- This topic has 33 replies, 14 voices, and was last updated 5 years, 3 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Fun trivia bit: The entire reason DAZ Studio exists in the first place is because Curious Labs (which owned Poser at the time) was coming out with Poser 5, and demanded that DAZ pay them for the privilege of having the Victoria 2 (or was 3 out yet?) mesh use the Hair Room, Face Room, and IIRC dynamic cloth as well. Then Poser 5 flopped hard, the dot-bust arrived, and Curious Labs began to die (and take Poser with it.) DS went from a backup plan to being a survival tool. Even then, I doubt they had more than 4-5 developers working on it at any one time.
It was never intended to be a permanent thing.
Insofar as Blender? I'm just a hobbyist these days. If I wanted to wrestle polys into a mesh, grind on shaders, and meticulously place a rig and pray for rain, I'd go get Blender and do that. I don't.
I just want to make pretty pictures. To mint a metaphor, I don't want to pull up in a Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer just to plant carrot seeds in my garden. That's why I use DAZ Studio. If someone comes out with something better that works on Linux, doesn't require a Intel + GeForce specific rig, and I can use all my existing crap dating back to 1998? Cool, I'll jump to it. Until then? I use what I got.
I think daz is doing what it does because it has minimal competition. If it had competition it would fix the program to be faster, to use amd cards, assets should be simpler in their foldering systems instead of adopting the poser system and never changing it, make it easier to use various assets instead of half being in the surface tab, the other half in the parameters tab etc etc.
A newer model should bring things to the table like faster rendering times (eg some hair have myriads of polygons) some skins do the same. that i would buy. Buying a figure just because it has better facial expressions no, i ll pass.
newer models should bring new things. Be less system taxing. Thats my opinion as someone who knows very little about daz inner workings but likes to render as hobby. I also find wrong how they just focus on 3-4 actors like victoria and manuel?
At some point a similar program to daz will come, by then it will be too late for daz and their practices.
The gentleman is right about Poser being dead. He's also right about the forums at Renderosity being a good ol' boys club.
IIRC, doesn't iClone have a DS bridge? I might look into that if they have a Linux port.
@KefkaI I sort of of disagree that 8.1 is cash grab
because everything released by daz is cash grab.
the basic principle of daz company is to release something supposedly new which has no real changes but just breaks compatibility with older content and then cash on content creators remaking everything for that new figuregenesi 8 already was absolutely pointless update and genesis 8.1 is in essence even offensive content which has no purpose at all but to break compatibility.
For those who believe that it improves eyes or expressions
all genesis 8.1 updates are applicable to genesis 8 you can apply eye enhancement to genesis 8
and also expression control can be applied to genesi 8 and even genesis 3
even 8.1 texture can be used on genesis 8 but the main problem with 8.1 textures is that they will eat big chunk of extra GPU memory and offer no improvements. (unless you have bald head fetish and render closeups of foreheads.)There is a fix to restore full compatibility with generis 8 expressions.
All those skin enhancements are pure lie because you can turn PBR for any model
The biggest surprise for me is that so many people are actually following that marketing nonsense.I am super curious what DAZ will offer for genesis 9 as there is just nothing to add and nothing to advertise even when counting totally bogus promises of nonexistent quality improvements.
TBH Obviously lighting dependant, but I actually prefer the way the earlier skin looks to PBR & that is in their promo renders too. :0/
Hi there is some issues with characters , I admit that from Genesis 2 to 8 they had many progress but something is missing for example when we have third party hair props that are good, they continue to do haired body, for example using age control morphs it became ridicule we obtain a young but hairy body. In "August 8.1" we can see tendency to make a unisex character, but this line is not continued. I think that the sex of a character must be defined by artist using it by adding anatomical element and morph dial "more feminine/masculine like in august 8.1" I haven't seen noticeable difference between other 8.1 characters and those of 8.
There is no doubt that there are many things to improve even with current DAZ software.
but those things could be done at the genesis 2 or 3 already
The only thing what DAZ developers are doing is trying to cripple their base figures as much as possible to sell more addons.
currently their business model is to make figure polygon count to resemble "Mario version 1" and then sell HD morph addons so they will definitely not do anything useful in genesis 9 besides maybe slashing polygon count even more to make sculpting totally impossible
Genesis 8 is already not any better than genesis 1/V4 it has no improvements that could not just be backported to G1Daz studio is actually pretty well designed all those "bugs" are special features designed for licensing purposes and this is why they will not be fixed ever.
The reason why I am curious of what they will do with G9 is because to release G9 they have co come up with something that once again breaks compatibility with every previous figure and present it as some kind of improvement.
They could once again change mesh, UV maps or default pose, but how to convince everyone that this change somehow improves quality? Also as noted before needs release must be even more cripled than current one in terms of geometry detai.
Everything else can be released as simple addon to existing figure and it will heavily contradict with their business model.Wish they would fix the dam load time on loading a single character. I don't even mind the cash grab if they fix this one thing in Genesis 9...
Daz Studio is OK. It's cheap and easy to learn and you can get some nice results if you're prepared to do a bit of post and have just the tiniest inkling of artistic talent. If you want to do animation, though, forget it. If you want to do a complex scene with complex lighting and have an AMD card? Forget it.
