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The future of rendering is realtime for sure. Still though, don't read too much into these tech demos. The amount of trickery going on in there and also obviously the sheer amount of technical and artistic skill needed to pull something like that off is quite staggering. Game engines may be less of a threat to Daz Studio than you think because Daz users are simply not tech-savvy enough to handle a game engine. Otherwise they would most likely not be using Daz Studio in the first place.
Now what would be nice is to have some purely visual realtime feature like Marmoset Toolbag inside of Daz Studio. I could see something like that happen if Daz manages to buy and integrate such tech. I don't see them develop their own, it's just too big of an untertaking.
As far as movies go, I don't mind some things being off. I've seen off things in practical effect shots since day one.
When CGI shows up, it can be understood that THIS IS A MOVIE and somebody is trying to show you something that is diffucult or impossible to make happen in real life as they film it. Hello real world disaster films that start with real news footage to set the tone....
It's not that serious. It's like grammer police. Some people are really caught up in how you write and others are actually into the message of what you are trying to say. When I watched....Peter Jackson's King Kong- some shots are incredible and some sequences are horrible...
Like the section where they (oddly enough) are running down that valley being chased by dinosaurs...it looks....terrible....
Hard to watch.,...
But the fight with the T-Rex wa incredible. Still looks good to this day- even if the choreography is a little over the top.
I would watch movies with digital actors. Rather have real ones, rather have practical effects, but for some stuff, I still like mat paintings and such....
Daz3d doesn't control the development of iRay and I'm not sure its possible to turn a raytracer into a game engine anyways. They would be better off licencing a game engine to add to their fleet. I don't think they will benefit from developing their own. Unity, Unreal and even iClone have a head start on them and are well established. I also think Daz = turbosquid option isn't particularly good idea either because without the technology in Daz Studio, Daz figures are no more special than the figures that are sold on CGtrader, Turbosquid and other asset markets. If you export Genesis, it loses much of its rig and all of it's special features. No autofit, no auto-JCM, no morphing, no EZ button. Daz could take the easy way out and develop DAZ3d to be a staging app for export to other platforms. That is what many are already using DS for (present company included). If they make it easier for 3rd parties to use their assets, they could retain their asset business and not disturb their core users who just want to make pretty still pictures. I personally would be disappointed if they went that way. I think Daz3D is in a unique position to service indies who don't have a bunch of modelers and riggers on call. Their software with it's figure technology could lead the market for semi-pro hobbiest who want to make a professional quality production. That's what iClone is shooting for and they only lack the vast market of assets that Daz has. Its only a matter of time before they do.
"Like the section where they (oddly enough) are running down that valley being chased by dinosaurs...it looks....terrible....
Hard to watch.,...
But the fight with the T-Rex wa incredible. Still looks good to this day- even if the choreography is a little over the top."
You mean the scene where they are running between the legs of the brontosauraus looking dinos who are being chased by raptors? I feel exactly the same way. It is the weakest scene in the movie IMO. But the King Kong vs Tyranasaurus battle more than makes up for it. I agree with you on most counts.... but humans are different. We have a different emotional response to a realistic human character on the screen. If they look a little creepy or alien, it blunts the impact. I am not overly bothered by it, but I can't help but notice it.
If they make it easier for 3rd parties to use their assets, they could retain their asset business and not disturb their core users who just want to make pretty still pictures.
Yes! Well, if you ask me what I want, I just want faster render times. I want to do animation, but if it isn't going to be easier, then maybe not yet.
Or not using Daz alone...I thing getting a game engine or maybe a game engine bridge that --
prepares their stuff so that it does transfer or better yet TRANSLATES all the Daz features into whatever format the game engine uses/needs.
**** not sure if this even makes sense. I'm not a game programmer- so I might be talking unicorns with a golden horn here *****
Already, Daz and 3D is overkill to create a single image. When I look at some of the sets, it SCREAMS animation.
And if anything, maybe there should have been a simpler point where the still frame users bump up to short clips of animation.
Vines, if you will..short enough and samll enough for instagram etc....
