Dear all,

The last few days presented messages like "Unbiased renderers are slow", "Octane 2 is slower than 1.5", "are there Firefly alternatives", and the like. Time for some testing myself, so I took my last scene made in Poser/Octane as published in the Rendo gallery:

Rose Garden, http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2474504&user_id=378571&np&np

The scene contains 1 character (V4) with conforming hair, 5 complete clothing sets,  and a few scene props.

The render measures 1200x1200 pixels, and uses texture maps (2000 to 4000 in size), transparency only for some lace-like clothing, reflections in mirrors which could see each other for nice (infinite) mirror-in-mirror effects, simple IDL lighting by two meshlights and hardly any SSS. No refractions or other raytracing demands, no volumetric effects like atmospherics, solid glass objecs or alike. Nothing Firefly has troubles with, Poser 8 / Pro2010 and up.

Hardware makes a difference. My CPU (i7 990x/OC) handles 12 threads @4.0GHz so when yours handles 8 threads max @3GHz then CPU-based renders will take (12x4)/(8x3) = 2 times as long. My GPU (dual 770GFX/OC) handles 2x 1536=3072 cudas (processing units ) @1.2GHz so when you have an single 670GFX with 1344 cudas @ 1.0GHz then GPU based renders will take (30721,2)/(13441,0)=2,75 times as long.

Vue Complete 2014 rendered blazing fast: 5 minutes.

That's in Broadcast quality (Final quality took 3 mins), using the high-end Photometric atmosphere and the Global Radiosity lighting model. It required 4Gb userRAM (Final quality even 10% less) while deploying 8 threads out of 12 only (a Vue limitation in the Artist-series of products), and no GPU processing so it's extremely resource-friendly. 

Vue integrates quite well with Poser, all variations of this produced similar results. The two mesh-lights hade to be made luminant, the three mirrors had to be made reflective and the camera had to be positioned explicitely as Poser direct lights and cameras are not imported. All (220) materials in the scene had to be re-considered for highlight production, but that does not effect render time.

Like Poser, Vue is a biased renderer which applies tricks to establish semi-photoreal results in an acceptable speed at medium-level machinery. Such renderes usualy have issues in properly handling the "raytracing meets transparency meets glass/fluid volumes meets atmospherics" area. Vue does too, but from all biased renderers on the market is does so about the least of all, and produces quite believable results in a wide range of cases.

Vue supports Poser dynamic hair with ease, and supports displacement mapping although that might require manual adjustment of the material settings.

Is Vue always this fast? No, Vue becomes slow when lightrays travel long paths within scattering cloud layers at angles of incidence (sunsets), and becomes a resource hog when it has to deal when extreme amounts of vegetation. But for regular Poser portraying scenes, Vue is fast. In background, it only deploys 2 threads in parallel which slows things down to 25%.

For this kind of work, only Vue d'Esprit is required which takes $200. Other versions add modules for additional Vue functionaity. Note that Vue is not "saving back": when Poser alters the scene one has to make all Vue integration steps anew, and the Vue scene has to be saved as such.

Octane 1.2 required: 90 minutes.

Actually is does a great job even in the first 10% of that, but the mirror-in-mirror areas were extremely persistent in keeping visible noise levels so the quality level was set to 4800 samples/pixel. Except from the usual adjustment of the mesh-light and mirror materials no further adjustments were required. Octane runs completely in GPU, and the 1.x versions do not support dynamic hair nor displacement mapping.

Octane 1.5 required: 70 minutes.

It was mainly a performance update to 1.2, userRAM is obtained from the Poser process which increases from 0.8Gb to 4.0Gb.

Octane 2.0 requires: 80 minutes

So indeed, the new version is somewhat slower. But mainly, it produces different results, including stronger gloss/specular highlights. The mirror-in-mirror noise levels did not disappear faster, so I cannot support the idea that the new version might be somewhat slower but reaches quality levels faster. So I still had to go the full mile: 4800 samples/pixel. This new version supports Poser dynamic hair and displacements.

Note that without the quirky noise-holding areas, good results are derived at 1200 S/p which just takes 25% of the durations mentioned.
Octane + Poser plugin sells for 429,00 excluding all your additional hardware (GPU) upgrades.

Octane does "save back" and in fact is completely interactive with Poser: while rendering one can alter the scene in Poser and the render adapts immediately, while Octane specific materials used will be defined in the Poser file so they're available next time as well.

Poser Firefly required 410 minutes (7 hrs).

85% of this was in the IDL prepass which required 7.5Gb userRAM, 15% in rendering itself which took about 5Gb userRAM. Settings were for high-end results: bounces 12, irr.chache 90, IDL quality 90, samples 3. It was run as a separate process, Light emissin for hair was OFF.

Poser takes all 12 threads from my CPU, and has no GPU processing for render. In background, in can do the same. While rendering, one cannot alter the scene (unless in background, but then the result will not adapt).

Reality3.10/Lux1.3.1

Using this required the usual adjustment for mesh-lights and mirrors, nothing else. Reality ($40) launches the (free) LuxRender as a separate process, so I can continue working in Poser as well. LuxRender does not respond to such changes interactively. Material (re)definitions are saved back into the Poser file so they're available for a next session.

Three render modes are supported:

• No Accellaration: produced 1.6 samples/pixel per minute effectively. To reach the 4800 samples/pixel quality level, 3000 minutes (50 hrs) are required. This mode uses all avaliable CPU-threads but ignores GPU. Ram requirements vary from 3 to 4 Gb.
  I did not persue this render to its final result, so perhaps it could produce a high quality result in the problematic mirror-in-mirror areas much faster than Octane, or: perhaps the 4800 s/p limit is overdoen for this renderer. But even 1200 s/p would require 750 minutus which is about twice as long as Poser itself.

• Hybrid, which uses CPU and GPU to a limited extend, producing effectively 2.1 samples/pixel per minute so 2285 min (38 hrs) are required. Ram requirements vary from 6 to 8 Gb. My observation is that the same quality limit (say 1200) produces noisier results. So, while this rendering mode is faster, getting similar qualities will take about equal amounts of time.

• Pure, which runs in GPU only, has a few quircks in assigning the GPU's to the job (looked into by Paolo at the moment). On top of that it required twice as much ram again (16Gb for this scene), none of it seem to be virtual. And since Lux, Poser, Reality etc  are active too this drove my 24Gb RAM system into disk-swapping. No meaningful performance results therefor, don't use this render mode for serious scenes.

