Daz inc. innovating,imitating …
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Daz inc. innovating,imitating or stagnating??
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you need this plugin and preset's https://www.daz3d.com/fluidos-for-daz-studio
which need's CUDA in the viewport more then anything
Just want more integrated features and invariably one needs to pay for those
not wanting to deny anyone their free DAZ studio either who don't want
or have any need of those features
but just because they don't want them why should others have to go without if they are willing to pay for them?
Well ideally DAZ studio would remain a simple to use limited feature free software without bloat people like Kyoto Kid can use and Carrara would be a paid fully fledged software suite fully compatible with DAZ content.
no argument from me there
Perhaps a compromise would be a plug-in bundle, maintained by Daz, that would be a separate purchase, with occasional paid upgrades? There are plugins for Adobe software, for example.that are marketed on either this basis or, in some cases, on a *gasp* subscription basis. There would be an obvious temptation to skimp on the base and cater to the paying crowd, but I think Daz understands their customers well enought to know that wouldn't fly, and would hurt them in the long run.
yes the point is nobody is denying anyone their cake and latte here
just some of us want to splurge on a lobster grill now and then
and some just want to pick at their salad
the I don't use it so you cannot have it attitude is what is irking me badly
ironically I am also complaining in my own thead about so much new content requiring hardware beyond my means
I am actually not saying people cannot have it but maybe minimum specifications need to be spelt out more clearly on store pages
some PA's can maybe sell easy load stuff too and highlight that feature etc
so buying decisions are easier
and DAZ needs to let us roll back versions if needed the latter being my problem
...not saying that they shouldn't develop a more highly advanced version, provided they don't abandon or seriously hamstring the free track version or to where it is less functional than what we currently have.
...that would be a reasonable solution. Carrara was always a paid full feature programme.
...well considering that I am so heavily invested in Daz (and now on a tight fixed income), not about to move to any other software platform anytime soon.
Still in the process of rebuilding my characters after the HDD crash and finding it difficult to get the same look I had achieved before. Not really thrilled about going through all of this again with totally new software (while having to learn its ropes and dump a lot of finances into its compatible assets). Again I've seen what Unity and Unreal can do, and yeah, the lighting sets, props etc all really look great but once a character (created in them) was placed in, it didn't look as convincing as what I've seen people do here.
So, Hexagon 64bit resurrection didn't work enough to get more followers of "daz ecosystem"?
Imho, though, and YMMV, but Carrara/Bryce interfaces are definitely much more user friendly than Blender's (especially 2.79's) or 3ds Max's (or Zbrush's, that makes me cry as it's the most alienating interface/control change when you come to it from any other 3d app)
EDIT. Or you meant that UI doesn't scale on modern monitors, so icons and menus are very small on high resolution displays... Then i agree (though i'm person who spent ~15 years on 1280x1024/1366x768 duo and then will stick to 1920x1080 for another decade, at least at home, and i feel like i need to get good old CRT one day to fully enjoy again 240p era content).
Carrara is also 64bit and I find the UI very intuitive unlike Blender
each to their own
I cannot afford Max but from the trial I did a few years ago not that terribly far off what I was used to in Carrara actually
Chohole no doubt can share some opinions on Bryce, I know I am very impressed by what it's users model and render though since it uses Booleans and metaballs and stuff they don't export as well as some apps
I have 2 monitors I cannot see why one could not have two resolutions unless Subtropic Pixel's machine cannot run two or something
I think they just found Carrara too hard for them like I do Blender but I still think Blender is pretty awesome just because I don't find it easy does not negate it
Yeah i suppose each to their own.
From my viewpoint, Maya is more intuitive and quick than Max (experienced both apps in university and later on courses, in Max i never liked formula of "enable pane 2 to open pane 3 then you can return to pane 1 and get command 2", while in Maya there are many of context-sensitive shortcuts that you get right before you as pop-up, and most of things easily reachable and logically places in menus or tabs etc.), can't comment on C4D or Houdini or Modo or Lightwave (what else "big and expensive" left?).
Blender i first tried in 2007 and during that era it definetely didnt feel as overwhelming as Blender became nowodays where even for basic things you need to drag hidden ui sections, also there is too much clustered things together, for me it's visual overload.
All of this is subjective, ofc.