The scene of an- almost-real looking figure, but the hair is blowing or the camera moves a bit.
That, I always thought would be the next step.
That new 360 rotating stage product- was a big step in that direction.
Can't get there with several days of rendering for every...render.
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I'm starting to have flashbacks of the movie "Looker".
With the novice in mind, Daz Studio's evolution could be a simple progressive thing. For example, they can commission the creation of more animation assets (I forget what Daz calls their premade animation sequences). I agree that some of the sets that have been created people like Stonemason scream out to have animation. I imagine a novice user can buy an animation asset (walking or skipping), drag and drop it unto their Genesis character and drop the character into the Streets of Venice and press the render button. With a near real-time render engine, you have now introduced a novice to the world of animation. This is just speculation and dreaming guys!
People are correct to remind us that those impressive game engine
films have implemented alot of "cheats " and optimizations to get
that performance.
But frankly it is only a harsh reminder of how IRay ,in DS, is a truly
a DUMB brute force implementation of path tracing with zero options
for the user to optimize performance.
Compare it to blender cycles where you have the option of enabling
"branced" path tracing
which opens up a whole new set of parameters to lower the number of bounces and change reflection
depth&refractive index on glass etc.
Daz Iray is like an old NASA titan Rocket with two speeds.
completely off or full escape velocity with no in between.
Doesn't iray have user-controlled settings?
Aren't there LEVELS or render quality?
What am I not understanding, wolf359?
From what I remember of Daz iRay (Daz uses only a subset of Nvidia's iRay capabilities), it only has a very rough control of how the renderer performs. Compared to other renderers, there is almost no control. I guess Daz3D figured that the novice users who would be using their software would be confused by a normal production renderer, so they dumbed it down. This is why I stay away from it. The full iRay set has much more functionality. Apparently, DS just needs an EZ button for its users.
You are not understanding quit alot mate
if you have a scene with Volume materials ,glossy materials
mesh lights, or Ambient occlusion.
Attached is the Blender render settings panel in branched path tracing mode
note how I have the option of setting the number samples on a per surface type basis.
why does this matter?
Lets say you have your beautiful Genesis female in a hotel room
room scene where she is the subject of the portrait
I can raise the number of path traced samples for the SSS on her skin
but greatly reduce the number of glossy samples
on the Silver tea set on the room service tray in the background.
It gets even better when you start adjusting the number of bounces
on a per surface type basis.
Do I really need 128 bounces for that glass ash tray prop way
over in the corner of the shot?
or 128 bounces for those mesh lights that are just LED Decorations on some
sci fi panel prop and not actually lighing the scene?
Well with IRays Brute force, Bryce like ,approach I have very little option to prioritize
the engine resources based on the types surfaces I need to look super fine
and the ones I dont.
You are expected to buy the most powerful NVIDIA card you can afford
and wait while Iray Strong arms your entire image into an acceptable state.
deleted double post
Oh, I so do agree. They keep making those upper lip-nose whiskers move in every face animation since 3d face animation begun. I've seen it first on some lion like monster face first and since then they do it again and again with every digital character. Except Lord of the Rings, they didn't do it there, which made it so great. Those "whiskers moves" ruin the whole realistic effect. I know, that they wanted to add micro expressions in order to make the digital Peter Cushing look more real, but since Peter Cushing doesn't have (as far as I know) whiskers, they have blown it.
I know people (civilians) who thought the Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher CG was great. But I cringed when I saw it. It could have been much better given the expertise of the crew they had. Maybe the production was rushed.
It was great and yet cringeworthy. That's the very nature of the uncanney valley. It proves to be nearly impossible to cross if today's most experienced CG artists with the immense technology at their disposal these days cannot manage it.
Another thing about animation; Rogue One primarily suffered because it was mixed live and animated. In a purely animated film, we can adjust expectations. Heck, I really enjoy the style of the Clone Wars, which are quite obviously not meant to be realistic at all.
Amusingly, a few nights ago I watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the Tim Burton one) with my kids and was astonished at how amazing the cgi squirrels were, considering its 20 years old!