My Conclusions

It's well known that Firefly falls short for structural reasons in properly handling the "raytracing meets transparency meets glass/fluid volumes meets atmospherics" area. That material room has a steep learning curve, and that IDL lit scenes take long times to render at high-quality levels.

These are reasons people look for alternative renderers.

All three renderers mentioned: Vue, Reality/Lux and Octane, offer material preset collections and "material rooms" which are easier to comprehend. They  all produce higher quality results too (Vue being closest to Poser), but Reality/Lux takes takes two to four times longer - compared to Poser - to do so.  On the other hand, it's the cheapest expansion of all.

When you're not on a budget, Vue and Octane offer solutions for rather different workflows. Octane offers a rather interactive way of dealing with camera, light and more in an IDL environment and does require appropriate hardware. Vue requires some serious adjustments to the Poser scene materials but after that it's faster than anything, though not interactive. It does not put high demands on hardware, and it also offers a shipload of extra modules for vegetation, terrains, animation effects and the like (at extra costs).

Wow, thanks 4 the research and ...
... that's one fine image!

cheers,
dr geep
;o]

Without seeing the endresults of each render it is difficult to compare the render engines. Unbiased and biased renders and the enabled features give different results as well.

The firefly render has many differnent options which influence render times greatly such as shadow bias, IDL bounces, reflection/refraction quality settings. Adjusting those could make a much faster render.

The Octane render has 3 different render engines - DirectlLighting, PathTracing and PMC. I assume you have used Pathtracing. DirectLighting is mich faster and gives pretty much the same result as firefly. The PMC render engine is also a bit faster as PathTracing but clears up much quicker with specular surfaces. Using Hotpixel removal and adding a bit of caustic blur will make the render clear up faster as well. It would be interesting to see what the render time is with DirectLighting and hotpizel removal.

I assume that with Vue and Lux there are similar adjustments as well which will make the render faster

Could we see all the renders please? 

Quote - Could we see all the renders please? 

I agree.

To be fair, and make a fair comparison, you should show all the renders you tested, as well as the kernels you used, and settings for the Octane renders and Firefly.

Octane can render in a slightly biased mode, which is more similar to Vue, if you set it in Direct Lighting kernel.  This will increase render speed dramatically, with little difference in the render results usually, if you use Direct Lighting/Diffuse mode.  If you use Direct Lighting/AO mode, then it will go even faster, but with the loss of bounced lighting, so it will be more like Firefly.

Using Octane in Path Tracing/Unbiased mode is the most accurate, but with proper settings, you could increase render speed 4 to 8 times what you achieve in Path Tracing kernel, using Direct Lighting/Diffuse, depending on how many diffuse bounces you set.  Also adjusting the glossy/reflection depth in Direct Lighting kernel (any mode) can help increase or decrease render time.

Clearly, you know Vue settings better than you do Octane, which also plays a role in achieving faster results.

I wasn't after a detailed scientific result, but just looking for rough indications. But I will make a second round given your responses. Basically, I used defaults / out of the box settings, click and run, at a "no visible artefacts" quality level.

For Vue, the Broadcast level is considered fine for web gallery stills and professional animation, and (both being biased renderers) it should compete with Firefly's high-end settings as mentioned: bounces 12, irr cache 90, idl quality 90, samples 3. Firefly's result were not a surprise, but Vue's results were as I recently spend some serious rendertime on images which took say 10 hours on average (and smaller in size and lower settings). And of course Firefly results can be halved or doubled by altering values, same for Vue, but that's not going to turn about 7 hours into less than 7 minutes on about comparable quality output. Note that Firefly ran on 12 threads while Vue could only use 8.

Same for Lux, I mentioned the No Acceleration, Hybrid and Pure settings and each seems to trigger another tracing routine. As the Poser scene was set up using Paolo's gear (lights, studio) I only had to ensure that the mirrors were reflective indeed. I'm sure everything can be tweaked here too, and the 4800 samples/pixel is completely arbitrary although earlier tests revealed that 1200 - 2400 is required for final web-gallery quality. But even at the lowest limit Lux takes twice the time of Firefly.

Octane was the one driving it all, as I was about to replace my version 1.53 by the new 2.0. Same settings etc and it took slightly longer indeed. You can compare quality, the image above is the Octane 2 one at 4800 s/p. There is far more shine on the girls skirt (and a lot of other places) which hampered a meaningful detailed Photoshop image subtraction for comparison. There is slightly more noise in the mirror above the girl's shoulder. Both compared to the Octane 1.2 render in the gallery. Again, another image could have done with a 1200 s/p quality limit turning the Octane 2 number into 20 minutes.

But in the end, comparing figures for renderers on CPU-only with one at GPU-only can only be indicative. Everyone has a different kit. The differences by the CPU-only tools (Vue on 8 threads, Firefly and Lux-NoAccell both on 12) are clear.

I'll look into Octane 2 alternative settings - just for my own good, isn't it?

I've found, on my GPU, that switching to Direct Lighting/Diffuse kernel in Octane, instead of Path Tracing, increased speed from 0.5M to 1.2M on the same scene, same materials, and lighting situation.  That's more than double the speed increase, with very little noticeable difference in render quality.  I typically set the Direct Lighting/Diffuse kernel mode to 10 reflection, and 8 glossy bounces, and 2 or 3 diffuse bounces.  The higher you set the diffuse bounces, the closer your results to Path Tracing, at the expense of render time.  Try also the Direct Lighting/Ambient Occlusion kernel mode.  You'll see the render time cut in half yet again, at the expense of bounced light and scattering.  However, you can push the reflection and glossy bounces very high here, and still maintain extremely fast results.

I rarely use PMC.  ALthough it's optimized for the GPU, I've found it relatively slower than standard Path Tracing for the typical scene.  While samples do clear up faster for complex materials like glass or SSS, overall it seems to take longer to get the same results I get with Path Tracing.  It's handy when trying to solve caustics, or deep scatter, which can be very difficult to clean up with Path Tracing.

