Learning Iray 2022

As much as I prefer iRay because I know it and can't for the life of me figure out Octane plus don't want to take time converting shaders, it would probably be better for you to move to octane or even Blender rendering software since you don't have an Nvidia card so you will always rely on CPU which is slower.

Actually... I'm an expert Octane fanboy. I was there from the beginning and still have my perpetual license. (I was not aware that they supported Radeon GPUs yet.)

Its not worth even trying Octane if you don't have the REDSPEC skin shaders.

That's just my opinion.. but I'm never wrong so.. deal with it.

Ummm... At last check, the auto conversion of Iray shaders to Octane is just plain borked. You tend to get 100% glossy everywhere which necessitates changing every single shader in a scene before you can reasonably render. (Honestly I wish they'd just use a single simple shader for all textures when auto-converting. Then I could just get a 'good enough if you don't have it in focus' look, which is really what a lot of a scene is.)

Creating your own shaders in Octane is super easy, and its easy to understand.

Iray... is inscrutable to say the least. Good luck figuring out what the Daz shaders are really doing.

Most of my time spent on Octane renders was work on shaders\texturing to get them to look right.

I switched to Iray after I spent 6 hours converting all the shaders in one scene. It was amazing when done, but I could quickly get the same results with Iray without doing 6 hours of work.

Hands down, Octane is faster and easily cleans the performance clock of stupid old Iray. Daz outright lies when they claim Octane is slower.

@Frank21 "IMO a prog with native shader support will always beat importing and converting any day of the week."

Its a catch 22 really. It depends on the complexity of the background scene, and the level of equivalence you want. Also, to be fair, there are times that the existing shaders just don't cut it, especially with older products. Its virtually impossible to fix the shaders with the mechanisms provided by Daz. You pretty much need to be an expert in order to perform minimal amounts of shader work. ("Customer Vicious" must be their mantra.)

By comparison, with Octane you can do simple work very quickly, and you can even fix up shader\UV work when the older materials simple won't cut it in an Octane world. In one case, I had a single texture for the entire surface of a build and grounds, so I created map to separate the grounds from the building. I then built separate shaders for both, and combined them using the map. Suddenly I have high detail grounds... (and sigh.. shitty buildings)

The real cut off for where Octane shines versus Iray is how often you have to run test renders. I tend to do that a lot in order to tweak my final works. Since Octane is blazingly fast, adjustments are simple and easy to do. With Iray, kicking off a render is just slow enough to tickle my ADHD in a bad way.

Some folks here may recall the days of 20 hour renders with Reality\Lux. The quality was there for sure, definitely comparable to Iray\Octane, but seriously... 30 minute test renders... I could watch a whole sitcom between test renders, then say, "Oh yeah, that Chrome could be more shiny..."

This thread spurred my interest in Iray animation, temporarily anyway. I did a test with a very short basic animation at default settings and.... 30 minutes to render a 1.3 second video, I'm sticking with rendering stills. I suppose I could have dropped the render settings but I doubt that would have made much difference with my old 2080.

Animation Test (NSFW)