 advanced is being priced at 79 upgrade if you already own Daz3A, which you could have gotten for 1.88 last year.

So has everyone switched to DAZ now? Weren't alot of you Poser freaks before? lol

Not everyone, I think just I did recently.

Some of us are still Poser freaks

Some of us are considering the return to Poser o_O

Not diggin daz4? I have it installed but I'm still using Daz3. I have my poser disc somewhere, but ugh...I don't want to relearn that again although I think it would render a helluva lot faster now.

My computer hated both programs, but its in Canada. I could never get it to reload anything I had started and saved. Unless I had hours to sit and complete something, I could never finish anything. Thinking of buying a new laptop when my tax rebate comes in, will see how it goes from there.

I dunno. There just doesn't seem that much different between the two versions. Most of the advancements are directed towards creators. The Genesis thing is cool, but I get that with the free version.

Versus looking at Poser they've finally got the 'do things in the program while you render' thing finally. Of course they are way more advanced because of they've been around a lot longer. I think I'm missing out on a lot of stuff because Daz Studio just hasn't caught up yet.

I never thought I'd switch to daz, certainly not drop 100 bucks for the 3adv, but when it went for sale for 1.88, i figured what the hell. I'm not that talented an of artist, so for what I can do, Daz is purdy cool. Poser was just so laggy for me, but I do miss the mat room. I see poser9 coming out and I still have poser8 or whatever so I dunno. My computer rocks it pretty hard now, so maybe I'll reinstall it some day. /shrug