The default conversion of specular materials in Octane is too high. Change the index to 1.3 for a less shiny result. The default 0 setting is a left over from the old version of Octane when speculars were handled differently

Using default settings to compare render engines is a bit tricky since most settings depend on the scene being rendered (lights intensity. emitter meshes, reflections, volumetrics, etc). The default high quality setting for firefly is pretty slow and often completely over the top. I almost never have a FF render which takes longer as an hour - with the same spu power you have. The FF Rendersettings script from Dimension3D allows you to reduce the IDL cache and IDL bounces independent of the irradiance cache. Optimizing those will dramatically reduce your render time.

I use both Firefly and Octane. Firefly's ability to tweak materaials is pretty good and much easier as in some other render engines. If it was an unbiased render engine and GPU support it would be awesome.

Octane is a great render engine and v2 has now added a lot of very useful features. One advantage of Octane is that the speed is linear to the number of GPUs and you can add more (if you have the space and money) and if you want more speed you can go to network rendering as well - all the additional network node are  now like new GPU cores. 

Quote - index to 1.3 for a less shiny result

As far as I understand, the Index is actually akin to IOR in Octane.  It's the fresnel effect of the reflectivity, not the intensity.

Correct - it is the IOR. But the defaul the plugin uses in its conversion is 0. 0 however is the old indexing style of octane which has been replaced with a range of 1.0-8.0. The renderengine now treats0 as being an index 1.0 which is way too reflective. Together with a reflection value of 0.05 and rougness of 0.7 is renders like the first image.

In the second image I changed the index to 1.3 in the base of the sweater and it looks miuch better.

well, since benchmarking as such is not my hobby, my interest is not in the detailed figures but in the final conclusions that can be drawn from them. Details even depend on the temperature control in my box, and eventual other processes running too.

Is Octane 2 slower than 1.5?
yes, 15% on the same settings, but v1.5 became 30% faster than v1.2 before.

Is that so for elaborate scenes only?
no, my scene is not that sophisticated

Although v2.0 is slower, you can stop at a lower s/p limit since it converges faster to to required low-noise result.
Not found real proof for that.

Unbiased renderers are (much) slower than biased ones.
Luxrender is slower than Firefly and Octane is slower than Vue (both 2x to 8x depending on scene, settings etc), but Octane is quite faster than Firefly (4x to 16x).

Where does Vue stand as a renderer alternative?
We've seen that one above, surprise to me ! Vue is a known snail in scenes with light scattering in clouds and rich vegetation, but since all that is out in a "standard" Poser scene where Firefly, Octane or Lux can perform to any extend, it's blazing fast for that purpose.

And so on, take your pick. I've left Blender, PoseRay/POVray and more alternatievs out of the loop as well.

@WimvdB - this helps, great !!

I'd like to see Vue tested against Octane in a totally enclosed, biased, Direct Lighting/Diffuse mode, with one or two area lights, IES, and a lot of refractive/reflective surfaces.

As soon as you start to use Vue in a closed enviroment, like you did, it is very fast.

I did these 2 images one is a while back and one is more recently.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2540091&user_id=23722&np&np

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2505689&user_id=23722&np&np

Both are completely set up in Poser and rendered in Vue. They rendered in about 5 minutes in Vue on my machine (i7 3770, 4 cores/ 8 threads), setting Vue on superior. The second one, with the knights I did render in Poser as well and I stopped Poser after 4 hours, but the image wasn't done by then at all.

The results surprised me as well. I now working on a new image, completely setup in Poser. There are 9 fully dressed figures in it. 2 of them are knights with a full armor. 3 ladies with long dresses, 3 others in tunics and one figure with a different set of clothes. Each figure has it's own body texture and 6 of them have hair, each one of them a differently. 6 different sets of clothes, but when I used double, I made sure each figure has it's own unique texture set. They're in a tavern with roughly 35 unique props, but in total over 50.

I tried to render it in Poser, using 9 lights (the scene is candle lit), render settings not too high. Even waiting on Poser to gather all the textures took ages and rendering was going to take hours, so I stopped the rendering. Opened the scene in Vue, added the reflections that were lost in importing. Added the 9 lights again, same type as in Poser and set the rendering on the same size. First tried Final for rendering..... 3 minutes later the render was done. Then tried superior... 15 minutes later the render was done. That is still faster then Poser managed to gathered the textures for the scene. Finally I opted for indirect lighting, set the atmosphere nice and high and switched on some other time consuming features and left the render setting at superior. The image itself doesn't look much better at all, but sure took longer to render. Just under 3 hours, but these are insane settings and still it's faster then Poser, since Poser didn't even manage to produce a render on much lower settings in 3 hours.

Enough of this.... what surprises me here though is how slow Octane and Reality are. I remember a while back everyone was so happy with Octane being so fast. When people started showing off their images though, they were of a lesser quality. Once people wanted quality, it wasn't so fast anymore. At that time I wanted to jump on the Octane bandwagon as well, but chose Vue instead. I'm glad I did..... by now I know that rendering my Poser scenes in Vue is insanly fast, yet of hight quality. As soon as you start to create outdoor scenes, Vue won't be as fast. That is mostly due to adding too much stuff though..... a little plant here, a few more flowers there and a couple more trees and there goes the rendering time. Still most of my Vue scenes, some being complex render quite fast. 2-4 hours with a size of 3500x2500. That's not too bad at all. Rendering for a forum of my screen (1366x768) takes 15-30 minutes for a complex scene. In the end I'm happy to have choses Vue! I not only have a cool rendering engine, I also have lot of cool stuff to play with as well.

Quote - what surprises me here though is how slow Octane and Reality are

Reality is not slow, Luxrender is.  I'm actually surprised for the opposite reason.  I think what we are seeing in some of these replies are people who are just comfortable with one renderer, and know it very well, but don't know the others quite as well, and can't get them to perform the same way.  You can not compare Luxrender's speed to Octane.  Octane, on every scene I have tested, was up to 8x faster at converging samples than Luxrender, using my GPU vs. CPU at the time, with same lighting setup, and equivalent materials.  Yes, Octane will slow down if you use SSS and lots of refractive materials in PATH TRACING or PMC kernel.  However, no one is discussing how fast Octane can be under the same conditions in Direct Lighting/Diffuse mode, when settings are tweaked, with very little loss of quality.

