A DAZ Studio Version to Render in Metal?

Richard Haseltine

robertswww said:

It would be nice, if in addition to the nVidia ray tracing for Windows PCs being supported by Daz Studio (iRay), that developers also made a separate render engine that takes advantage of Apple Silicon's hardware-accelerated ray tracing for Mac users. 

Daz didn't make Iray, and probably (almost certainly) doesn't have the resources to make a render engine from scratch.

The Mac version wouldn't need to have the exact same results as iRay, as it would be a separate render engine designed to output photorealistic art on Macs using Apple's ray-tracing option.

In which case you are asking PAs to make two sets of materials, or relying on Daz to make a converter.

Of course, Daz Developers could first ask nVidia if they have any intention of making a version of iRay that runs on Apple Silicon Macs. 

It would need to take advantage of Apple's Metal graphics framework and the Metal Shading Language (MSL).

Maybe it could even be done by a 3rd-party as a plugin, similar to the Octane render engine. Octane has a texture conversion option to auto-convert materials into Octane compatible shaders.

https://developer.apple.com/metal/

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/ray-tracing-with-acceleration-structures

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10128/

https://docs.otoy.com/DAZStudioH/DAZPluginManual.htm#DAZStudio/Features.htm

jmucchiello

And the odds of NVIDIA supporting hardware they didn't create and they don't get a cut of the sales from is 0%.