Comparing to all above, Bryce is pretty mininalistic, almost Zen :D Granted, it doesn't have all those functions they have, k
I like Small Soldiers better although the special effects in Small Soldiers were comparably awful (I also found that movie more interesting the 1st time I saw it).
that is what plugins are for, which you can obviously do powerful things things by the fluidos example video's together with dforce and wind node's, plugins would be more interesting if there was a category on the store, like unreal and unity has, and could easily make Daz become more like BorisFX
all viewport modes outside of IRay need's CUDA first, so you can actually animate a genesis 8 model without needing a ryzen 3900x + CPU
I'm passed 40, have no arthritis and find Blender's interface easier to use than Studio's. This is for Blender 2.8 and prior. I find keyboard shortcuts far simpler. I suck at modelling characters which is how I got to Studio. :)
Daz is certainly not resting on its laurels; Studio continues to improve, which is very impressive considering the size of the development team. As other's have said, it is free to aid in the sale of Daz's products and seems to be a very effective model - I expect that to continue with Daz looking for new ways to improve their business.
Interesting that most of the posts have focused on Studio (admitedly I skimmed) when the subject of the thread asked how Daz Inc. (the company) is progressing.
TBH, for a while now I've considered Daz's real business to be content and the content marketplace, not the programs that use them. I think from a character creation standpoint their innovation from Gensis to Genesis 3/8 has been outstanding. Just look at all of the creatures and other figures that have been created based off the same basic mesh and rigging. I say 3/8 because while I think the updates from Genesis 2 to Genesis 3 were significant, the updates from 3 to 8 were less so. And I'm hard pressed to find anything that I think needs to be added / fixed for a future Genesis 9.
As for Studio, it does everything I need it to right now. And the scripting and SDK has allowed people to create some great add-on tools to make certain aspects easier. I'm not an animator. I know the tools there may be lagging a bit, but it doesn't really affect me. If you were to ask me what I'd like to see for Studio 5, I'd be hard pressed to come up with a feature list worthy of a new ".0" release. And I'm well aware that my wishlist is a "niche" that is unlikely to get any attention. Studio doesn't need to compete against Max or Maya or even Blender. It's already the standard tool that most of the people who buy content from the store are going to use to render an image.
I imagine Daz Inc. is watching the use of their models. They're a fairly well managed business. I'm sure they have looked at the benefits of making "Studio Content" more easily used in other applications and engines. There's always a cost/benefit analysis to these sorts of things. And the needs of say an asset in UE4 are going to be different than what we need for a Studio Iray render; so the question becomes "If we invest X dollars to make a UE4 transformation tool, how quickly will we recoup our investment?" as well as "How much will it cost in ongoing support and maintenance?"
People still complaining about the Blender interface should give the latest version a look. They have made great srides in meeting the demands of people to make it more like oher user-friendly interfacs out there. I've tried ZBrush and Carrara and Poser and I dislike them all for their interface quirks. DAZ Studio is at least friendly if somewhat buggy (mouse cursor control being a pet gripe of mine) but I can get around the Blender screen just fine too. The only trouble with Blender is that it is all things to all men and that means complication so they have tried to separate all of those applications-within-an-application into various workspaces available via tabs. I think it is that complexity that makes it difficult but you can use just the bits you need without having to learn everything at the outset.
What bugs me about DAZ is not that they imitate too much but that they don't imitate enough. There are offereings you can see demonstrated all over YouTube which have cloth simulation in almost real time, rendering in almost real time, soft-body physics in almost real time. DAZ is literally lagging behind in all of those areas while they try to go it alone with dForce and IRay. If I have to spend $1000 on a GPU I want (almost) real time for my money and I want human figures that move and jiggle like humans do.
I think a lot of us would like that in theory, but the problem is that I don't see how they can do that without breaking backward compatibility, while at the same time dramatically increasing poly count. Daz has to decide whether it wants to make that leap, because it would be a big one and leave a lot of people behind. PAs would, on the one hand need to learn to create and rig character models and hair and garments all over again, but on the other hand, it would require us to buy everything all over again. It might be a good thing in the long run, but in the short run, it would be pretty painful. For those of us who don't animate, which is probably most of us, it doesn't seem worth the trouble.