There's a guy in the 3dsmax forum here who renders top-notch, realistic renders with Octane for most of his freebie previews, and believe me, the realism is insane on most of it.  A look also in his gallery shows some very high end images with incredible realism done in Octane.  I've discussed his hardware and render time specs with him on several occasions, and have concluded there's just no way to get the same level of realism in the same timeframe out of Firefly or Luxrender.  I don't know about Vue, because I've never used it, and really have no interest in it.  Vue doesn't play well with some of the high end softwares.  It may be good with Poser, but it's Xstream plugin is unreasonably buggy, and crashes constantly with other software, so I've dismissed it as a serious tool in that regard.  I know it's renderer has been used successfully in studio production, mainly for matte renders and flythroughs of extensive outdoor environements, but I rarely, if ever, hear of it used in production for much else.  Especially not character rendering.  It lacks a good skin shader (SkinVue is ok, but not anything like a good multi-layer BRDF SSS shader).  Octane can do multi-layer SSS, although it does slow drastically with Path Tracing, and most average or casual users do not know the proper node setup to get the most out of the SSS in Octane for skin.

Vue has SSS and it can perfectly well be used for skin shading :) I've seen some excellent character images made with Vue, but most users do not do that, so they are few. SkinVue is OK, but outdated and relies on faking SSS. The last few good character renders I've seen don't rely on Skinvue anymore.

As for Xstream not being usable with high end software, I don't know about that, I don't own or use Xstream, so I can pass judgement on it and neither can you. You only have second hand information. Xstream's core is integration and seeing how many studios, people and even well know studios use it, I'm sure it must be working somehow. You haven't used Vue, so don't make any claims about it :) It's the same with Poser..... it's unbelievably buggy, it crashes all the time and you can't do serious work with it..... at least that's what a number of people try to make us believe on this forum, yet we all know that's not true ;)

Well, yes octance is faster then poser (but what isn't?) if you have an insane graphics card at hand. When I made my choice I took all of that into consideration.... buying a decent graphics card and a license for Octane isn't exactly cheap, the octane part already is €429.00 and the I still need to get a new graphics card to get most out of it. So, forgive me if my choice fell on Vue, I not only get a top notch render engine, I get a whole software package with it that can produce amazing stuff and it works great with Poser without having to figure out tons of settings. After all, that's what interest me and that is what this thread is about..... render engines that work well with Poser.

@aeilkema  - since you don't have Octane you can't make any judgements about Octane either

Octane works wonderfully well with Poser. And it is a lot faster as Poser with most modern NVidia videocards.

My experiences with Vue are from some years ago (Vue 8) and were not very good. A simple HDRI skymap took days to render.

Whether something looks good or not, is a matter of personal opinion. Both Vue, Firefly, Lux and Octane can make great realistic images. How good depends on your knowledge of the tool you use and your personal preference

Vue 8.... that's old stuff :) Vue has improved... a lot. Comparing Vue 8 and Vue 2014 is like comparing Poser 4 and Poser 2014 ;) Days of that slowness are gone!

As for Octane..... it's called demo :) From that demo is was obvious what my investment would need to be on the machine I use poser on, but that's not the only machine I do have :)

hi all,

in my opinion, since people are different, purposes are different, 3D knowledge and experiences are different, educational backgrounds are different, wallet contents are different and machineries are different, there is no good or bad or worse or better, and our endless list of alternatives is not exploited to the full either.

But when I open the Poser forum, the front page reveals various threads in alternate renderers without figures to support the various statements, so I just give some numbers. Then everyone makes his/her own choises. Okay?

Some additions for the moment.

By accident, I found out that the scene rendered in Firefly in 1 hour (58 mins) when mirror-reflections were off, instead of the 7 hours when these reflections were on. This confirms that the mirror-in-mirror is causing the pain, especially in conjunction with IDL because that light gets reflected till infinity as well.

Second, I tried the tracing alternatives mentioned for Octane. Direct / Diffuse with bounces set to 12/12/6 - to stay in sync with the Firefly and Vue settings - did not make any difference with Path Tracing. It took 4800 samples to get rid of the noise and that took 80 mins again. Reducing the bounces to 6/6/3 reduced rendertime to 66 mins, and of course puts a limit on the mirror-in-mirror effect.

I'm re-rendering the scene in Firefly to give you a good comparison with the two Octane results available now. Given rendertimes, it will be available tonight or tomorrow.

Quote - Vue 8.... that's old stuff :) Vue has improved... a lot. Comparing Vue 8 and Vue 2014 is like comparing Poser 4 and Poser 2014 ;) Days of that slowness are gone!

As for Octane..... it's called demo :) From that demo is was obvious what my investment would need to be on the machine I use poser on, but that's not the only machine I do have :)

Someone did another HDRI map for me recently and her render times were measured in days as well -[ and she was using Vue2014. So I don't think that it has changed. And she is very proficient in Vue. Apparently rendering clouds is extremely time consuming.

If you are talking about investments, Vue Studio is not cheap either

Also, there was a request for a specific benchmarking-like scene: closed environment, two IDL lights, reflections etc. It surprised me a bit to be honest because that was exactly what the presented scene was offering already. But nevertheless:

closed environment by Reality/Paolo's Studio prop

two meshlights, from Reality/Paolo's meshlight props, with the appropriate ambient, intensities, luminances etc set for Poser, Octane and Vue.

two parallel mirrorring boxes to make nice mirror-in-mirror effects, and the camera in between at a slight angle.

two colored balls, each with reflection and transparency / refraction including fresnel, making the best glasses available in each tool with all settings as similar as possible, to my current understanding.

All renders set to similar quality standards, like 12 bounces in all, etc. Direct / Diffuse tracing for Octane as requested.

Here are the results for Octane and Vue, Poser is still crunching at the moment and will follow later on.

But do note the crispyness and multipicity of the internal reflections in the front balls. This is Octane, you've got to wait a bit, and then you get something. Though Vue is not doing that bad either.

===

to the other discussion: I can compare a family car to a formula 1, and mention speed. I can compare a family car to a road-train, and mention cargo volumes. But why should I compare the formula 1 to the road-train?

same here: I can compare Firefly to Vue, I can compare Firefly to Octane, but why should I compare Vue to Octane? It's so different. Don't make religions out of it, please.

===

I just finished a series of Vue renders, no vegetation, just clouds, reflective objects and low sun. Render times varied from 10 hours (sun at 4* above horizon) to 20 hours (sun at 0* above horizon, rays parallel through cloud layer) and the latter reduced to 5 hours when I altered the default "flat earth" model to a "spherical earth" model. As I said earlier: light scattering through cloud layer formations is the Vue speed killer.