Yeah, it wasn't cgi. Most of them were actual trained squirrels.
I thought Uncanny Valley were the makers of that Ranch dressing... Uncanny Valley Ranch... "If it isn't eerie and revolting... It's not our dressing"... Good stuff if you don't mind a dressing that tastes like plastic garlic jellyfish armpits...
I wonder if people who didn't have any context for who Peter Cushing was still had the same "off" response to the animation.
To be honest, it didn't hit me that Peter Cushing's double was on the screen until just after the scene ended (Hey, that was...). I really didn't notice anything untoward because I wasn't looking for anything. In that sense, I considered the scene to be a success. I guess I will have to look at it again with a critical eye. Maybe tonight.
Just returning from Blade Runner 2049, and I am dying to hear what people think of approaching the Uncanny Valley after a certain scene....
The issue is that the closer CGI gets to pretending to be organic reality, the more out of place any little tiny flaws will look to the trained eye. While the average movie goer will be in awe, we will be there critiqing and picking apart every scene trying to figure out how certain effects are created.
Right now we are still looking at CG effects that are just "near" photorealistic. I chalenge anyone to show me a CG 3D rendered image with zero postwork that is 100% photorealistic. You can't because render engines are just approximating the way light works, and hardware is not fast enough to process true 100% acurate lighting.
It's like for example... on your Iray render if you set the convergence to 100% that last 5% of the render process can easily take as long as the first 95% because calculating light gets exponentialy more complicated the closer your get to realism.
How do you do on this? https://area.autodesk.com/fakeorfoto/
Number 1. The images are all too low resolution to easily pick out render and modeling tells.
and Number 2. Nowhere do they say that those are raw renders, or raw untouched photos.
Badly, then?
Less than 50%, which is really impressive actually! I think my trained eye betrayed me.
I got 50%
the best cg work out there is going to be the cg your not even aware of,whether the render is raw or not is irrelevant,the final product is all that counts..I think Benjamin Button is the best work I've seen,and that film is nearly 10 years old.
I think most people just want believable characters,regardless of what they look like..Woody and Buzz from Toy Story are believable as characters and you can have empathy for them the way you would have for a real person.or the apes in Planet of the Apes,everyone knows they aren't real..but you certainly believe in them as characters.
Durring Rogue One, I actually sat there trying to remember if Cushing had died, dismessed that because of course he'd be ancient if not, wondered if it was CGI or just a really good look a like, knowing it was CGI, but not seeing the signs.
Leia was bad. Not "uncanny valley"..she wasn't off putting and creepy for some unknown reason (it refers to an emotional response on a graph, folks), but just bad looking.
There you're getting into storytelling. We by nature anthropomorphize things. Look at the pictures that get past around of sad faucets and happy gutters. If a good storyteller then takes that tendency people have, and ..well tells a good story, we invest in the characters. I've seen cartoons just about lines and circles that you get drawn into just because it's quality storytelling.
Let's wait a day ot two lol.
I have the same thought and my own theory which like Mon Motha from Return of the Jedi.
They got an almost identical looking actress so really, casting is all you needed.
But I liked the Leia.
Just returning from Blade Runner 2049, and I am dying to hear what people think of approaching the Uncanny Valley after a certain scene....
But scavenger is right.
I KNOW Leia isn't 19 anymore so NOTHING WOULD convince me. Trained eye or not, my brain doesn't counter my common sense.
But there is that extra scene of Luke coming out the cave and building his lightsaber.
Looks 100% real. Mark Hamill said he didn't remeber filming that and everyone said "Aha, I knew it was fake all along".
Then Lucas said it was an extra scene they never used and Hamill said "Oh yeah....I kinda remember......"
Then everyone who said it was obviously CGI looked a little silly.
But Lucas and Hamill could both be lying and wrong and ...and....
------
I thought TRON was great, but that was actual footage.....
I think Ironman did the same thing.....
I didn't notice Captain America (the first one) until it was noted and they had a whole special on the effects of his body and age...THEN I began to LOOK for it and it didn't hold up.