What’s the difference between Iray, 3Delight, and Filament in Daz Studio?

Daz Studio offers users a powerful suite of tools to create stunning visualizations, animation, gaming, or artistic projects. This capability lies in the rendering engines available within Daz Studio, each designed to meet different needs and preferences. Among these, Iray, 3Delight, and Filament stand out as the primary rendering options with unique strengths and weaknesses. Understanding the differences among these rendering engines is essential for artists and creators using Daz Studio. This knowledge enables users to select the most suitable option tailored to their specific project requirements, whether they seek lifelike realism, efficient rendering times, or real-time workflow capabilities.

In this blog, iRender will explore the features of each rendering engine and highlight their functionalities, ideal use cases, and key distinctions.

Daz Studio is a software application developed and offered by Daz 3D. It is a powerful 3D creation software that allows users to design, animate, and render detailed 3D scenes. Primarily aimed at artists, animators, and designers, Daz Studio provides a versatile platform for creating digital art, illustrations, and animations through a user-friendly interface and a range of high-quality assets. 

Iray in Daz Studio is a physically-based rendering (PBR) engine developed by NVIDIA. It is renowned for its ability to produce high-quality, photorealistic images by simulating the behavior of light in a realistic manner. This engine leverages advanced algorithms and graphical techniques to accurately replicate how light interacts with different materials in a 3D environment.

3Delight is a powerful scanline rendering engine integrated into Daz Studio, known for its versatility and efficiency in rendering 3D scenes. Unlike physically-based renderers like Iray, which focus on achieving photorealistic results, 3Delight provides a good balance of speed and quality, making it suitable for a variety of artistic styles and projects.

Filament is a real-time rendering engine integrated into Daz Studio, designed to provide fast rendering capabilities while allowing for immediate feedback during the creation process. Developed to leverage modern graphics technology, Filament enables artists to interactively visualize changes to their scenes with minimal delay.

Speed and Quality

When comparing the speed and quality of the three rendering engines in Daz Studio—Iray, 3Delight, and Filament, it’s important to understand how each engine performs under different conditions and for diverse types of projects.

Iray is known for its compatibility with Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) principles, which are designed to simulate how light interacts with materials in the real world. Iray calculates light interactions based on real-world physics, which means that lighting in your rendered scene behaves as it would in reality. This includes effects like light scattering, reflection, and absorption, all of which are crucial for achieving lifelike visuals. Iray is primarily for designers and visual effects artists working with 3D content who require predictable photorealistic imagery.

3Delight is indeed Daz Studio’s original rendering engine and is a CPU-based scanline renderer. Therefore, 3Delight can run efficiently even on systems that may not have powerful GPUs. This makes it accessible to a broader range of users. It has almost a toonish look because it fakes rendering 3D objects with something that isn’t compatible with PBR (physically based rendering). It only provides flexibility and speed particularly for simpler scenes which results in limitations regarding realism and material interaction compared to engines like Iray.

Filament is indeed the fastest rendering engine available in Daz Studio, primarily due to its real-time rendering capabilities. This engine is designed to provide immediate feedback, making it particularly valuable for artists and designers who require speed and interactivity in their workflows. Although Filament produces visually appealing images, the quality is generally moderate and less realistic when compared to Iray. It works well for applications that demand speed over ultimate fidelity, making it suitable for prototyping and early-stage visualizations.

Global Illumination

Iray uses advanced global illumination techniques, incorporating methods like photon mapping and path tracing. This allows it to simulate light interactions effectively, providing a high degree of realism. The GI quality in Iray is high, effectively capturing how light bounces off surfaces and illuminates other areas in the scene. This leads to realistic shadows, reflections, and soft lighting effects that mimic real-world scenarios.

3Delight employs a more simplified approach, relying on traditional raycasting techniques and shadow mapping rather than full physical simulation for GI. The GI offered by 3Delight is moderate in accuracy. While it does achieve satisfying results, it does not replicate the level of detail or complexity found in Iray. 

Filament features a limited real-time global illumination approach designed for speed and efficiency rather than physical accuracy. The accuracy of GI in Filament is not high compared to both Iray and 3Delight. While it can provide a basic sense of lighting interaction between surfaces, it does not strive for a high-fidelity illumination model.

Real-Time Preview Capability

Iray provides a limited real-time viewport that allows users to preview changes, but the updates are generally not instantaneous. This means that while you can see what you’re doing, there’s often a noticeable lag, particularly in complex scenes.

Meanwhile, 3Delight offers an interactive preview, providing a more immediate reflection of changes compared to Iray. However, it still does not reach the true real-time rendering capabilities of Filament. 

Filament is designed for true real-time rendering, providing immediate visual feedback. This characteristic is a significant advantage for users needing to iterate quickly. The response is extremely fast, making it easy for artists to see the results of their changes without delay. Alo, any changes of lighting, materials, or camera settings appear instantaneously.

In conclusion, the differences between Iray, 3Delight, and Filament in Daz Studio are significant and cater to various rendering needs and artistic preferences. Therefore, selecting the appropriate rendering engine depends on the specific requirements of your project. If you want to prioritize photorealistic outputs, Iray is the best option. Besides, if you are looking for a speedier and more versatile rendering solution for illustrations, animations, you can consider 3Delight. About Filament, it excels in providing real-time rendering capabilities, making it ideal for environments where immediate visual feedback is crucial. Understanding these distinctions empowers artists and designers to leverage the strengths of each engine to achieve the best results in their artistic endeavors within Daz Studio.

iRender is a perfect option to render projects in PC optimization for rendering tasks, CGI, and VFX with over 30.000 customers. To bring the best experiences for customers, iRender has been improving the quality and updating the newest technology every day. We provide high-configuration dedicated servers (physical computers/machines) specifically optimized for GPU rendering.

We support Daz Studio and all render engines such as Iray, 3Delight and Filament. You only need to access our server and connect to it to install software you need just Once then you add your license and render yourself.

Iray Server is a software solution that provides distributed Iray rendering across networked machines. If you are using Iray Server, for example with DAZ Studio, you will need multiple computers to run IRAY distributed renders. Because of this, iRender Farm is the most sensible and efficient option for the IRAY server. To improve render performance, you can conduct a distributed render in Iray Server  with ease using our “Open Port” feature.

Test rendering speed Video

We suggest Windows users work with our all-in-one application, iRender GPU instead of coming our website. For Linux or macOS users, we provide a helpful and free transferring program called iRender drive. You can take a look at this video For Windows or For Mac OS to understand our workflow.

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In case you have any problems or questions, don’t hesitate to contact the 24/7 support team. We will be happy to help you with your questions and problems at all times.

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iRender – Happy Rendering!

Reference source: daz3d.com