===

stated already: Vue d'Esprit is what you need for rendering Poser scenes, $199 which is about half the price of the Octane+plugin combo. I paid $700 to replace my 560Ti by dual 770/4Gb/OC's and I'm facing airflow-heat management issues as a consequence.

But it's just different tools for different trades. They are not each others alternatives, in my opinion. Unless you've got them for speeding up Firefly results only.

A few random thoughts.

One thing that always seems to get missed in a comparison of render engines, is what the final renders will be used for. Fast does not always mean accurate, neither does slow unfortunetly. Comparing render engines will always be full of opinions, etc. Because in the end we are what is looking at it.

Comparing GPU to CPU rendering is not so easy to do. It doesn't matter how good a GPU render engine is, if it runs out of memory or has to do tons of memory swapping.

Comparing the number of CPU cores is tricky. just because one has twice as many cores or twice as fast does not always mean it will be twice as fast. But it could be way faster.

Compare an 8 core I7 (990x) to a 16 core Xeon (E5-2687) ... The Xeon will be more than twice as fast in every type of benchmark including rendering. Doesn't matter is if is CPU or GPU rendering either. The Xeons systems memory pipelines are faster than any I7 system.

One of the best things you can take away from Art's examples here. Is that he actually put together real numbers. That sort of takes the guess work out of it with the scene(s) he used.

Lets face it, there are other things better to argue about then the numbers Art took the time to put together.

Use what ever render engine you want to, and if your thinking about getting another one maybe the numbers Art put up will help.

Thanks for puting this together Art.

I'd love to compare modo801's renderer to your results but without an identical scene setup the comparison probably wouldn't mean much.

Quote - One thing that always seems to get missed in a comparison of render engines, is what the final renders will be used for. Fast does not always mean accurate, neither does slow unfortunetly. Comparing render engines will always be full of opinions, etc. Because in the end we are what is looking at it.

This comes up quite often discussions where renderers are compared. At some point the relative accuracy of 2 render engines becomes less important than which one makes a more appealing image (with the least amount of jumping through hoops to get there).

Quote - > Quote - what surprises me here though is how slow Octane and Reality are

Reality is not slow, Luxrender is.  I'm actually surprised for the opposite reason.  I think what we are seeing in some of these replies are people who are just comfortable with one renderer, and know it very well, but don't know the others quite as well, and can't get them to perform the same way.  You can not compare Luxrender's speed to Octane.  Octane, on every scene I have tested, was up to 8x faster at converging samples than Luxrender, using my GPU vs. CPU at the time, with same lighting setup, and equivalent materials.  Yes, Octane will slow down if you use SSS and lots of refractive materials in PATH TRACING or PMC kernel.  However, no one is discussing how fast Octane can be under the same conditions in Direct Lighting/Diffuse mode, when settings are tweaked, with very little loss of quality.

There's a guy in the 3dsmax forum here who renders top-notch, realistic renders with Octane for most of his freebie previews, and believe me, the realism is insane on most of it.  A look also in his gallery shows some very high end images with incredible realism done in Octane.  I've discussed his hardware and render time specs with him on several occasions, and have concluded there's just no way to get the same level of realism in the same timeframe out of Firefly or Luxrender.  I don't know about Vue, because I've never used it, and really have no interest in it.  Vue doesn't play well with some of the high end softwares.  It may be good with Poser, but it's Xstream plugin is unreasonably buggy, and crashes constantly with other software, so I've dismissed it as a serious tool in that regard.  I know it's renderer has been used successfully in studio production, mainly for matte renders and flythroughs of extensive outdoor environements, but I rarely, if ever, hear of it used in production for much else.  Especially not character rendering.  It lacks a good skin shader (SkinVue is ok, but not anything like a good multi-layer BRDF SSS shader).  Octane can do multi-layer SSS, although it does slow drastically with Path Tracing, and most average or casual users do not know the proper node setup to get the most out of the SSS in Octane for skin.

Hi there

From my personal experience,I've tried LuxRender/Reality on the nVidia/GeForce GPU and on those cards LuxRender is very slow and will be slow,that's not by HW issues,but SW issues,just due nVidia crippled OpenCL and OpenGL on their cards(CUDA concurrency?)

On other hand on the ATI/AMD cards is LuxRender bearable and fast,but still is not fast as I would like,but still is faster than on nVidia GPU..

I must admit Octane is great plugin,but unless OTOY will or at least try to make OpenCL version of Octane I'm out,I've owning nVidia GPU now,but after few tests what I've done on borrowed GPU(R280X and GTX760 plus my 560Ti 2GB),I'm sure I will be getting AMD/ATI card,I've done test renders like LuxRender or V-RAY and in those SW simply R280X is faster and better than my 560Ti or borrowed 760

In V-RAY I've tried R280X,must admit I've thought so,VRAY RT will not work with this card9as from previous experience with older ATI GPU),but after few quick renders everything has worked as should without the single issue,but still think I will be getting R290X than R280X

Agree on Octane will make or can make great renders,I've tried too VUE PLE only and must admit I've love work with the VUE,although not sure if I would use this as my main SW,I prefer to work with Poser and 3DS MAX,I've tried too Blender,but after trying that,think I will leave this SW on other long winter days

I know this has been bit off topic and sorry to OP

Thanks,Jura

Quote - Reducing the bounces to 6/6/3 reduced rendertime to 66 mins, and of course puts a limit on the mirror-in-mirror effect.

Still not optimizing Octane correctly I see.  Increase the reflection to 10, because that is mirror reflection.  Reduce the glossy reflections to 4, because you don't need that much depth on the glossy reflections in that scene.  Why would you make them exactly the same as mirror reflections?  Reduce the diffuse bounces to 2.  I've found in most scenes, anything over 2 doesn't have much visual impact on the scene (only in some cases where there is a lot of SSS or translucecy.

This should help increase the results even more.  Every diffuse bounce, and glossy bounce, will exponentially increase the sample convergence.

Quote - This comes up quite often discussions where renderers are compared. At some point the relative accuracy of 2 render engines becomes less important than which one makes a more appealing image (with the least amount of jumping through hoops to get there).

Another issue is animation, which isn't part of this thread testing obviously.

The results of global lighting in the Octane unbiased render, in path tracing mode, would not flicker in animation.  The 5 minute Vue render most certainly will.  Also, the biased Poser render would flicker terribly.

