Hunks, heroes, render wars and window shopping

Old Reality render: Leon

New Reality render: Rock Star

The top render is an IRay render done today ... and what you see here is not a clean render, but a composited "painting" derived from three renders, one of which was a raytrace, painted together in Photoshop! IRay is waaaay harder to use than it's said to be, and the interface is From Hell. It's not playing nice, and when you get into the surface, texture and shader settings --

Now I know what the guy behind the Reality engine means when he says, "No spaghetti shaders," on the Reality 4.3 page at DAZ. Spaghetti shaders? Huh? Yep, he's talking about IRay without (diplomatically!) mentioning IRay, since that one is the official built-in unbiased render engine in Studio 4.whatever  --

Now, I'm not saying IRay is crap!! Don't get me wrong: IRay renders are the equal of Reality renders. But here's the difference: it'll take hours to configure an IRay render; it's so complex, it'll take weeks or months to learn it; they sell the tutorials for US$50 per package (!), and so many people are so baffled, there's a huge trade in lighting suites for IRay, to make it possible for desktop users (hobbyists) to squeeze good work out of it ... and these ready-to-go lighting suites are not cheap.

Bottom line: IRay is a deep money pit, although they give away the engine ... meanwhile Reality is so simple, I was doing the rest of the renders, above, within a matter of days, on my own nutting-out, didn't even look at a manual, just poodled through the interface and thought about it. Reality is EASY, and I guess the ultimate bottom line is that its render quality is at least is good as IRay, while costing nothing but the plugin, and being sooo easy to learn/use. Hey ho.

Soooo, I've about had enough of IRay already, while still waiting for DAZ Tech Support to get back to me regarding the ticket I put in four days ago. Not very happy about this. And I'll add one other thing: I am not spending one more dollar until the tech aspect gets worked out, and I can load my content. Because this is getting silly.

None of which stopped me window shopping, and these, below, are on my wishlist:

...the really dumb thing is, I'm sitting here salivating, dying to send them money for Genesis characters, costumes, hair, props; but Tech Support is not answering. I ain't spending another dime till the technical bugs are sorted.

But yes, I did play around with IRay a lot ... enough to discover that it's 100x harder to work with than Reality, and it will turn into a money pit, which very few people can afford. I know I certainly can't. So -- bear with me a tad bit longer.

The leader picture today -- "Snake Charmer" -- as an IRay version of a raytrace I did about five months ago. Here it is ... and I leave it to you to decide if you like the IRay render or the raytrace. I have a feeling I actually prefer the raytrace, even though it's definitely art, not trying hard to be a photo.

Last for today: badlands, in Terragen:

Now, Terragen I am seriously loving. The computer romps it now, and each of these renders took about 20 minutes. So realistic, you're looking for the dinosaurs! Reminds you of something like Dakota, or similar, which was dinosaur country about 60 million years ago. If I can ever get my head around it, I hope to be rendering dinosaurs in Terragen. One day...