what would persuade Daz Inc there's value in updating Bryce and Carrara?
Mistara
Posts: 38,675
what would persuade Daz Inc theres value in updating Bryce and Carrara?
would a quota of new users do the trick? how many?
Post edited by Mistara on
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Three rubs of Aladdin's lamp under the light of a blue moon silhouetting a flock of flying pigs?
...particularly Carrara since it is more of an all inclusive programme. It actually has a pretty decent render engine of its own that can produce some very lifelike results when comes to natural and architectural environments. It would also be nice to get a stable bridge between Daz and Carrara (I remember there being the capability back in the 6.3 days as I often built scene subsets that required a lot of posing first in Daz and transfer them to Carrara).
The failing point is that characters tend to suffer as I haven't seen skin textures be as convincing as we have in Daz, and many custom morphs are not supported. I also use a lot of Daz based merchant resources in character design much of which doesn't translate through as it isn't supported. For a while Daz released Carrara optimised skins for G2 but they were still limited to the base characters. Skin design resources like SBP and Angenssis are useless. Hence I ended up building a large library of Howie Farkes' sets for Daz which take far longer to render in Iray than their counterparts do in Carrara. Attached is a quick little test I did in Carrara Of the Secret Lake which looks every bit as good as the Daz Iray version and took a fraction of the time to render.
when I collect my Academy animation award
...and mention DAZ3D Carrara as my tool in my speech
..wearing my Versace skimpwear
Carrying a sword?
A couple of souls.
...I've always felt that Dazas a company had the foundation for a what could have been a comprehensive suite of 3D programmes that could interact with one another via multiple two way bridges. With Bryce and Carrara there is the ability to create large scale environments. