I’m primarily interested in using Daz software products to make 45-60 minute animations (if you google “Star Trek Aurora” you will get an idea of what I’m aiming at) either in 16x9 480p or (the render gods willing) HD (720p or 1080p). It would be nice to be able to do 1-2 of these a month, at a minimum. This seems to be what is known as "a lot of frames", at least for an amateur without an ILM sized render farm.

   Preferably I hope to do this through  GPU rendering: either Reality+LuxRender on Radeon GPUs, or Octane on Nvidia GPUs. I hope to also use Blender, hopefully GPU assisted either through LuxBlend+LuxRender on Radeon GPUs or with either Cycles or Octane on Nvidia GPUs, and a terrain generator yet to be decided upon (I'm not aware of any that are GPU assisted, or need to be, but I've never generated an entire planet either). If I eventually use Cararra I would either use Luxus+LuxRender on Radeon HW or Octane (they have plans for a new add-on) on Nvidia HW. I guess I'm hoping to not stray into using Poser Pro 2014 on the grounds that I have enough on my plate with what I've discussed already, but I suppose its possible that it could be a solution for certain scenes.

   So, ideally my workflow would be something like this:

Script->Live Actors->Video/Audio Capture->Facial & Body Motion Capture SW->BVH files->Daz Studio (/Blender/etc.)+3rd Party Models->GPU Render SW->Local and/or Internet Render Farm->Raw Frames+Captured Audio+Sound FX+(3rd Party?) Music->Video Editing SW->Digital Video

   I'm at the point of acquiring GPUs for the render farm, and I'm having second thoughts about how quickly Lux Render produces frames for Daz Studio projects. I hope there are people who either have tried both or use one or the other render SW (LuxRender or Octane, though Octane vs. Cycles is of interest as well), as well as the various plugins/applications to access them from the primary software. On one level the problem has little or nothing to do with Daz SW, on the other hand it has everything to do with rendering quality Daz compatible content and scene settings.

   So, with somewhat similar settings, how much faster or slower does each program seem to be? What are their limitations (other than VRAM limits) in terms of scene content and settings? Which is easier to work with Daz Studio (and other software), which has a better user interface and workflow, which save the artist more time? Please add any issues that I have failed to address.

   The other threads I found where people asked these questions were left unanswered on the grounds that you can't compare apples and oranges. Well, some of us find apples better than oranges and vice versa, so obviously we can compare non-identical things, we just have to provide detail and qualifiers.

   Please, any input would be of great value to me. For me, if one program is slightly faster than the other than its a wash,  but if they are twice as fast that's something I would like to know.

Regards,

Whorfin

I would plan on more time then 1-2 every month!  I think you're underestimating the time involved.

I usually take 20-30 days for a 10min episode of Secret Agent Cat or SpaceCat (see my site below).  All of my animations are done in Daz Studio 3.0 Advanced.

All my post-work/compositing is done in AE and editing in FCP.  Sound work in SoundTrack Pro (but moving to Logic X).

You could get faster output from C4D, but the time to convert DS animation and figures may be a wash. time-wise.

Overall, I consider the DS route to be the fastest, and best for my worksflow.

-AniMajik

editing

From your stated interest in GPU rendering I'm guessing that you are talking about using either the Hybrid renderer (GPU assisted CPU) in Lux, or SLG (GPU only). On my system, the hybrid renderer is about twice as fast as straight GPU, which would still be rather slow for animations unless you have a good render farm. SLG is very fast, but doesn't have the same materials available as the CPU and Hybrid renderers. It's also a bit less stable than the other two, with CPU being the most stable and trouble free at this point. Since SLG is now "a part of Lux", it should be improving and getting more materials and features in the coming versions.

As with anything, the preferred user interface depends on the user. For Lux, I prefer Reality over Luxus (I have Luxus for both DS and Carrara). Both do a good job, but Reality fits with the way I think better. Keep in mind though that many people who tried Reality 2, liked Luxus better. Reality 3 for Poser is even better than Reality 2. The materials conversions are typically quite good, and often need little user intervention. This is just my opinion, but I like the materials conversion results with Reality 3 better than Luxus. I haven't used the Carrara version of Luxus much, mostly because I can get results that I like as well directly out of Carrara much faster and easier than using Luxus. But again, your mileage may vary.

