That is worth remembering, in this case the time went from 2 minutes to over 3 minutes, more than 50% just by a change of camera angle. An extra minute may not be much but the camera angle may be very important for those of us that don't have such lightning fast rigs.
One thing that can speed up PBR is to use a closed environment, so that the casted rays have something to hit and bounce back. In my tests with Superfly, it can easily cut rendering times by as much as 60%. That makes no difference in Octane, though, because it has a built-in physical sky. If we use a closed environment with it, distante lights can't pass through and the scene goes pitch black. This is more for the likes of Cycles and iRay.
If you notice though the camera is closer to the hair. Hair, transparency maps of any kind, will slow down a render.
Indeed both Cycles and iRay get a spike in rendering times when we have a lot of transparency to render. Octane is basically unaffected by that, though. Depends on the renderer.
Being a Poser only user I don't have access iRay. I know there is Superfly but I didn't upgrade Poser this time around and I also think that Superfly is not as advanced at this point in time as iRay, there certainly seem to be more iRay shaders on sale than Superfly.
Both iRay and Cycles are "advanced" in the sense that they are both PBR solutions. On one hand, iRay is financed by a major corporation, while Cycles is homebrewed by community effort and is still under development. For instance, Cycles still has no support for a shadow catcher, micropoly displacement, or caustics, but it is certain that all of these will be added over time. What's really good about Poser adopting Cycles instead of iRay is that Blender3D has a huge community, so we can share shaders between Cycles and Superfly.
To be precise:
there are only a handfull of Iray shaders on sale, shaders as in different node trees or different MDL files. There are a lot of materials based on Daz Iray Ubershader on sale. Same as was with 3DL - many materials packs and only a few really different shaders.
what is more advanced is tricky question. Iray is more physicall correct. It was made such, it was made for archviz and product renders. It allows measured materials and measured lights and so on. All this is aviable even in DS al long as you can work with Shader Mixer. Suprefly is Cycles-based, and Cycles is animation render at base level. So basicly you can't make precise diamond ring render, but have less troubles making believable skin.
The reason why we don't hear much about commercial Superfly shaders is that they need no conversion in Poser. All Poser materials already work in Cycles, so there is no need to create Cycles-specific shaders, UNLESS we are dealing with very specific surfaces such as glass or metals, which are better handled in PBR for the obvious reasons. For the record, Cycles supports physical lights just like iRay, so one is not better than the other in this particular aspect. Both also use the exact same kinds of lights that are typical of PBR. The real difference between them is the way the math is calculated with the interactions between lights and surfaces. This is what makes the visual differences on the renders between Octane, iRay, Cycles and Lux. From this bunch, Lux is the most accurate (by design) when it comes to illumination realism. NVidia has some interesting approach for cloth rendering that was introduced in iRay, so each have their own strengths.
Admitedly, I haven't played with Superfly much (only a couple of renders) but I think Iray is easier, I got good results with Iray from the start (but I've only been doing this a short while, I came in just as Iray did and I find lighting with the HDRi enviro to be easy for me than setting up lights manually
not sure if Poser has the same thing as I haven't looked it up and I find Poser soooo confusing
)
I have tried both, and I have to admit this is not a fair comparison. All my existing Poser shaders render beautifully in Cycles off the shelf - no conversions needed. Poser RSR shaders have all been seamlessly integrated into Cycles, so we don't actually have to do anything for them to work in either Firefly or Superfly. When it comes to iRay, it's the exact opposite. None of my 3Delight shaders work in MDL, so I have to redo them every time, like I do with Octane.
So which one is "easier"? The one where I don't have to do anything to use my shaders in both rendering engines. This is probably why there isn't a great demand for Cycles shaders in the Poser community. Your existing shaders will work in Cycles - EXCEPT for those that make no sense with the way PBR works. It's not that it's incompatible, but instead that PBR only understands materials that make sense in the real world. The default Dawn SE shaders for Poser are an example of that, where it tries to connect a Blinn node into an alternate diffuse, which makes no sense in physically-based rendering. If we just disconnect the Blinn node, it all works nicely. If I were in iRay, I would have to recreate all the shaders in MDL architecture, like it is with Octane.
Superfly also allows CAs to create both SF and FF shaders and put them into a single material with 2 root nodes, so we only distribute 1 material for both SF and FF. When Poser reads the material, it automatically picks the right one for the rendering engine currently selected - the user doesn't have to do anything on their side. In DS we have to create 2 separate sets of materials: 1 for 3Delight and 1 for MDL. It's up to the user to pick the right set for the rendering engine they want to use. Which one is easier for both CAs and costumers?
