DS + Hexagon/Carrara + Bryce3D?
WsCG
Posts: 391
Hi all,
I've decided to go "all-in" with this DAZ3D "ecosystem", I guess you could call it. Because of the way the programs can communicate with one another, it seems awfully convenient, and eliminates the need to export from one program and import into the other, hoping all the data properly gets carried over, etc.
The only exception being 2D stuff, which could be Photoshop, Painter, etc.
I'm curious who else here works in a 'DAZ Only' ecosystem for their 3D work (again, excluding 2D painting, etc)? How do you find it works for you as an overall solution?
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Comments
Well D|S to Bryce does make perfect sense as Daz 3D even made a bridge to make it easier, and also Hexagon has a bridge. At one stage Bryce D|S and Hexagon were released together, at 100% discount for a limited time, as a suite of programs.
Indeed, it's a nice setup all around.
I'm curious if anyone else here does their work within that "ecosystem", and how they find it's been for them, etc.
You may want to ask this question in the Bryce, Carrara, and Hexagon forums.
I have all three programs, but have not used them enough to give an informed opinion yet. At this time Carrara does not support Genesis 3 or 8. There is a third party solution for using Genesis 3 in Carrara, but I don't know how effective it is.
You may want to wait until the PA and PC+ sales before buying the programs, especially Carrara. I was able to get Carrara 8.5 Pro for $7.65 last September. There were several times it was discounted below $30 during the sales.
Forget Photoshop and Adobe's bad subscription, watch out AFFINITY!
Agreed on the subscription.. I have a stand-alone license for CS6 :D. It's an older version, but it does everything I need it to,and then some.
I'm even farther back than you. It's amazing how much Photoshop 7 can do, even today. I'm still squeezing the life out of that $300-500 purchase (bought it at Circuit City of all places).
'Sure, Ron's brushes aren't really an option, but I manage just fine.
I like the "ecosystem" as you describe it. I combine Daz programs in an integrated workflow. However, I am concerned that if Hexagon does not get a minimal maintenance update, the bridge beween DS and Hexagon will become useless. One typical reply that I often receive when expressing this concern is that I have the option to use Blender or some other program to do the tasks that Hexagon does. And that is true.
I like Carrara very much, especially the ease to which one can integrate various tasks in a convenient workflow. As I migrate to DS to assemble and render scenes, I'd like to try to establish a similarly convenient integrated workflow. And good news. DS has bridges to Bryce and Hexagon! Unfortunately, Daz's lack of minimal updates to those programs seems to indicate that they are moving away from an integrated approach. Instead, in order to use DS, I actually have to learn Blender or a host of other non-Daz programs, even if I just want to make morphs for content I buy at Daz for figures that I buy at Daz.
Oh well, these things go in cycles. I am hopeful that the "exciting changes" to Studio that are supposed to arrive during the 2nd half of 2017 will include a few features that make it easy to customize DS scenes and the content that I buy in the Daz store in a relatively painless workflow.
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I guess it depends on what you need. Clearly, Hexagon and Carrara haven't been updated in many many years, and it seems pretty obvious (to me at least) that DAZ has no intention of putting resources on anything but Studio. Personally, I think the free Blender is vastly superior to both Hex and Carrara in technical and functional aspects. If you listed features side by side it's a no-brainer. Of course, that doesn't account for the "yeah, but I LIKE Hex or Carrara", and whether you actually need those features.
BTW, just be careful evaluating software based on people's biased reviews rather than a functional analysis and actually trying it yourself. Carrara is arguably decades behind the times, but people will tell you it's the greatest thing on the planet. Just because someone likes it and it does what they need doesn't mean it will work for everyone else.
Personally, I think Blender plus DAZ Studio (which IMO has recently come of age and has become a surprisingly powerful application) is the way to go, for me at least. They're both actively developed, very powerful, they are both free, they both have tons of training resources out there, and IMO the render results you can get with both are pretty jaw dropping.