Octane has made it possible to render high quality GI without flicker, in a reasonable time per frame, and at a reasonable price.  If we think Octane is expensive, consider your needs, and how expensive Arnold is. I wouldn't dream of trying animatin with Luxrender at the rendertimes I get from it.

My optmimum settings for Direct Lighting/Diffuse mode for your first scene would be 12 reflect bounces, 4 to 6 glossy bounces, and 2 diffuse bounces.  For your first scene, you should see significant render improvement there, with those settings.  The second scene can be about the same settings.  I don't see any reason to go higher than that.

in my opinion, Vue and Octane are too different in purpose, applications, pros and cons, system requirements, etcetera to make meaningful mutual comparisons in just price / performance / render result alone.

But meanly, and that is/was the purpose of this thread, I would welcome statements to be supported by investigations, facts, tests and numbers. Does speed increase mean: ten times faster, or just +20%.

All figures depend on all sorts of settings and influences, and may half, quarter, double, whatever. The essence is: will that alter any of the conclusions? In my view, it will not.

For instance: I did try all sorts of settings in Octane, and for my (first) scene I needed 60 mins at least to get a "visually noise free" result. Which is a 25% increase on the 80 mins of the Path Tracing with defaults. Impressive perhaps, but it doesn't bring the Octane performance numbers any significant step closer to the Vue ones, for those who care.

For instance: in the Advanced Animation settings Vue offers a plethora on animation flicker reduction options, to get satisfying results with hardly loss of speed. The issue is well understood and the solutions are adequate. Just google "Vue animation flicker reduction" and you're there.
For Poser, the solution to avoid / handle animation flicker for IDL renders is presented in the manual as well, but reduces renderspeed considerably (render all frames single threaded on the same machine).

So folks, do try to avoid factual statements without sufficient proof or without numbers and testresults. Please. In this forum thread at least.

And while on it..... keep it Poser related, since we're now starting to see render engines like Arnold that are totally irrelavant to Poser.

Quote - And while on it..... keep it Poser related, since we're now starting to see render engines like Arnold that are totally irrelavant to Poser.

Arnold was only mentioned as an example of price comparison to a render engine that was already being discussed in this thread.  That's not irrelavant, and in no way intended to derail the thread.  Carry on.

Well, I'd like to say that I found this thread interesting and useful for consideration of potential renderer choices. Just thinking out loud here, but would it be worth having specific threads for settings in different renderers? One for Poser scenes in Lux, one for Poser scenes in Vue... the main thing holding me back is a complete lack of understanding regarding the materials settings, not the software itself. Reality offers some decent support for Luxrender, but trying to find specific information on getting V4 in Vue to look like V4 in Poser is very hard.

Just thinking out loud, but as I've had only limited success in importing scenes into Vue or Carrara, and limited success with renders in Lux, I haven't invested the time into them (given the wealth of information available here regarding Firefly). From a personal point of view, my main issue with Poser is not being able to do large outdoor scenes with plants. Carrara and Vue can, but then the people look completely different.

Quote - This comes up quite often discussions where renderers are compared. At some point the relative accuracy of 2 render engines becomes less important than which one makes a more appealing image (with the least amount of jumping through hoops to get there).

I was thinking animation and should have stated directly.

Maxx was thinking the same thing.

A render engine that can't do animation without flicker is all to common.

At that point its a camera, not an engine.

Quote - And while on it..... keep it Poser related, since we're now starting to see render engines like Arnold that are totally irrelavant to Poser.

Not sure how Arnold is irrelavant. Something like Reality could be made to use it with Poser. Presently Arnold is rather expensive, but that does not mean it will stay that way. Many Render Farms are already using it, putting it easily in reach of any 3D artist.

Having a render engine with the capabilites of Arnold available to the average user is a good thing, and to me is very relavent.

Wouldn't anyone like their renders to come out this good?

Quote - Not sure how Arnold is irrelavant. Something like Reality could be made to use it with Poser. Presently Arnold is rather expensive, but that does not mean it will stay that way. Many Render Farms are already using it, putting it easily in reach of any 3D artist.

I agree, but since this thread seems focused on considering the comparison of Vue, Octane, and Poser Firefly, I'd be interested in seeing any human renders from Vue which can produce results like Octane's render engine.  So far, I've not seen any human skin shaders in Vue that convince me of it's potential for such a purpose, but I've also come to realize that this is often not the fault of the render engine, but rather what the software is intended for, and how the users choose to impliment it's use.  On the other hand, I've seen a plethora of very convincing human skin renders from Octane:

can you guys and gals please stop mutually comparing Vue and Octane, with "Vue people" questioning Octane and vice versa?

please consider Vue as a Firefly alternative, please consider Octane as a Firefly alternative, and please do NOT consider Vue as an Octane alternative or vice versa. It just does not make much sense - to me at least, and I started the thread. Not to compare renderers as suggested, but to support the various qualitative statements made elsewhere with quantitative facts and figures. To find out whether "huge speed increase" means 20% or 100% or what.

Vue provides some quality improvement over Firefly results and a surprisingly huge speed increase, plus all the Vue functionality like vegetation and atmospheres. It's not the best renderer of the world, but perhaps it's one of the best biased ones. It did my scene mentioned in this thread in 5 minutes, but it took half a day to re-adjust the materials. It just did a native Vue scene - cloudy sunset with lots of reflective buildings - in 20 hours.

Octane + plugin provides a huge quality improvement over Firefly and a serious speed increase, plus say full interactivity. Without that, I could never have done some of my scenes at all. At the other hand, it took over an hour to get the scene in this thread renderered to a "visually noise free" quality. But also it took all materials without any reconsideration. From all commercial unbiased renderers it's one of the cheapest (most do $600, Arnold does $1000), and it's the only one with a good direct Poser interface/plugin.

I do use both, and I do use Firefly as well. All for different purposes. They all can make photoreal faces, once lighting and materials are mastered. They all have weak spots too, where a lit bit of extra result does explode render time.

I try to master all of them in full detail, including Poser integration. Then I try to turn my experiences into decent tutorials, to save you part of the troubles I'm facing underway. Stay tuned.

Now, I'm going to stop the Firefly render on the balls-scene. It took 7 hours to do the IDL pass alone, and 17 hours after that (24 in total) the renderer itself it not showing any progress while still handling the first ball. Infinite reflections - either external between parallel mirrors or internal within a reflective and transparant object - are Fireflys weak point, especially when combined with IDL and refraction.