...I still would occasionally run into instabilities. Now the Blender has a UI I can actually work with, that has changed the situation. I always knew Blender ot be a very powerful and stable programme, it was just that it's former wonky keyboard driven UI had a steep learning curve of its own, which for myself, got in the way.
..I'm in my 60s and have arthritis, but it was chronic before I started in 3D (and the reason I even got into this as It became too difficult and painful to hold a pencil or brush steady). The change to Blender's UI was definitely most welcome.
You expect dynamic hair like this?:
...nice, however Frostbite apparently is an in-house proprietary engine for EA's development staff and not available as a commercial product.
Yeah, just an example of technology (that colour change was pretty, and motions without colliding).
Though i think that it'll either be downgraded or used in actual projects several years later.
Yes to be honest.
It's kind of the reverse situation of Poser. Poser is a piece of software that lacks support regarding content. Daz has a very good content system but maybe in the future studio will lag behind regarding features.
It seems kind of stalled now. The current Beta is over a year old.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/256961/hexagon-beta-version-2-5-2-137-updated/p1
Not friendly if you can't read the damned UI.
Thank you, yes that is the problem.
The fact that you think you need to downlevel your computer equipment is EXACTLY what I mean by "unmitigated fail".
But I can't read the damned UI. Intuitive does nothing for me when the dropdowns are too small to read on high res monitors. Blender's UI can be resized. Intuitive is a "nice to have" when you can't see the screen.
Chohole and others have some INCREDIBLE art done in Bryce. But it is useless to me with such tiny icons. I'm not asking for a little bag of gold. I'm just asking to be able to set my own UI viewing parameters. I am asking for equality; to be able to use the software like everybody else. Like Blender allows me to do.
I have 3 24" monitors attached to my desktop machine, and the built-in monitor on my laptop. First off, it's an extra step to perform EVERY TIME. And to "undo" EVERY TIME just to play a game or watch a YouTube video.
Changing resolutions on one monitor will also throw things out of whack because then I have one or more monitors running at their non-standard (aka: Not their "best") resolution. Doing this also does not allow me to stretch elements (or drag them) to the other monitors.
No no, changing resolutions is NOT a real solution. And neither is changing the text size settings in Windows. The former is a hassle and the latter distorts sizes and measurements. Neither is acceptable.
With all of the prior nested-quotes, I'm not sure who wrote this. It doesn't matter really, except to say that I think it's really unfair to suggest that my complaints about UI visibility and clarity should be discounted because Carrara is "just too hard" for me to master.
Maya is subscription only and costs now nearly $1,600 per year, without even an option for a one-time payment. I can afford this probably easier than many. But I have no idea if the UI is squished like DAZ software...and that would make it worthless. Besides that, I have my dignity to consider. A cruise might be more rewarding.
But Bryce is a pain to use with it's 32 bit and crashy-crashy limitations. Plus, I can't read the damned UI.
Good observations; you're probably not wrong about any of this.
Funny I know two legally blind people who use Carrara
one uses a Zoomer software the other who posted here too resizes the fonts
Good for them. Those things do not work for me and it makes me sad.
Carrara was last released in 2015:
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/16776/start
So I'm not wrong here. An update is badly needed. And I have been complaining about user interface readability ever since the day I set foot in this forum. But I think I know why DAZ won't/can't do that. Carrara was built on old non-agile software methodologies and programming languages. It was created in the days of C, maybe even before C++ and most definitely before QT or any other modern development tools were even thought up by anybody. Carrara, and to some extent, Bryce too, are getting creaky in their bones, and the dev effort would be to costly to take up any significant project work. And I say the same thing it true also for Hexagon. Betas should be coming out A LOT MORE OFTEN than once per year!
DAZ would need a mass of skilled "old school" developers to really do right by Carrara. But how would DAZ fund such an effort, and why should they when DAZ Studio already deeply leverages the store? I think DAZ probably needs to either start developing (and I mean REAL developing) for Carrara, Bryce, etc. And they need to get back to priorities for Hexagon.
Without that stuff, it's unlikely that people will skip Blender, especially with this new version 2.8 out there kicking butt in the marketplace.
Times have changed and DAZ needs to move on. If they cannot incorporate new features into Carrara (and be cost-effective for the effort), then those features need to go into Studio. Or Blender will eat Studio's lunch (it already is).
This...