Carrara isn't as far behind the times as you think; it has features that folks are asking for DAZ3D to add to Studio, such as a physics engine for dynamics, it supports up to Genesis 2 figures natively and could easily (relatively speaking) be extended to support the two new generations of figures, and probably other things I'm forgetting (I own it too, though I've not used it much). I also own Bryce, and I believe there is a closed private Beta for a new version of Hexagon (I also own this, by the way).
I've got Studio, Bryce, Carrara and Hexagon. Bryce is great for landscapes and atmospheres and it's really useful to be able to bring scenes in from Studio.
I like Carrara, you can create your own models in it, I like the modelling tools and the renderer and it can use Studio content up to Genesis 2, and Poser content, but not the very laetst stuff like Paul and Pauline (I also have Poser, I was using this before Studio was released).
I haven't used Hexagon much, I had problems with it but I think I have found a way round the one that annoyed me the most so I'll have to give it another try.
For 2D I mostly use Paintshop Pro but The Gimp works well on Windows now and it's free so I might give it a go. I've never used Photoshop at home (used it at work a bit, didn't like it much). When it was not subscription I couldn't see the point in spending so much on a paint program when I can't paint or draw. Now it is subscription I'm definitley not going to keep paying for the same software over and over again.
I certainly don't want to get into a debate, but have you used Blender, or ZBrush, or Maya, or any of the cutting edge, actively-developed 3D applications out there? Like I said, make a side-by-side list of features, and how well those features work, and it's a no-brainer (IMO). Just as one example, the "physics engine" in Carrara, as I recall, doesnt' even work on moving objects. And that blob thing they use for fluids? Compared to fluids and smoke in Blender it's not even close. And the list goes on....
Of course, whether you need those features is a different issue....
I agree with ebergerly that in the end, I predict that Daz will be telling us to just go learn Blender. To which I might add, if this is indeed the outcome, I hope Daz makes file integration between DS and Blender even easier. Whichever method they choose, I hope Daz provides Studio users the ease of integration among functions that Carrara has had for a long time. Unfortunately, Studio seems to be moving backward in that one dimension.
Because I am a (soon to be former) Carrara user who is currently watching the videos and reading the documentation to migrate to Studio/Blender, I feel relatively confident in reporting that documentation for Studio and Blender is just as terrible as it is for most products in the 3D world. As usual, the mere existence of clear instructional resources is not sufficient for enabling newbies to find it among the not-clear instructional resources.
Hear, hear!
I've got Bryce since 5.01, Carrara since 3 up to 8.1, Hexagon 2/2.5 and Studio since 0.8 or 0.9. I've never used Carrara a lot, every version a bit, and only experimented with Hex and find Wings3D a bit easier but then I'm a bad modeler anyway. Studio 2.3 worked fine with Bryce 5.5, Studio 3 with Bryce 6 and the early Studio 4 with Bryce 6 and 7. Meanwhile Studio 4.9 is not very suitable to use with Bryce anymore, the objects are better exported as OBJ than sent over the bridge - or I start Studio 3.
Studio seems to go in one particular direction, Bryce and Carrara are both more versatile and can do any artwork from abstract to photo-realism and anything in between. I just stick to Bryce because the best program is the one you know how to use to get the result you want.
If I need a 2D program to finish or improve a render, I made a mistake and go back, make adjustments and render again. For spherical HDRI panoramas, photograped or rendered, I use a couple of special programs.
Daz will never do this themselves.
this sort of thing is left to third parties.
DAZ studio already exports to "industry standard" formats
FBX,collada, MDD,Alembic,.obj.
I remember when genesis was first introduced and was awarded
3D world Magazines software inovation of the year??
https://www.facebook.com/notes/choice-studio/3d-world-cg-awards-2011/313830561990593/
Daz stated that they had approached the makers of many professional
CG software suites like Autodesk, SideFX etc,
to get them to embrace the new genesis tech and they obviously met wall of silence.
This was under Dan Farr.