Octane is definitely very fast, and you don't have to compromise for quality vs. speed - if your scene will fit within the restrictions of you video card. Other than the up coming cloud rendering system for Octane, there is no option for a render farm yet. The current version of Octane does not have any way to control multiple computers for rendering. Octane (and Lux) can use more than one video card in your machine, but you will be limited to the RAM of the "lesser" card (i.e. if you have a card with 2Gb and one with 4Gb, you will only be able to use 2Gb for your renders). Of course you could use multiple PC's and manually distribute your render load to each machine (i.e. frames 1-100 one PC1, Freames 101-200 on PC2, etc.), but you will  need to by the appropriate Octane/plugin licenses for each computer.

The speed and quality of the renders from Octane is really amazing, but when sending your data to any external renderer, you will need to edit/tweak your shaders/mats. the Octane plugin for DS does a good job, and will no doubt get better as it nears the end of the beta, but it's impossible to write conversion routines for all possible shaders. There is a free demo version of Octane available, and if you have Poser, there is a demo version of the Poser plugin a well. If you don’t have Poser, the manual has suggested settings for exporting data from DS or Carrara to Octane (but you will need to make your shaders in Octane). The image above was done with the DS plugin for Octane. It took 16 minutes to render (1200 x1500) using Path Tracing (fully unbiased render). This is a straight out of the box render with no changes to the shaders/mats, and only an HDR image for lighting. The same image with equivalent settings would easily take several hours in DS/3Delight.

I think the biggest question is do you really need an unbiased renderer for your project(s)? If you plan on using Carrara, you may be quite happy with the results from using optimized lighting and shaders in Carrara, especially if you use 2-4 other PC's for rendering (Carrara has native render farm support, you get 5 "free" render nodes included in the Pro version). But if you really want to use an unbiased renderer and DAZ/Poser content for the creation of your videos, right now the fastest, most stable and easiest option to use with DS or Poser is Octane with the appropriate plugin. 

It's hard to predict if this will be true when the Carrara plugin is available since I don't know when it will reach the masses, and what will happened with SLG in Lux. But if the Carrara plugin were available right now it would be a great option.

Cycles is also very fast, and has good shader support (I think it even has caustics now, but I could be wrong), but doesn't have a good auto conversion of materials like the plugins for Octane and Lux provide. Moving data into Blender to render in Cycles is a fairly labor intensive process. On good thin though, the licensing for Cycles just changed to Apache, which will open it up to plugin developers for applications other than Blender. It may be a good idea to contact Pret-a-3D (Reality developer) and/or SphericLabs (Luxus developer) to see if they have any interest in developing a DS or Carrara plugin for Cycles.

Hope all this helps, and wasn’t even more confusing.

Having spent quite a bit of time on a Lux animation run, I can tell you its doable, but much agreed, 1-2 per month won't be happening without a studio and lots (and lots!) of processing power. 

Your idea looks solid and you've done your research, but your success will depend on how crazy you want to get with your scenes. 

My vid here using straight CPU in Lux took four months to set up, render and edit, working one guy eighteen to 20 hours a day some weeks (I about killed my marriage to 'chase the dream').

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSal_ah0Iag

I wanted bigger and better, but I didn't have the requisite processing power. I even started putting together a 32-core CPU render farm, but it's still on the back burner for monetary reasons. 

Anyway, back to the GPU debate. Both programs can do the job, but Lux is far more finicky in the stability department. If you want to do hardcore GPU animations, get familiar with how game designers set up their characters (lower poly characters, normal maps, and downright tiny texture maps). Texture atlas and decimator in studio can be good tools with judicial use. 

There's a lot more to it than the basics I've noted, but it you like huge scenes, full res. textures and lots of ooh and ahh, CPU is the only way to get it done without an Nvidia Grid K1 card. 

All the above is definately something to watch out for and keep in mind.

I know you are looking for the best output quality, but there are less time-consuming ways to do it.  I cheat whenever possible.

The biggest "slow-down" is your lighting set-up - lights, if not done right can throttle render time.

Animation is all about trade-offs - what will work with the least amount of resources.  I "cheat" all the time, or I'd never get my stories done.  Render in layers and composite later.  I do this on ALL my animations.  Saves time since you may have elements in your scene that don't move, and others that do.  Why render the parts that don't more more than once.

A carefully planned workflow will really help speed things up.  I usually render on one machine and composite/effects on another.  You can work wonders with color correction in your compositing app (AE in my case) to scenes/images that don't quite "cut-it" on there own.  Sound design and editing. I do on yet another machine.

Best of luck and hope all the info in this thread helps you.

-AniMajik