Have a good weekend.

Cool, Artbee! Waiting for the tutes!

Well, I am going to try Vue. My scenes are getting more and more complex and large, and I am getting so frustrated with Firefly choking on renders. My book illustrations are 2400 by 3000 pixels, and in almost every scene I have the problem in Firefly rendering almost all of the scene and then sticking at one point making no further progress for days on end. It doesn't seem to matter whether I render to the queue, in the background or directly in the Poser application. I have resorted to terminating the render, saving it out and than pasting area renders of the trouble spots on top of it, but this is getting tedious too. One would think the problems would occur on hair, plants with transparency or some other thing with known difficulty, but that is not what I am finding. I am left with mysterious buckets on plain flat surfaces without complicated shaders, that fail to render. I am at the end of my tether with these Firefly rendering problems. 

hi Nanette,

I'm happy to sort things out with you, also for the sake of all the other people facing the same issues. But that's another topic, so can you start another thread on that?

We do need your render specs, your material specs, your lighting setup etc. What is the progress bar telling you, what is Taskmanager telling you on CPU activity. Well, you know the drill, help us to help you.

"Another issue is animation, which isn't part of this thread testing obviously.
The results of global lighting in the Octane unbiased render, in path tracing mode, would not flicker in animation. The 5 minute Vue render most certainly will.  Also, the biased Poser render would flicker terribly."

Agreed, I understand that this thread and it's render time Data is limited to the perspective of poser users who are looking for alternative renders
for rendering indoor lit stills.

But any truly comprehensive comparison of render engines would have to include their performance in rendering animations.

This is where engines like firefly really,truly fail the user.!!

Once you get into animation you quickly realize that you need a "hybrid" render engine that contains within it several modes for approaching GI:

Brute force
photon mapping
Irradiance Mapping
Light cache

These are just terms for how you should direct your engine to compute GI based on what is actually in your scene (fur/hair/water etc)
and wether your camera is the thing moving or the scene objects are moving or both.

For the most part the average poser user does not need this level of complexity
but it is good to see this thread address the General subject for those who are not content with firefly both in terms of speed & Quality.

last word from my side on this.

Poser firefly is a great tool. It does comic book style, 3D cartoon style, sketch style, a great variety of illustration styles and it even makes serious entries into semi-photoreal styles. For both stills and animations, with separate render passes as well. But especially the photo-real styl meets the "natural" limitations of this tool. Which cannot handle solid glass and liquid volumes, because the material definition is on surfaces only. Which cannot really handle raytracing on direct lights and the shadows thereof. Which can handle some fakes of those but falls over when the scene gets slightly above "very simple". That's it. As I cannot do a meaningful video postproduction using Paint, I cannot do all kinds of high end / large scale ultra-photoreal productions in firefly.

Using figures on that is tricky, results depend on lots of unexpected settings. My scene in this tread rendered in 1 hour with mirror-reflections switched off. With those reflections on it took 7 hours of which about 6 on the IDL pass. Slightly adjusting the focal length and position of the camera turned those into a 7 hour IDL pass, and a render which couldn't finish within 24 hours. Beats me...

Similar story on the balls scene. BB contructed the material as the best fake for solid glass for scenes that included some direct lighting as well. Tests showed it rendered decently (15 mins or so) on a single object. When I put it on two balls with some visual overlap, in a IDL lit environment between two parallel mirrors, rendering did not finish within a day.

Vue rendered both scenes, in full complexity, within a few minutes. So it did with a landscape scene, soon to be published here. Until I added some sophisticated clouds, then it took 10 hours. And when the sun set from 2* to 0* above the horizon, render time doubled at least. Then I switched from a "flat Earth" to a "curved Earth" model. Far better sky hues, and a rendertime... within 4 hours.

I can produce similar stories on Octane and Luxrender.

The devil is in the details, and comparing renderers is nasty business. Tools must be fit for purpose, if not one needs other tools. Which are not better in general, but different and just better fit. Fit with my wallet, fit with my scene preparation time, fit with my required render time. As stated, Vue took half a day to re-adjust materials and rendered in a few minutes, Octane took the materials right up and rendered in say an hour, with a nicer result.

But when comparing, please give the facts and figures. Can firefly produce portrait images like the blonde girl shown some posts above? I've seen results which come close (http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2312762). But did they tell you that that girl was custom modeled in ZBrush, custom haired in Maya, took the professional artist at least a few days texturing, and is so famous that she appears in about all 3D magazines, and even made it into Playboy? Even for professional work it's exceptional. http://www.khitandigital.nl/
This is not a proof of rendering quality, it's a proof of artist quality. Let's not get things mixed up. And please do provide details in debates. That's the point of this thread.

All the best, happy rendering (which whatever you like most).

aRtBee - could you post all of the renders from your initial post/test? There is a lot of great info there, but IMHO, a picture is worth a thousand words :mellow: 

It would be nice to be able to compare the visual differences in context with the speed differences, and would help me, and probably others reading this thread, to "evaluate" the numeric results.

Octane 1.2 render is in the gallery
Octane 1.5 render was made, showed identical to the 1.2 one even in the hotspot details and was not saved, as I actually was in the verge of updating to 2.0
Octane 2.0 render is in the thread

Octane 2.0 balls render is in the thread as well.

LuxRender renders never finished, the statistics were used instead. For that reason a guess had to be made about the samples/pixels for the final result. From my posts it'll be clear whether I used the 4800 (Octane limit) or half of that. I expect hardly any quality issues, as the environment (Studio setup, meshlights) came with the Reality package, and Lux as well as Octane handle the image-mapped clothed similarly, about. I do have an intermediate result at 100 s/p, still very noisy of course.

The Firefly 1-hour result was not saved, because when it finished I found out the mirror-reflections where missing in the materials. I just noted it took 1 hour only. The 7-hour result is added to this post. To make it, I had to reposition the camera from the original Octane-oriented setup, because Octane sets the camera just slightly diferent - and it's set just a cm in front of screens and clothes in the scene. So I altered the focal length, but quite a lot. At least you can compare colors and materials, and note there is something bleaching the mirror-image too much.
Then I adjusted for all this, cleared the mirrors are redid the focal length. That render was stopped after 24 hours (at 40% on all 12 threads), I need my machine for other things. No image, sorry.