When to new team took over ,they tried the disasterous
paid pro version of studio and quickly settled on a loss leader model of a free Full Studio version
with tight seamless intergration of the flagship genesis models promoting paid content sales.
Spending resouces on Bryce Carrara,Hexagon does not really contribute
to this economic model.
That said DAZ_Steve stated that a Carrara 9 is impending
so there is that at least.
Huh? I don't see anywhere it was said "Carrara 9 is impending". There's a thread talking about the reception of G8, and that DAZ has big stuff planned for this year, and lots of people speculating on what that means...
And looks like someone ASKED DAZ_STEVE if the "big stuff" included Carrara 9, but I didn't see any response from DAZ.
And even if they do a C9, I doubt it will be much more than a content usability upgrade.
How soon before a major release of an application (other than open source stuff like blender) do most of the big companies usually start hinting at them? I suspect there might be more coming out of DAZ3D this year than just the new version of Genesis.
Perhaps I misread that post.
if so it only further makes my point
about Daz's priorities.
The paid versions of DS were when Dan and Chris were still at the helm.
Yeah, there would never be GoB for Blender. https://www.daz3d.com/goz-for-daz-studio
and there would never be TransBlender. http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/artzone/pub/tutorials/otherapps/otherapps-carrara03
because Daz would never (future tense) do anything like what they have already done (past tense).
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GoZ is not their unique concept, but a cooperative venture between Pixologic and a number of software vendors, like Autodesk (Maya, Max), Maxon (Cinema 4D) and Adobe (Photoshop). In fact, there is even a GoZ addon from someone on zbrushcentral to go from zBrush to blender.
Never said it was their unique concept. Said that if Daz is sending us to Blender, make it easy.
EDIT: and GoZ and TransPoser are two examples where Daz made it easier to use Daz owned software with other software.
Wouldn't it make sense to be able to send DAZ content to a widely used app like Blender? Seems like it would be a smart move for DAZ. Imagine all the Blender users who would buy DAZ content if it was easy to use it.
Not sure I understand why they don't work on something like that. Or maybe its too tough to convert a Genesis to rigging in Blender. Seems like a GoB would be smart. The GoZ for ZBrush is pretty sweet, but it's without all the rigging and stuff. Really just a glorified OBJ transfer I think.
Why do people assume that Carrara and Bryce epople don't contribute to the Daz economy. There was a tread in the Carrara forum and the members were giving figures to prove that we do in fact spend a lot of money at the Daz 3D store. It is wrong to assume that because program specific produgts don't appear to be so popular taht we don't spemnd money. We, like D|S afficionados, spend moeny on products that are marketed for D|S and/or Poser and then use them in our program of choice. I for example have 77 pages in my product Library here, and I only ever render in Bryce, with the exception of the promos I have done for my freebie textures for clothing items.
How about this..."don't contribute significantly to the DAZ economy compared to the zillions of Studio users" ?
If you have 10,000 Studio customers, and 100 Hex/Bryce/Carrara customers, which would you put your resources into? It's all relative isn't it?
I think the original intent of this thread was trying to find out who was using a purely DAZ software approach to content creation for Studio, not a debate as whether or not users of Hexagon, Carrara and Bryce were significant buyers of DAZ assets for any particular program.
But Carrara and Bryce users are consumers within the "Ecosystem" that the OP is talkling about;- Bryce, Carrara, D|S and hexagon (in alphabetical order)
I'm not arguing that, as I've used G2 stuff in Carrara that I originally bought for Studio.
There is a difference between having an SDK that gives talented third parties
the ability to bridge with other programs plus
, building in the ability to export to "industry standard" formats
FBX,collada, MDD,Alembic,.obj .etc....
and internally developing officially supported"bridges" to specific
to cycle nodes (SEE PIC)
other programs whos' update cycle you do not control.
I use the MCJ teleblender script all of the time to send entire DAZ scenes to Blender
with auto conversion of matererials
This ^