I looked at IRAY with DAZ4.8... not free. The renderer is, but you buy all the texture stuff separately... ever added up all the 'add ons' that DAZ have available? Comes to 100's of dollars. Not free.

Oh, BTW, I use an AMD video card. IRAY is no advantage to me over Luxrender. Which IS free.

I think you are referring to vendor products as add ons, as there are no iray add ons. Of course they aren't free. Iray provides you with everything to do your own shaders and lights. Only thing DAZ sells with iray right now are lights. You can plug in your own HDR lights or create emission surfaces (and go to lighting manufacturers' websites to download EIS profiles) if you do not wish to pay. You can also pay around with the settings to convert old sets to look better without paying for anything. What you are paying for is the convenience of not doing it yourself. Also luxrender is free, though they are asking for donations to help keep their site running. Unless you are using the free script to export it from poser, you are paying for Reality, which makes it a bit easier to convert materials because you are paying for the convenience to do so.

Hi there I wouldn't compare IRAY with Reality or Luxrender at first place,IRAY I've used on numerous occasion not just in DAZ,but with 3DS MAX when I've owned Nvidia card,but still I've been unable to reproduce same details or same skins like with Luxrender 

Reality with all in will never go in 100's USD,you will pay once and have all there and you don't need to pay extra for shaders if you are Poser user,not sure if in DAZ you need to use different shaders as I've never used there Reality,yes agree Reality is lot more slower than IRAY,but with new Luxrender we should have much faster rendering system 

I've rendered with IRAY too with DS,I like the idea of this,but still this SW or renderer will never will be working on AMD GPU which you can't say about the Luxrender,due this most of people will rather go route of Lux/Reality if they want to harness GPU,older Lux has have issue with GPU,but newer beta which I've tried is much faster than with GPU or CPU,time will tell us

As I said about the DAZ,they're like drug dealers,everything which will give as first,later will cost you,this I don't like on the DAZ

I don't have anything against anyone,but sometimes I just think they(DAZ3D) using their dominant position in wrong way(monopoly?)

Thanks,Jura

I think you're still not getting it. What add ons are available with iray? Links please? That's right. There are none. If you are linking vendor products, those are NOT add ons. So your cost to use iray is $0. If you do not wish to use vendor products and make shaders yourself, you can very well do that or find a freebie. Your argument is no different than a offering a figure for free, then you have either purchase content of find freebies, or make it yourself. I'm sorry but your argument is very flawed.

I have licenses for Octane and Reality as well, and used luxrender for my renders and promos for years. For reality, with the upgrades I am at the $100 mark, as I'm was an early adopter. Was an early adopter for Octane too and spent hundreds on those licenses too. AMD cards aren't an issue with me, as those cards historically have lower performance than their counterparts in Nvidia and and chipsets with Intel processors. Both Octane and Iray use gpu with CUDA because it has way higher performance than OpenCL.

Also your argument with Reality incorrect. When Reality was released, it was pretty much like what Iray was now. There were actually products that worked with Reality made by vendors at DAZ. So you could buy products specially that worked with Reality, which then converted it to a format Luxrender could read. I did a few promos for a few of those products. When Paolo's store was removed, all those products were removed as well.

Also I won't get into quality of renders made by these products, because it really comes down to the skill of the user. They all produce physically based renders, so if you know how each product works, you can come up with the same results.

And as far as being a monopoly or drug dealers, no one is forcing you to buy anything. You pay for convenience. If you want to make it yourself, you are able to do it... you just need to roll up your sleeves and learn how to make shaders, lights or clothing. If you don't want to learn, then you pay for the service. That's how businesses are run. Anyone can start a business too, but your product needs to be good, not just because it's not made a company, because that's not how the general public spends their money. Maybe that's where the perception comes from.