The Vue result was not saved either, not only because my findings were not on image details but also because the result looked quite a lot like the Firefly one. Which was not a surprise, as the Vue function was used to call Poser for handling all materials at Vue render time. With a serious difference on specularity (way too high) with was caused by the new Vue Photometrics atmosphere (it tenfolds this kind of direct light effects). I did not rerender, as I had to adjust all 220 materials for that and the image itself was not what I was looking for.

I did save the balls render, it shows in this thread.

Note that I started my thing when in other threads people were stating that Octane 1.5 was (much) faster than 2.0, that for compensation v2.0 was converging (much) faster to the final noise-free result, while I was on the verge of updating from 1.5 to 2.0 (and solving various cooling issues, the gear got awfully hot with these long tests at 100% GPU/CPU capacity).
Then just for the sake of it, I ran the scene also through Reality/Lux (where I was experiencing issues with the various Acceleration modes myself). And as I was doing such things anyway, I just fired up Vue and Firefly for fun. The rest is history...

And I''m stopping now, as this thing has cost me a week 100% machine capacity, not being able to make or render anything else.

I learned that...

• Firefly is a great tool for about all artistic purpuses. It just has some limits in the photoreal area, though it's far from incapable. When I want to exceed those limits, I have to face extreme render times, extreme memory use, or I just need another tool.

 - Octane is great (but not cheap for a hobbyist), but for large scale high quality results it''s not the holy saint like some people are preaching. It needs render time too. My choise for portraying and product stills, and I love (and need) the interactivity.

 - LuxRender is nice, a cheap improvement on Firefly, but I don't see real improvements in deploying the GPU acceleration - on my nVidia kit, that is. I can get Octane quality at a cost, which is not money but time instead. I think I''m not going to use it that often, but I am going to support it for the community as good as I can. Not anyone can afford the $1000 I spend on Octane SW and extra HW.

 - Vue is my surprise for rendering Poser scenes. It gives me sort of Firefly-plus quality results but much faster, after taking the effort of adjusting materials. Plus all regular Vue functionality. I will go to use it for my current (8000 frame) animation project, and various arch-viz renders (especially the vegetation-rich ones).

happy rendering.

Quote - This is not a proof of rendering quality, it's a proof of artist quality. Let's not get things mixed up. And please do provide details in debates. That's the point of this thread.

It's very relavent to the debate as well that the best, most prolific artists in the world are using certain render engines as their tools of choice.  That speaks volumes for the tool, that it's product is respected enough, and capable enough, to meet the needs of the world's best 3D artists.  Sometimes you MUST consider who uses a product, as well as the raw facts and figures, to make the most complete and wise decision on a tool.

Like I had said earlier, there's an artist here on Rendo in the 3dsmax forums who is well known, and creates some of the most realistic product renders for his freebies with a particular engine.  I'd find it interesting, and perhaps very enlightening, to understand why he chooses to use that particular engine, when he obviously has other render engines available to him, and has said as much.  Sometimes people with the most experience understand details and nuances which bring to light REAL LIFE, practical situations and uses that you just don't get from raw mathematical comparisons of two or more render engines.

Quote - > Quote - Not sure how Arnold is irrelavant. Something like Reality could be made to use it with Poser. Presently Arnold is rather expensive, but that does not mean it will stay that way. Many Render Farms are already using it, putting it easily in reach of any 3D artist.

I agree, but since this thread seems focused on considering the comparison of Vue, Octane, and Poser Firefly, I'd be interested in seeing any human renders from Vue which can produce results like Octane's render engine.  So far, I've not seen any human skin shaders in Vue that convince me of it's potential for such a purpose, but I've also come to realize that this is often not the fault of the render engine, but rather what the software is intended for, and how the users choose to impliment it's use.  On the other hand, I've seen a plethora of very convincing human skin renders from Octane:

The question is though.... are these poser figures?

Quote - The question is though.... are these poser figures?

They are not.  I would, however, like to hear why you feel that makes any difference in the validity of the results.  We are looking at the quality of a render, materials, and the speed, not the topology of the models used in this case.

The model here was a 17 million triangle scanned head mesh, with texture maps.  The maps were 2048x1024, which is LESS quality resolution-wise than the maps typically found in most commercial Poser products.  This is also a much higher resolution object mesh than any Poser character without subdivision, which only serves to prove the number of polys does not matter as much as texture size when it comes to GPU rendering.  Yes, textures can slow down GPU, but polygon count doesn't.  This is GOOD news, because textures are something we can resize easily anyway in most image editors, without knowledge of modelling or 3D in general.

The render you see was rendered completely noiseless in only 8 SECONDS, using only one single GTX 680 in Octane render 1.01, at a resolution of 8192X4096.

http://raytracey.blogspot.com/2012/12/photorealistic-head-with-octane-render.html

If you read the blog, you will also notice that they did have two lower resolution meshes, but they didn't bother even testing those, because Octane handled the 17 MILLION polygon mesh as fluently as a 1 million polygon mesh.  WIth Octane 1.01, and importance sampling, the render converged in only about 2 seconds, and was noise free after 8 seconds for that specific model and resolution, and INCLUDED SSS in the materials.

Why it makes a diiference?

Quote - the model here was a 17 million triangle scanned head mesh, with texture maps.

That says it all, it's not only the texture map that matters..... We're now comparing super detailed meshes to a 20-40,000 poly model, of course that's making a difference. That's like comparing my Mazda MPV to a Bugatti Veyron. Is there a difference, of course there is, what they've got in common is that they're both cars and I guess that's about where it stops. So if comparing a million triangle mesh to a 40,000 or so. Of course there's a huge difference when rendering the two, there will be so many details in the mesh that you cannot even remotely accomplish with a texture. > Quote - The render you see was rendered completely noiseless in only 8 SECONDS, using only one single GTX 680 in Octane render 1.01, at a resolution of 8192X4096.

How odd that no one around here, even with much better equipement can even get close to that. If you want a noiseless render with poser models with octane at that size, forget about it, you will not even rmotely get close to 8 seconds.

The thing is you show beautiful renders with amazing render times which none of us can accomplish when using poser in conjunction with octane. So, once more, completely invalid to this thread.

It's obvious these amazing skin renders are due to the amazing resolution of the mesh and we don't have those amazing meshes in poser at all.