Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Compare and Contrast

willdial opened this issue on Nov 26, 2016 ยท 18 posts


willdial posted Sat, 26 November 2016 at 12:33 PM

Instead of complaining, trolling, or acting like a Youtube commenter, let's actually see how Iray and Superfly (Cycles) work and compare to each other. Shown below is the exact same scene rendered in Iray and Superfly. Well, it's close as I can get it. I had to eyeball the location of the camera and lights. It's close enough for decent comparison.

JenaraMuscle.jpg

The original Iray image is here
The original Superfly image is here

Scene
Figure: Genesis 2 Female with Genesis 3 Female UV
Character: Jenara by Silver
Hair: Soleil Hair by AprilYSH
Shirt CropTee by ModelPro
Shorts: Boardwalk by Bobbie25
Shoes: Patchwork Shoes 2 by Esha
Props: Sandy Bay by 3D Universe
HDR: SunnyL from Skies Of Iradiance by DimensionTheory

I chose a set that was really not designed for either rendering engine. Most of us have a large amount of older props and figures and I wanted to see how well they handle the older items.

Machine
Processor: Intel I7 3.06 Ghz
Memory: 24 GB
Video Card: 2 NVidia GEForce 960 GTX 4GB

While most people do not have two video cards, 4GB is a common memory size for mid-range video cards. Iray was able to handle the entire Sandy Bay scene. I had to hide several buildings (not in the camera's view) to render the scene in Superfly. If there is a way to list out a scene's memory usage in both tools, please let us know.

Render Settings
Iray: 6500 samples for the whole image
Superfly: 55 samples with no branch path tracing

Iray and Superfly really don't have comparable render settings. So, I used settings that gave acceptable results. That probably affected the render time.

Render Times
Iray: 20 min
Superfly: 40 min

Since the settings were not equivalent, it's hard to compare the results. But, Iray does seem to render faster and it should. NVidia made Iray and the video card processor.

Lighting
The three spotlights were added for highlights. It was difficult to work with the spotlights in DAZ Studio due to a lack of visual feedback on the intensity for Iray. For some reason, the HDR light was way too powerful in both applications. I had to reduce the intensity to 60%. Which is weird considering the HDR was created for Iray.

Materials
Most of the material settings were unchanged. In Daz Studio, I converted the dock and umbrella to use the Iray Uber Shader. Jenara uses the vendor provided material setup in Daz Studio. For Poser, I used a Cycles skin material setup and set the eyes my preferred settings. The skin settings can be found here. There is a weird texture pattern on the dock in the Iray image. I have noticed that pattern in other Iray images. I wonder if it's caused by a low resolution image map.

Character
Despite claims to the contrary, Genesis 3 Female UV maps for Genesis 2 Female work in Poser just fine. I prepared a character in DAZ Studio and then created a Poser companion file. Zev0's fit control morphs helped to fit the crop top. Daz Studio's mesh smoothing did not quite get rid of the cleavage line. Poser's Morph Brush is good for the fine tuning.

Overall
This is not a comprehensive example of either tool. The example is based on my limited experiences. Your results will vary. So go try it yourself. You'll be surprised at what you'll find.