I've been hearing a little bit about NVidia's L Ray lighting & rendering system that supposedly works with DS 4.8 I've been away for a while and haven't had time to do any DS work in months. 

1. Which NVidia cards are compatible with L Ray?

a. Do I need one of the very latest like the 960-980 cards, that Titan-X beast, or one of the Pro level Quadro cards costing both arms, legs & an internal organ?

b. I currently have a relatively old GTX 770 card. Would that work by any chance? (crossing fingers)

1. Do I need to download additional software from NVidia afterwards? This segways into next question...

2. Does L Ray come installed with DS4.8 or is DS simply compatible with it and I have to pay separately for it from NVidia site somewhere?  

3. Are there tutorial videos to help learn the use of it? And in Plain English not requiring an advanced degree.  

For starters, it's not "L Ray", but rather iRay (it's been around since 2003)  There are hardware specs at the Nvidia site as well as other info

It is not necessary to have a fancy graphics card, it can use CPU only rendering.  If you have a high end graphics cards you will get slightly better performance.

I have a GTX 750, but don't use it for rendering acceleration because most scenes that I do are too large to load into card memory.

You need to have 4.8 installed, it comes with iRay gratis.  You can still use 3Delight if you like because iRay doesn't support certain shader networks.

I haven't looked at any tutorials for DS, because it doesn't operate substantially different in DS that it does with any other program.
There are differences in implementaion of MDL, but that only matters if you are going to write your own shaders

There seems to be one of their learning lessons with the new Daz studio 4.8 that shows you how to find out if IRay render option is available with your video card. seems it is using the Barefoot Dance lesson that has been updated to include some basic visual steps on setting IRay IRay is not fully included with Daz long as you have the latest version. Hope this offers some help 

Good luck 

There seems to be one of their learning lessons with the new Daz studio 4.8 that shows you how to find out if IRay render option is available with your video card. seems it is using the Barefoot Dance lesson that has been updated to include some basic visual steps on setting IRay IRay is not fully included with Daz long as you have the latest version. Hope this offers some help 

 

Iray IS included with DS 4.8. 

Good luck 

For starters, it's not "L Ray", but rather iRay (it's been around since 2003)  There are hardware specs at the Nvidia site as well as other info

It is not necessary to have a fancy graphics card, it can use CPU only rendering.  If you have a high end graphics cards you will get slightly better performance.

I have a GTX 750, but don't use it for rendering acceleration because most scenes that I do are too large to load into card memory.

You need to have 4.8 installed, it comes with iRay gratis.  You can still use 3Delight if you like because iRay doesn't support certain shader networks.

I haven't looked at any tutorials for DS, because it doesn't operate substantially different in DS that it does with any other program.
There are differences in implementaion of MDL, but that only matters if you are going to write your own shaders

Just to be correct, it is Iray. LOL. (Sorry I couldn't resist.)  The biggest differences between 3Delight and Iray, in DS, is lighting. Since it is unbiased physically based, light it like you would light something in the real world, and set your tonemapping like you would a real world camera. 

I use it with a 3gb GTX 650 Ti Boost and it works fine :). I would make sure that you have the latest drivers tho before using it with DS.

Laurie

 Okay, my bad, iRay, not LRay or lRay.

Thanks for the info everyone. As always though, if I go away for a while I always find myself with a big learning curve to deal with upon returning. Never really did get the hang of lighting in previous DAZ versions. It always seemed so counterintuitive to the real world, which is why I always struggled with it and the technical stuff involved that went waaaaay over my head. Which is why some good "See-Spot-Run" or "DS lighting for Dummies" tutorials would've been real helpful. I was going to try the Dreamlight tutorials, but a lot of people on these forums had bad experiences with the author and felt ripped off, so that scared me away from trying them; didn't want the same experiences. So I'll see what I can find on YouTube & see if I can make sense of "iRay."

As for DS 4.8, can we still save our renders in .BMP, or .TIF?  

Iray, not iRay - it isn't an Apple product. Yes, you can save in tiff and bmp still.

Thanks Richard. I've seen lray spelled(apparently incorrectly)as iRay a few times, and with largecase I looking like smallcase l, well you can see my confusion. lol

But thanks again.  

Yes, all the iDevices have conditioned us to put a lower case i and then a capitalised name.

I've found that if you have an nVidia card without a lot of RAM but leave CPU rendering active, it will still cut the rendering time way down from going CPU only. So far, I'm really happy with it -- I'm actually thinking about getting an accelerator card to boost things way up.

 Thanks everyone! And for everyone in the U.S., have a very happy 4th!

Mark,
A few simple tips that you might find useful.

1. Search out SickleYield's tutorials on DeviantArt. They're good and one of them deals with setting up your first scene.

2. You mentioned lighting being something of a problem. Google 'free hdri' and get the ones you like the look of. Also get the free RedSpec HDRI pack from DeviantArt.
   Set up a figure in your scene with a camera. Make sure the camera is selected in the Scene tab, got to it's Parameters and turn off the headlamp. Press Ctrl-L if your viewport goes dark. Then go to Render Settings and Environment. Make sure Dome and Scene is used. Browse for an Environment Map and select one of the .hdr or .exr you got earlier (don't use jpg's as they're crap). Depending on what the HDRI is, you'll probably want to turn Draw Dome on as this will give you a background image of some kind. Render. If the light is coming from the wrong direction, use Dome Rotation to alter it until you're happy, or load another hdri.

I rarely use the normal lights now. HDRI's do the job for me but I mainly do portrait/figure stuff.
Happy rendering.

Does IRay automatically handle SSS or do I have to turn it one like in Poser?  Also, is there a way to tell DS4.8 NOT to use all of my CPU when it renders?  It's impossible to do anything else. 

Ok - I changed priority in Windows 7 Task Manager to Med-Low and that's helped.  At least I can type.  That's not a great solution.  How long do I have to let an IRay render run to get smooth skin?  No speckles.  That's one of the things I hate about the 3delight render engine.

Does IRay automatically handle SSS or do I have to turn it one like in Poser? 

Depends on the texture/material you have applied to the character. If you use a material built for Iray then you shouldn't need to do anything (unless you want to tweak). If it's other materials you will need to set it up and use appropriate values. But there are a couple of default materials included with 4.8 that will get you most of the way so all you need to do is tweak the settings. You can also set up your figure with a non-Iray material, ctrl-click an Iray skin material to apply it, choose ignore, and then you get those Iray settings on your current material. "How long do I have to let an IRay render run to get smooth skin?  No speckles."

Speckles?? Do you mean fireflies?

It's impossible to answer. How long is a piece of string? How big is a hole?
It depends on how quick your CPU is, what you have in your scene, what you are doing in that scene in regards to lights, shadows, SSS, caustics etc etc. You could try messing around withe the render settings, change the quality, max samples, make sure the firefly filter is enabled. But if most of those are increased, then so is render time.