Normally in the morning I sit sipping my coffee while reading posts and looking over the new pictures posted by artists, but today I have spent my morning reading up on Reality 3.

Being a Reality 2.5 for Daz Studio user I have been curious how much better Reality 3 will be. I will be a happy camper when it comes out for Daz

I have toyed around with just about every render engine out there. I stick with Reality because compared to the others the price is right and once you learn how the lighting and material settings work, it is a lot easier to use than most programs out there. I did try a very popular render engine out...I won't mention the name...and it drove me nuts just trying to get the skin right. I gave up on it and went back to Reality.

I will throw out a couple things to think about.

With Reality it exports to luxrender. I have a Quad core AMD with 8GBs of RAM and a NVida card. I usually have one picture rendering while setting up another one and repeatedly testing different settings. Meaning at times I have 2 renders running at the same time. It does slow down render times (I don't worry about the render times because I am never in a rush to do a picture) but it doesn't bog down my computer unless I have increased the subdivision on some of the the material settings.

I usually spend a lot of time throwing out the bump maps for each material and changing them to normal maps. Normal maps are easier for me to use than bump maps and give me the results I want a lot faster. I like the preview screen in Reality because it does help me with getting the settings right for each material. All this is time comsuming but once it is done I can save the ACSEL and the next time I use the same prop or outfit, it automatically loads the settings I saved, so I don't have to spend time with the settings again.

As for lighting.....as the saying goes...the proof is in the pudding. If you would like to see what the lighting is like just take a look at my gallery. I have used just about every type of lighting available for Reality...softbox, mesh lights, spot lights, IBL's/HDRI's and sunlight.  Just remember that depending on the lighting you might have to make slight adjustments to the material to make them look right.

There are some things that are tough to figure out at first but once you understand how Reality reads the different materials it is easy to use and the results are great. It takes some trial and error.

Just thought I would throw this stuff out for those that are thinking about purchasing Reality 3 and wanted some more info on it.