New Daz update: What are the spotlight new features?

Scavenger

There's some buzz around the newest 4.9 update, but what's the new featues/changes?

Iray is faster, I hear, but is that it?

SixDs

The changelog lists all the improvements. All listed here:

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/138871/daz-studio-4-9-3-pro-general-release/p1

Richard Haseltine

The first post has a list of updates http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/138871/daz-studio-4-9-3-pro-general-release/p1

Scavenger

I was hoping for a less bug oriented and more "this is the fature I'm exitexd for" type.

Daywalker Designs

Some folks want to see bug fixes before new features, so I guess you gotta take what you get. :)

Richard Haseltine

There are new features there - new camera options for example - but it is only a third digit update (4.9.x) so it's not likely to have a lot of major new stuff. They wanted to get Pascal support out there - I suspect they will have deliberately avoided any changes that might have led to delays in doing that.

dukes

is the blue highlight" new content" option  which was in all the daz studio until 4.9 came outt still missing , the missing option in 4.9 makes it harder to find older content in daz studio and some times the current content if they are spread over in different folders, that is why i am still on studio 4.8 for easy content finding

wiz

OK, here's the exciting stuff, in something that resembles plain English (sort of)...

1. An IRAY update that DAZ users are reporting to be considerably faster. Some say twice as fast.
2. Batch rendering. You can be editing a picture on your machine, hand it off to the render queue and go on and edit another while the first image is rendering. You can queue up as many images as you want, so you can put half-a-dozen 2 hour images in the queue, eat dinner, watch a movie, go to bed, and find them rendered in the morning. You can render to multiple machines across a network. Downside is the license is $295 per render server (including using your own machine as a server). (I'm not sure if that's $295 flat rate, or $295/year).
3. Better "caustics", those pretty shapes projected on surfaces when light passes through an angled or curved transparent object, thanks to a feature called "spectral rendering". 
4. Support for 10 series NVIDIA cards, like the 1060 or 1070.
5. Some ability to make "packages" that should be useful to DAZ content creators, especially those who aren't DAZ PAs and only distribute on places like atrocity or careCG.

Everything else looks like either bug fixes or minor UI tweaks that few will notice.

kyoto kid

..so #2, 295$ for a licence? What if I have my own render box aside from my production system, do I have to buy a licence to render on it?

Richard Haseltine

If you want to do stand-alone rendrs you need the Iray server license, which I believe is licensed p.a.

Oso3D

Spherical camera for Iray.

Novica

Scavenger said:

I was hoping for a less bug oriented and more "this is the fature I'm exitexd for" type.

I did a test of the spectural Cie1931 and 1964 settings, and Natural and Faithful- starting here.  With glass vases in the scene, it rendered faster by 13 minutes compared to without spectural.

Stryder87

One of the first things I noticed after upgrading (and having to uninstall because the in-place upgrade destroyed the CMS component and it forced me to completely wipe Daz off my box and install fresh), was I now have a ton of dead icons in my Smart Content list.  No idea what they're for as right-clicking on them gives me no details, and I can't figure out how to get rid of them.

But... the Help/About splash screen is nicer than the last one.