There may be some engines out there that do take advantage of SLI (Nvidia’s Scalable Link Interface), but neither Octane nor Iray support it. I’ve seen many people make this mistake and run off to buy as many shiny cards as they can stuff on their motherboards. Before we get to that there are a couple of points that need to be demystified. So, in the interest of getting the best bang from a limited budget I set about finding the best card for me.

Being able to work with these tools with the huge speed increases on mid – high end gaming cards means we can experiment and get much faster feedback, and for me that’s the greatest thing of it all. Sure, most people who come to this little blog aren’t working at Pixar on hundreds of millions of dollars movies, but that’s not to say we don’t see the benefit and joy of working with lights that behave as physics intended (or close there enough to). There was an interesting article in a recent 3D Artist magazine that discussed how incredibly complex and painstaking lighting arrangements had become for Pixar movies prior to adopting global illumination (GI).Īnyone else go along to see Monsters University and realise Pixar had just changed the way they worked? Well, that’s GI, and it’s glorious! But just as this was happening with titanic farms of CPUs it seems that the GPU is poised to take over, doing it faster and cheaper.īMW Iray render – Maya courtesy of Nvidia CPU driven physically plausible/accurate rendering has been around a long time, but it has only been recently that the hardware made it financially viable to go this direction for large-scale production.

In short, unbiased takes so much of the pain out of lighting a scene, especially when quicker, more realistic renders are the order of the day. Lights always behave realistically, you get that nice bounce of light and blending of colour. Unbiased physically accurate/plausible GPU rendering is great. It also works out great for DAZ as they have wanted to incorporate simpler GPU rendering solutions for a long time. This is a very nice marketing move by Nvidia. And now we have Iray – It’s there, it’s free to use, and it is already well integrated into DS. Of course, Octane has offered support for DAZ Studio a number of years, but for some with AMD cards (no CUDAs) then the price of a higher end Nvidia gamer card and an Octane licence may be a little on the hefty side.

With Iray coming to DAZ Studio it is becoming harder to ignore CUDA/Nvidia powered rendering.

Octane render for daz studio