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Speculating again, but by not telling us anything, the developers can set the bar as low as they want. If we're not promised any quality of life improvements(like viable replacements for retiring render engines), then there don't have to be any.
The tools are available for any third party to make a plug-in tor ender in any available render engine that supports such links - materials would be an issue, of course, but that isa lways going to be true.
it's why I use Carrara, (not the Octane plugin)
honestly if DAZ could incorporate THAT render engine into studio the biased render fans would all be using it
no noise
can exclude stuff from light or shadow
backface culling
toon, non PBR options with brushstrokes
and fast
Yeah, but then we'd be stuck with being able to build our own renderfarms for free (or almost free) with any machines we have sitting around or even buying low-end machines to build the farm from scatch, like a three- or four-machine farm for less than the price of a new, high-end Nvidia card. What next? Implementing the 64-bit Mimic plug-in? Where would it end?
I wonder what would be easier, copying the Carrara render engine into DAZ Studio, or updating Carrara enough that it could import *all* the DAZ content into Carrara with an improved "bridge"?
One way, you get a new rendering engine in DAZ Studio, the other you get an updated product to sell (or update for previous owners) that gives them a DAZ-owned renderer and content creator. Unlike licensing someone else's render engine where it would cost DAZ to implement it and force them to keep up with the 3rd party updates when necessary, a Carrara engine would only cost them development time (which they'd have to do for a new rendering engine anyway) and an updated Carrara would first cost them development time but then generate income as people purchased it. It wouldn't have to complete with other 3D programs, simply replace 3DL and Hexagon.
At one time I think we were hoping for a DAZ Studio-Carrara-Bryce mega-program, but keeping DAZ Studio and Carrara seperate but more closely integrated would still be awesome.
Carrara would be the perfect companion program for Studio IMO if Daz would just develop and update it
Very true, but without knowing DAZ's plans, why would you start building such a plug-in when DAZ's next release might make it redundant or unnecessary?
They left Bryce to die too, so I wouldn't count it Carrara seeing any kind of updates either.
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Daz does not develop Iray, so they have no control over how it works.
The version of the Qt aplication framework used for DS limited UI scaling on Windows, certainly. I would suspect that these display issues are rlated to that too, in which case DS 5 might well enable them to improve things.
Ain't available for Mac, whereas DS works with it albeit somewhat adequately...
But Blender blows both out of the water by volumes.
Never used Blender, so I really can't comment on it but I will take your word for it.
Yes. Shader Builder Works with renderman shaders, for complex shaders is better than shader mixer but is a nightmare to connect parameters in testing. Learning Shader Language is needed.
I think there are some broken or disabled things that limit the potential of the visual environment and the interface is a mechanism of torture and disruption of patience.
I am told that the newxt major build of Daz Studio, using Qt 6, is going to use Metal for MacOS. Windows may use OpenGL, Vulkan, or may even offer a choice - that is not yet determined.
That's fantastic news! Thanks. Gives me another reason to get my system working again. (sigh)
I know most people love them, especially Blender people, but I despise nodes. I hated them in Poser and I hate them in Daz Studio and Blender. Whenever I look at a node setup in Blender or anywhere else, all I see is an impossible pile of spaghetti that's the most unintuitive thing I've ever seen and I have no chance of following or understanding just WTH is going on ;).
+1
I love a nice shader tree like Carrara has but can see how nodes can be reconected back on themselves in a loop, I miserably use them mostly in Unreal Engine, Shadermixer is just an impossible mess
Thanks very much for that update, much appreciated.
I've been spending a lot of time with node-based shader systems, and they have considerable advantages. After getting used to Cycles, Octane and Arnold, working in Iray in DS seems frustratingly limited (though Shader Mixer is uniquely opaque, so no help there).
Oh, I didn't say they didn't have advantages - they definitely do. I just can't seem to follow what's going on with them. Apparently, my grey matter just doesn't work that way. LOL Shame, since everything seems to be going that way now. Otherwise, I'd have bought Terragen a LONG time ago.
I don't love nodes for everything. I've tried Embergen for fluid sims, and it's incredibly frustrating to use compared to X-Particles. I will also probably need to get into Nuke at some point, which is a node-based compositor, and I'm not looking forward to that.
I agree that the node system is daunting and I take one look at some of the more complex examples and quickly move on to something else. On the other hand, I can understand why they are powerful and would like to become familiar with them but whenever I try to follow a tutorial (usually Blender) I realise that the person who created the tutorial knows exactly what nodes to plug-in and what they do or how they affect the whole. That knowledge must have taken a long time and a lot of practice to master so the tutorials are kind of useless unless you are trying to achieve that specific effect described in the tutorial.
And then there are nodes with mathematical formulae which are an instant turn-off because I do not have a mathematical brain. I'm more comfortable with the IRay surface sliders but I realise that combining all the different properties is totally trial and error for me and that maybe a node system might offer greater control.
Tha animation previews will be faster and smoother?
We probably shouldn't speculate too wildly for fear of disappointement, but the potential is sure there. As a Mac guy, I know that *theoretically* Metal is capable of 10x the speed of OpenGL, but I assume that's under absolutely ideal conditions and perfect implementation, the real world usually falls short. Metal previews can use both the CPU and GPU cores, though so if DAZ is able to implement that, then I would expect a significant bump in speed of some sort.
