bantha posted at 12:07PM Tue, 11 September 2018 - #4336030

But even if not, P11 does work for me. I don't like the Genesis figures that much. I don't know if Iray is really that much better. Heck, if there won't be another version this year I will get Octane to see if it renders better.

Unless someone goes into technical details in regards to why Iray should be better than Superfly (Cycles), I really don't think that the issue is with the render engines as much as it is with everything else.

Both of them can produce very good looking images. But I think a lot of people are fooled by Iray using HDRI by default, which gives it a nice look if you just do a quick render. Whereas Poser doesn't, so you have to setup this manually.

Here is a quick test, with a plane and a sphere.

Looking at Poser default, it looks rather poor, dull colors, weird shadows and the low default render settings doesn't improve it either. The Iray default, even though its very bright looks more pleasing than Poser does.

The last two I have added HDRI to Poser, increased the render settings to better match the time Iray uses. And I have turned down the intensity of Iray default light as well. Personal to me I think cycle give a better result in this case, the shadow underneath the sphere seems to bright in the Iray. This is not to say that Iray is then worse than Cycle as pretty much no settings have been tweaked or any effort made to actually setup lighting, its pretty much as default as possible.

So what becomes interesting when looking at these, at least to me have little to do with the engines themselves, but rather options available. Daz does shine in HDRI compared to Poser, there is really no default controls here, where you have a lot in Daz. It doesn't mean that Poser handles HDRI worse, but simply that you lack a lot of control here compared to Daz.

Here is a test of glass:

Again only HDRI is used, which are not the same maps for each program, but regardless of that, I don't think that cycles does a worse job at this than Iray.

Last is a single spotlight test:

Again the results are slightly different, due to not using the exact same settings. But wouldnt say that cycle does a worse job here either. There is a black weird box in the Iray render, which might be because of the sphere being at lower resolution than the one in Poser, but to me it looks like a bug in Iray and have no clue why it is there.

To me, it seems like there is a bit of confusion or miscommunication whenever there is a talk about what render engine is better, because unless you are really getting into the technical stuff, which I can't :D. I think its more a comparison of what options are available in each program. And currently in my opinion Daz have better options overall, whereas Poser lacks a bit, especially when it comes to controlling HDRI, but also I think a lot of Poser users, because HDRI is not used by default and might not know how to set it up, draw the conclusion that Iray must be better then, which is simply not true, when it comes to render quality, i see very little difference between them visually and pretty much comes down to how they interprets light in the end. So having more options or better control is a benefit in Daz compared to Poser. For instant the camera an light controls are not very good in Poser, I think. But is something that could and should be fix in a new Poser version. Then you have some bloom controls etc in Daz which is also nice, but again these are more effects, than actual render engine qualities. And can easily be added in Photoshop afterwards.