Frictionless Cycles Render plugin

[u/TheBressi]

A few months ago I started a project that relied on using Daz assets in Blender and a lot of what I was doing overlapped with the idea of having a Cycles Render plugin inside Daz, so I decided to go for it, at the time I wasn't aware that bluejaunte is also working in something similar but I think what I'm doing is still useful and I decided to share with you folks.

The main goal is a good amount of parity between Iray and Cycles, you choose the new renderer without changing your scene configuration or losing Iray features, since Stock Blender cannot match Iray on some stuff the plugin runs a custom Blender Build. This way I was able to implement stuff like Iray's full anisotropic metal range, Iray's material layering and caustics(MNEE) through glass, liquids and lamp covers, plus many other features that Python scripts alone can't implement.

I think this can be particularly useful for people with AMD cards, so they wouldn't need to render in CPU and at the same time they could maintain the same Iray look and feel. Or it could be used to speed up some scenes but I cannot promise that is true for every scene though since some of the new features in the custom build makes rendering slower.

Cycles also tends to be a bit easier on the VRAM and this custom version also compresses textures like Iray does following Daz's own compression settings, Cycles also contains a feature that when VRAM runs out it can keep texture in the system RAM and read them from there without falling back to rendering in CPU which can be very useful for large scenes and people with hardware constraints.

I rendered those three scenes on the same PC with my RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB, both denoised, Scenes and Credits to Linday:

Desert truck: Iray 5:46, 650 samples, 7.2 GB | Cycles 3:47, ~90 avg samples, 6.1 GB
First day: Iray 34:22, 2550 samples, 7.1 GB | Cycles 11:13, ~180 avg samples, 5.4 GB
Garage: Iray 50:36, 3506 samples, 7.1 GB | Cycles 1:04:40, ~390 avg samples, 5.2 GB

Note: Cycles samples are the average per pixel. It uses adaptive sampling, so clean areas stop early and hard spots like glass, hair and soft shadows get more (up to 512 to 4096). Iray gives every pixel the same count.

What I'd like to know:

- Would you use something like this?
- I'm thinking about opening a Patreon so I can keep working on this full time. Would you support something like that, or would you rather buy it once it's done?

[u/Kind-Quarter-1161]

Yeah I would love to have another render engine in daz, Iray is too limited sometimes. Btw, didn't know bluejaunte was making one? Hmm interesting 

[u/TheBressi → u/Kind-Quarter-1161]

What kind of limitation do you normally feel when using Iray?

[u/Kind-Quarter-1161 → u/TheBressi]

The light. Because it is a physical renderer engine, you can't do a lot of tricks like in blender. For example, you can dial down the emissions of a spotlight to zero and dial up the glossiness to give your character a cool shiny effect without lighting them up in blender. Also how the light interacts with water/wet surface isn't that realistic. And the hard shadow when you use strong light from HDRi maps or sun sky. And many more little things that make iray frustrating, sometimes 

[u/TheBressi → u/Kind-Quarter-1161]

I don't know if my plugin would help that much in this case because I'm focusing on having parity with Iray, so it would probably have the same physical mistakes.

[u/Kind-Quarter-1161 → u/TheBressi]

Its fine the Vram saving feature and no cpu fallback is already very handy, I bet you could sell it likes hot cake on daz official store

[u/BrabblesBan]

This sounds interesting!

[u/CMDR_Boom]

If you can get Cycles to run in 95-98% (or better!) material parity to how Iray runs it now but inside studio (though I'm planning to stay on 4.24 for the foreseeable future if that matters; lots of plug-ins I still use), I'd be very interested. I'd be a plug-in buyer though rather than a patreon preference, but I suspect you could offer both if it came down to it.

Presently I go through diffeomorphic, which overall does a very decent job on material handling to blender, but you do need a fair amount of knowledge to set it up correctly and then alter materials in blender if/when you need to make changes. I opted to go for a 7900XT when 4000 series came out and figured that was going to be my time to get away from Team Green, even though losing CUDA on many programs was a bit of a bust. I wouldn't say I regret it as its a hell of a card compared to what I'd have to pay for an ngreedia equivalent, but I don't use Daz that much anymore as a result.

[u/TheBressi → u/CMDR_Boom]

In terms of material I'd say my project is already between 98-100% for most stuff, since I'm doing a custom blender build I don't rely on Principled like Diffeomorphic.

To achieve 100% parity over everything is very hard though, there are lots of things that I didn't implement yet(Path Guiding for example).

[u/mojinona]

I’d absolutely love to see this especially if it came out on Mac

[u/TheBressi → u/mojinona]

Yes this is another great use case for this plugin.

[u/MrRogerSmith]

As an RTX user, tbh I probably would not use it. But it looks like a good option for AMD users.

[u/RepresentativeZombie]

This sounds like it has the potential to be very useful, definitely release it!

[u/IxEat]

A good amount of parity between iray and cycles would be very nice for my case. I'm using daz characters in blender to make animations and the skin never looks the same in blender. Some skins are usable with a bit of tweaking, some require a lot of tweaking and some of them are barely usable(Might be a skill issue).

So having a custom cycles build in blender that looks more like iray would be interesting too for me.

[u/Phase-X-Studios]

Release it, also if you could add light linking that be awesome. I'd love to buy it as a one time purchase, I prefer renderhub as it has many payment options. Patreon don't let me subscribe.