I was already pretty eager waiting for DAZ 5 (and after two years of waiting for Filament) so now there's a new level of excitement.
Where would you suggest somebody start that is thinking about making this journey? Which tutorial? And lets just assume I know nothing
Well, like most things, I really didn't learn node-based shading in any kind of structured way. I just F'ed around and found out. I may put together a tutorial for Octane in DS.
Carrara can load and use Genesis 9 and its content. Yay. Have to convert to blended weight and save as a Character preset.
Hi Richard,
Firstly, this is fantastic news! Knowing that Daz are investing in the Mac as a platform is great to hear. Apple deprecated OpenGL four years ago, and are all-in on Metal, so bringing any kind of native Metal support to Daz Studio would be an awesome thing.
I'm curious to know what this will mean in practice, however. I assume it could be one (or both) of two things:
I can see that 1) would make total sense for Daz Studio, and would be entirely within Daz's control. A fast, platform-optimized viewport is always a good thing when working in a 3D application. If this is on the cards, then that would be an awesome improvement.
As for 2), which is what I think all Mac users are really dreaming of… I imagine that's a much harder ask. Iray is a great cross-platform renderer, and its CPU performance on Mac is pretty good (I'm running it as my primary renderer in Daz Studio on a 28-core Mac Pro, and it's not slow), but it's still not on a par with the speed of modern GPU renderers. The problem is, Iray is from NVIDIA, and NVIDIA will surely never port their own renderer to Metal, given that doing so would effectively be providing it to their competitors (AMD and Apple). We all know that NVIDIA GPUs don't support Macs, and given the bitter history between the two companies, I expect hell will freeze over before NVIDIA graphics driver support returns to Mac, especially now that Apple are making their own GPUs, and Apple Silicon Macs don't even support external GPUs (such as ones from AMD). So on the assumption that Iray will never run natively in Metal, what might it mean for Daz Studio to support Metal for final renders?
The most obvious alternative would be Mac support in something like the Octane plugin for Daz Studio. Octane already has a Metal implementation, so perhaps there's a faster path to adopting that on Mac for Daz too? The problem is, with pretty much all new Daz Store products being tailored for Daz's Uber and PBR Iray shaders (totally understandable, from both a Daz standpoint and a PA standpoint), I wonder how reliably Octane can be a 1-1 visual match for the intended rendering of every product on the store. (The same would be true for any other existing Metal-capable renderer, such as the excellent Redshift, which I've used extensively in Houdini on Mac.)
So beyond those options, what could "using Metal" mean for Daz Studio? Personally, I would be very happy if it "just" meant a Metal-native viewport! But I think we all would truly love is native final-render GPU performance on Macs. I'm also aware just how complicated that might be in practice.
– Dave
DISCLAIMER: I may be wrong in my understanding of the Apple Metal API (and most likely am) but here goes:
I think it's important to keep expectations to a minimum when possible. Apple's Metal is an API that acts at a low-level to speed rendering like OpenGL by simplifying how things are set up, and by providing access to Apple's GPUs. Theoritically this will speed up the viewport and final renders, but only if you're like me and using "Viewport" or in this case OpenGL as your final render quality. Instead of CPU-only OpenGL, we *might* be getting CPU/GPU Metal previews.
Viewports themselves should work faster for Apple users as well, making setting up the renders faster and smoother.... "should" being the important word.
I suspect Windows users should see similar advantages using Vulkan, but again, my understanding of Apple's Metal API is limited, and almost non-existant in regards to Vulkan, so take my guesses as just that, uniformed guesses.
To try to use it for high-end final rendering using only it's shading language, I believe you'd be looking at writing a complete rendering engine from scratch, if not a complete 3D program. With Apple 3D users in a minority, I do not see this happening; it's taking years to update the Qt to the latest version, I highly doubt they'd have time to even start planning to build their own render engine, their plates are already pretty full.
As you mentioned, a number of rendering engines (e.g. Redshift, Octane, Cycles, etc.) have used the Metal API to speed up Mac renders by providing access to Apple's GPUs; unless DAZ is adding a new rendering engine to DAZ Studio that already uses Metal, I don't think we can expect a huge increase in high-end rendering speeds.
I'm already pretty happy using OpenGL with my toon characters (my render times are 0.55 seconds for a 1080p frame) and was looking forward to Filament, if Metal can do at least as good as either and to it faster, I'm going to be a very happy camper.
I hesitate to do too much speculation on the one update Richard gave us, and from here on will sit back quietly and wait for more actual announcements from DAZ... hopefully in the near future.
Oh, my GOSH!! That is fantastic! Oh, I do hope Mac users get the option of using Metal. And I hope that someone comes up with a shader translator that's as quick and easy and accurate to use as the ezskin 3 shader translator by Snarlygribbly. It quickly converts Poser firefly shaders to Poser superfly shaders which work with the cycles render engine [using at least some of the cycles nodes] that Poser now offers as an option. And to think that he did this as a freebie! Snarlygribbly, you belong in the same class as Dr. Saulk. Somebody nominate him for a Nobel Prize.