Who cares about the render engine?

[ThomasBr]

I read a lot of complaints about IRay. It’s slow, lacks certain features, can’t do this or that. The thing is, the render engine isn't all that important anymore, or, given how AI is evolving, it’s hardly important at all.
The first image shows a scene where the only things I really cared about were the perspective and the placement of the figure. It took 2 minutes and 45 seconds to render at very low quality and large resolution of 3600x3000px. After you can use a denoiser like odin or Topaz and the quality improve drastically. It’s a trick many people use these days.

In the second image, Gemini added late-afternoon light and eliminated the noise. In the third, it introduced wind and rain, and in the fourth, it added hands, lightning, plants, and cracks, before the image went into Photoshop for some minor color adjustments. The total time for all three images was around 5 minutes.

Honestly, I don’t know how long it would have taken me to come close to this result— if I’d ever manage it at all— but I know it would have taken more than 3 or 4 days. So, who cares about the render engine? And this isn't just happening in Daz Studio; it’s happening now everywhere in the 3D world.
And what about the artist? My own sense of space is certainly there, along with some tricks to guide the viewer's eye and (i hope) just enough narrative to make them build a story around the image. At the end of the day, I’m not the one who physically created it, but the one who imagined it. For now, that might be enough.

PS Sorry for my English

[barc]

I don't think most AI solutions will allow you to do porn, which is what at least half of the people doing 3d art are doing. But if you're not doing porn, then AI seems to be a major helper.

[3Demon]

Four sincere questions:

Is the end result of image production all that matters?

Is the process of producing the image relevant?

Is AI image generation the same as the 3D posing and rendering process?

Is one process of image production largely the same as another?

[Ethiopia]

If AI can do the job of rendering EXACTLY WHAT I'VE BUILT then I'm all in, but so far all it's doing is replacing what I've built with it's own.
I have a ball posing and dressing characters, adding props and generally 'playing dolls'. All the hype about AI is lost on me because I enjoy the process more than the final result. It's like building models. I have shelves of them and fondly remember the enjoyment I got out of building them.

[80's memories]

I enjoy 'playing' with daz-studio, creating the character, imagining the backstory, posing the items in the scene... writing a prompt will never give me that satisfaction

[3Demon]

And that's the crux of my above questions. In addition to getting a satisfying end result, there is the process of doing. Some people just aren't 'satisfied' by the AI process. Or not yet anyway*. The same applies to painting, penciling, inking, Photoshopping, and everything else.

I bake. I could just buy a cake at the bakery. Or buy a prepackaged cake mix. But I prefer to work from scratch. I enjoy the process of mise en place.

But make no mistake, I want premade cakes and prepackaged cake mixes to be available for whomever wants to take advantage of them. Although I don't use them, it may be the preferred method of others.

And regarding Iray being slow, it sure can be. But everything is slower than something else. Iray is supremely faster than oil painting. But I don't want to oil paint anyway.

*Currently, AI is a toddler. Before long, it'll be an adult. We'll see what we see.

[Author]

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