Nvidia Iray
| PRICE £230/$295 | COMPANY Nvidia | WEBSITE nvidia.com
Among the less well established renderers on the scene is Iray from Nvidia. By leveraging the power of Nvidia Optix, CUDA tech, AI denoising and Material Definition Language (MDL), it’s plenty capable of generating top photorealistic renders, and at speed too.
The more recent version of Iray includes RTX support that adds ray-tracing acceleration hardware support through RT cores. This is vitally important for any application making use of ray-tracing such as games and 3D rendering.
The latest Nvidia hardware uses tensor cores, dramatically speeding up the completion of rendering images, videos and interactive renders. Iray also boasts a range of integrated post-production features and controls that allow finishing touches and refining. Much of this Nvidia technology is also contained within other, more feature-rich renderers, which has always resulted in Iray’s popularity being held back.
“IRAY HAS THE BACKING OF NVIDIA AND ALL ITS INNOVATIVE AND GROUND BREAKING TECH”
EXCELLENT LIGHTING
A physically based renderer, Iray replicates the behaviour of real-world light. This focuses on bouncing light around the scene, picking up information about materials and surfaces, as well as how that physically reacts and responds to the surrounding environment.
With this technology, it’s possible to create astounding renders with a huge dose of realism. The physically based solution is also vital for archviz, where accurately representing light sources and materials is of paramount importance.
This form of rendering often comes at the cost of speed, but with AI denoising using tensor cores, the process is much faster. Draft renders can be created in a fraction of the time, as can final renders. This technology is of huge benefit to those rendering videos as the overall time is reduced.
FOOLPROOF LANGUAGE
As well as physically based lighting, Iray also has physically based materials, which is made possible with Nvidia’s intuitive Material Definition Language. This language defines the various properties of materials including the colour, reflection and refraction. Having these properties physically defined means your materials respond to light in an accurate manner, therefore making it impossible to set materials up incorrectly.
MDL is perfect for either beginners or artists who want a
foolproof way of setting up their materials. Having a library of materials that you know are going to work straight out of the box, and which have been tried and tested, makes the whole visualisation process far more streamlined.
Just like much of the Iray technology, MDL isn’t unique to this renderer and is available for other renderers to use. This is because of the separation of appearance description and software implementation that’s required by the current range of render technologies.
IN-RENDER EFFECTS
Alongside physically based lighting and materials, Iray also benefits from a wide range of camera effects, which reduces the requirement for as much work in the post-production phase. One of these must-have effects is depth of field. It’s possible to do this in postproduction with a Zdepth pass but, so often, it looks infinitely better when done in-render. That said, this does slow down the rendering process quite significantly so you’d need to make sure the visual benefits outweigh the speed costs for your project.
The same is true for motion blur, which can also be done in Iray. There are also speed costs associated with this effect, but adding motion to elements like car wheels and people running adds a significant amount of realism to renders.
A couple of other camera effects are stereo viewing and panoramic snapshots. The former is perfect for use with VR headsets, while the latter is a good tool for the interactive, 360-degree viewing of spaces.
NVIDIA TECHNOLOGY
Iray has the backing of Nvidia and all of its innovative and ground breaking rendering technology. This isn’t to be underestimated, but the fact that much of it is also available in other, more established renderers should make artists think twice about whether Iray is right for them.
Nevertheless, Iray is a great option for artists who are after a strong, physically accurate solution across their lighting and materials, although this would also be the case for renderers such as V-ray and Arnold, which are much more developed than Iray.
If you have the latest RTX technology then you’ll get the best out of this renderer, but that does come at quite a high price in terms of the hardware costs. Therefore, if you’re a big Nvidia fan and you want to make sure that all your CUDA and tensor cores are taken advantage of, then choosing Iray will be a good option for your pipeline.