As a follow-up I took the RTX render as input for NB2 with the prompt: “Render photorealistic with a distopian atmosphere.”
I like the elements that the AI added to the render, while maintaining the overall composisition.
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Finally installed it. Since I was working with Iray beta in 2018, I started off by comparing RTX and Iray render plugin with the same project I was using back then for benchmark tests.
Not sure if I should be excited or not, but the render speed is practically the same. Speed and some other incompatibility issues (like Popcorn FX) were the main obstacles no one would want to seriously consider Iray video render for projects over 1 minute inside iClone.
I used 500 samples with de-noise for both (Iray and RTX) with my RTX 3090Ti
DX11
Iray render (rendered inside of licensed version of iClone)
RTX
Both Iray and RTX completed renders in just above 20 seconds.
The appearance is slightly different lights vise because I did not take time to customize lights in RTX and used a default conversion scheme.
Also, thus far I cannot find a way to control anti-aliasing in RTX. In Iray there is an “Anti-Alias Radius” setting to control that. So the edges in RTX look ugly sharp.
I will continue testing…
Converted and rendered another project. This time it’s a “heavy” one. One thing I noticed is, that after conversion to RTX and “saving as”, it becomes a 3 times larger in size. Original is 1.3 Gb, RTX converted saved as 3.8 Gb.
A couple more notes…
I tried using a DOF in RTX, but that is practically unusable. There is just one F-stop control. I hope RL will add more controls to DOF such as blur strength and transitions control.
It is highly desirable to add a post Tone-mapper and Bloom filter (like we have in iRay). Otherwise, glow is plain and flat and works only to emit lights.
DX11
RTX (lot of lights and glow tweaking after conversion to RTX)
I seem to remember (but I may be wrong) that this was similar in Iray. Since you are simulating “realism”, you only have the F-stop and the focus point to adjust DOF.
No, you forgot 
Iray render engine follows all controls in DOF camera settings and even Bokeh
Here are 2 renders with the same F distance but higher far blur strength and star bokeh in the second.
In RTX a blur strength is way too high and the region is very narrow.
UPDATE: I did some more testing in RTX. F-stop does work better than before in different project.
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Playing with materials. Applied some Substance 200 materials as well as sample RTX materials provided by RL. Very much impressive and easy to customize.
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Here are two clips:
The first is the RTX render. This was created for the RTX renderer
Render time: 94minutes
This second clip was the same sequence rendered in using the DX11 renderer in the the beta version of iclone.
Render time: 64 seconds
In this beta version in DX 11 mode:
the Popcorn particles don’t work in DX11 (except for distortion).
the post effects don’t work - lack cinematic LUTs makes a huge difference.
All emission, lighting, IBL and camera focus setting have to be adjusted.
Al the above obviously impacts on any comparison. I could have achieved a better DX11 render using the full (non beta) version of iclone.
In RTX mode:
The camera F-stop is so superior to the DX version.
The material controls add much subtly, especially emission. The emission setting seem to change when moving from RTX to DX and back and also when reloading the project. Also the key frames on the timeline at one point did not align with the emission values.
The camera went into an endless rendering loop adding a keyframe to the DOF using the time line add keyframe option. However while one camera was ‘crashed’ it was still possible to create another camera and use that.
Changing any movement using Accupose risks a crash
Overall in the course of creating this the beta program crashed out about 5 times. However all changes were autosaved.
KIT: AMD Ryzen 9 3900x Win11 64Gb RAM. RTX4080Super.
CC5 newbie here. Getting the RTX build was a bit of a breeze, & running some tests with a modified Daz Thimor project got great results either way.
Excited to help out with testing!
DX11 with the ‘Neon’ light preset:
RTX with the ‘Neon’ light preset:
i also wanted to give this a try, it looks really good!
on my old 2080 laptop when i do certain operations such as adding objects into the scene or undoing anything there is a 1-2min wait for some scene refresh stuff, other than that even on my hardware this runs great!
What I do is switching to the DX render to add or move scene elements to speed things up. Then I switch back to RTX render.
This is especially helpful when posing a character.
Converted Loft scene to RTX. Main point was to test lights and then tweak for the best visual.
Enabled and tweaked Dynamic sky.
Reduced the Angle for the Key and Dir.Light_02 to sharpen window through shadow on the wall.
Turned on kitchen, ceiling and floor lamp upstairs to highlight interior.
Enabled DOF and Set minimal F-stop for max background blur, although, in this case it was not enough IMO.
And yes, we definitely need some sort of Volumetric light emulation developed (not sure if the core RTX has any option for that).
Spot lights have volumetric settings in beta 2.
Oh yes, indeed, I did not see that 
Would be nice to have it in Directional light as well at some point…
thanks for this tip!
Currently testing RTX on a project. Still takes some tinkering to get excellent results but very happy with it anyway. Unfortunately, trying to render 300 frames crashes Iclone and it even doesn’t seem to like rendering 1 frame with max textures enabled but here’s a 1080p render without max textures.