Optimising, refining, texture crunching - all of this is the staple of the Daz artist and there are quite a few people who self-righteously proclaim that if you're not doing the work to get around the limitations then you're not working 'properly' but at the end of the day, the real-time engines are here and one kicks Iray's ass. I'm using it in Early Access - Unreal 5.
Sign up for it, have a play and realise that Studio has about 12 months left. It's pretty straightforward to import Daz assets into Unreal (PBR works really well btw!) and you now have access to state-of-the-art animation, lighting, cut-scene and camera tools that are used on TV shows today.
I have a soft spot for Daz Studio - it's easy, it's relatively cheap and it can look good and there was nothing like it for years. I'll still use it for messing around until UE5 is stable but when that happens...bye. Although perhaps not 'bye' to the store...Daz assets cost a fraction of what UE assets cost and with a bit of fettling can look amazing. Maybe that's where Daz will end up... a model store.
/end ramble
regarding: "Wish they would fix the dam load time on loading a single character. I don’t even mind the cash grab if they fix this one thing in Genesis 9…"
The load time of a figure is almost directly proportional to the amount of stuff you have lurking in .\data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female - the more morph packs you have, the more expression packs you have, and the more UV kits and whatnot you have... the slower things load. If you have any "Duplicate Formula" issues or similar (which will crop up during the figure load if you have any), that adds even more time.
It's times like this where I almost miss the INJ/REM system that Vicky 4 had.
@cheviot ,The big obstacle that UE5 is going to present is the amount of required horsepower to run it. DAZ Studio is still light enough to run on a laptop form factor without undue strain. If I have to buy a fire-breathing monster desktop with multiple CPUs, multiple chained GPU cards, and 128GB of RAM (exaggerating, I know), then no sale. Otherwise, if it is relatively friendly on system resources, then I'm in - doubly so if it runs on Linux. I'll definitely take a look at it once it comes out.
I don't believe DAZ Studio will be dead in a year, though. It still has a great entry-level feel for those hobbyists that don't want to wrestle with the prosumer/professional CG suites. Most of DAZ Studio is drop-and-go, especially for still images. If you can get Filament to behave, it's even faster and comes out with decent results (although I've even had decent instant results using poly-light toon figures and the iRay preview mode in the Viewport - no render time necessary.)
Now Poser will likely be dead, or may as well be dead in 12-18 months. I'll kind of miss the damned thing when it does die.
Rank:
UE5 is going to need an 8+ core CPU, at least 64GB of RAM, and a good RTX card to get the most from it. That's voices from their forums.
Metahumans on the other hand with 4k textures will need some serious horsepower. So if you want the most from UE5 just sell a kidney if you don't have the cash for a powerful PC.
Or just stick with Daz Studio...@billyhill
At the moment you do need a top-end PC to use all of the new features in UE5. If I turn on all the candy-shop goodies (Lumen, Nanite, Shadowing et.al.) I struggle to get 30fps in a basic scene with a 59590x, a 3080 and 64Gb of system RAM.
It is, however, a Beta. It will have to get better than this as it is not realistic to expect the average gamer to own the PC equivalent of a Cray to run a game/application built with it!
UE5 can just about run on Linux but a lot of the new features don't currently work with it... neither does the launcher which is 32-bit Windows-only code right now. I would expect to see full Linux support at launch but right now the drivers for the GPUs aren't there.
You may well be right about Studio lasting longer than my cynical prediction but do bear in mind that UE4 and UE5 are also essentially drop-and-go if all you are doing is still renders or animated cutscenes, with not a single line of C++ in sight.
If you can use Daz coupled with an external renderer (say Octane or Lux) you will find UE or Unity no more difficult or tedious; the mystique surrounding these engines is undeserved but, obviously, you will be starting from scratch again.
I would love it if out of the blue Daz announced Studio 5 - tada! - which cured all the problems, had a built-in renderer for AMD GPU users and added the features people have been requesting for years on the forums but the day that happens I expect a large, pig-based object to appear in the skies...
Daz Studio is the perfect character creation framework for UE4 and the characters need only minimal adjustments for a perfect look once everything has been set up correctly. You can export anything from daz to UE4 with some minimal resculpting in blender for fitting multilayered clothes etc. MetaHuman will never ever have such broad range of character phenotypes, body types or clothing.
Rank:This hobby is becoming more elitist if you want to take full advantage of UE5 and other human generating software, no big bucks no play. With all it's flaws Daz should just fix the problems in studio and be done with it, or just couple up with another developer who are wlling to take DS to the next level.
There was talk of AMD GPU compatability in DS a few years ago but it never happened.
I remember some beta drivers being out but I don't have an AMD card so couldn't try them.
Anyhow, like I said it just didn't take off which is a shame.I miss the big array of indie CG sites which existed back in the day - 3DCommune, Poserworld, Fairyworld, PoserPros, RDNA, Thralldom, all the Japanese sites and their habit of throwing freebie exhibitions, way too many places to name.
That would be excellent to see happen again.
To break DAZ's deadlock, you have to have a program that does basically what DAZ Studio does, at the same level of newbie-friendliness, is cheap or free, and doesn't require an expensive rig to operate. It also has to be easy to import assets into, because of Sunk Cost issues.
No, I'm sorry, Poser isn't it, for way too many reasons.
We need something else entirely.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
