pzrite> Quote -

When "Reality" first was announced, I followed the thread with much anticipation, but the more I read the more disappointed and suspicious I got - and this was a couple of months before it was even released.  I still have a hard time understanding all the excitement over it.

The bottom line for me is that the renders LuxRender produces does not justify the LONG rendering time (or the price of Reality) for me to use it.  I can set up the similar types of rendering in Vue (Global Illumination, Global Radiosity, Ambient Occlusion, Spectral Atmosphere, etc) and come out with the same look (or very close to it) as Reality in at least half the time.

A lot of that suspicion that you and others were voicing was kind of nutty as some of it was around render times. How can you figure render times for an unbiased render? They are all different and all long, unless you use a GPU to render. It showed a deep lack of knowledge about unbiased renderers. Granted, Paolo should have addressed it more head on earlier but as he said recently, he didn't want to get bogged down in all the technical details. Some of those same folks who voiced suspicions are now happy users.

The excitement for DAZ users is they finally get to use a nicer render engine with ease of export/import (unless you have a really complex scene or character setup requiring lots of tweaks), support that is really there including several videos showing how to do it, good documentation for once, network rendering, even using the Amazon cloud for really affordable, quicker renders (trying to get a network license for 3Delight is very costly), and the ability down the road to use GPU rendering which will speed things up considerably. Given the lengthy render times in Poser, DAZ and Carrara to do good quality IBL and GI renders, it's not that far off. Many renders are being cooked much longer than they need to, but once folks start figuring out what to do, as they are here, it will be better. The light in Lux is very realistic, more so than in DAZ Studio, Poser, Carrara, Vue and other render engines and without having to do a bunch of shader cheats and lighting tricks. You can actually approach your setup as a photographer because light behaves as it should. You can actually set up and get quality lit scenes easily. There, of course, is more work to be done, but that's always the way it is.

The only other export options for DAZ users require exporting scenes as obj files for Octane Render or Blender or getting the FBX plug in at DAZ and exporting to Houdini or another more expensive program that imports FBX.

Kevin