Ehlanna wrote:As you say, the only difference you'll get between 32- and 64-bit versions is addressable memory. More memory equating to more complex geometry in the scene, which means more figures, props, etc.
Depending on what you need/want the final image for you can get some pretty decent results from the native DAZ Studio render engine (3Delight) with just using the standard, in-built lights - distant lights, spot lights, etc. What Uber Environment does is provide a means of generating the ambient light you get in real life with light being bounced around off all surfaces. You can also use a HDRI (actually , technically, I think it's just a LDRI) which will act as a light source. What Reality does is act as a clever interface between DAZ Studio and the open source unbiased render engine LuxRender. What that means is that Reality will take your DAZ scene, have a damned good stab at material conversion (you can manually tweak) before passing all that on to LuxRender. Where LuxRender scores is the fact that it is unbiased, which means it treats lights like lights. Sounds obvious but - that means no need to try and get ambient lighting to match real life, LuxRender does that because light is treated like light, it will generate ambience automatically. If it is there in the scene it will cause shadows or cast shadows - because in real life light will always cause shadows to be cast (in DAZ you can turn that off on a light-by-light basis), and if you have something in the scene it will cast shadows because that is what things do when hit by light! The downside of all this are the re-thinking of your lighting policy/style, a need to tweak materials in Reality, time - Reality renders can be lengthy. Upsides are the fact you can pause and resume your renders as and when you like, plus you can network your renders for more speed.
In my view, Reality/LuxRender are another tool in the box, to be used at the appropriate time. Not all my renders are done via Reality (in fact not many are!) as I can still produce output I am happy with using the 'vanilla' tools build in to DAZ Studio.
Ah, I didn't know there even was an interface to LuxRender. But that totally explains the long rendering time. Plus it doesn't really change anything about what I said, it still means less complex lighting results in lower render times (which I might add would go for pretty much any renderer). While I can see the appeal of physically based rendering, I think that if you spend some more time familiarizing yourself with the tools daz offers you (including the shader builder/mixer), you can get very decent results. And yes, those are "tricks" compared to what is more or less "real" in LuxRender, but then you can look at realtime games like Crysis which are full of such tricks and yet look better than many raytraced renders.
An example of one such a trick I use a lot is ambient light (in this case even without ambient occlusion, basically it just adds light to every point in the scene). I threw together a simple ambient light in the shader builder, which I use to get rid of 'hard' shadows, which in my opinion gives a render a more natural look. And it basically does nothing to my rendering time. Here's an example:
100% directional light (with 10% soft shadow, which kinda messes up the shadow on the ground):
http://uppix.net/b/8/a/1f4a222fcb3cc9b2b2050d4f5b127.png70% directional light, 30% ambient light:
http://uppix.net/0/d/1/fad11ca9904fb186e51a38f3f87e0.pngI'll also render it with my ambient light which does include AO, but I'm guessing that'll take a little while because of the hair :P.
Edit: Here it is:
http://uppix.net/d/8/9/e60daaa82cc88ed6 ... 6bc029.png (20 minutes on 3 cores, not even as bad as I imagined it would be
)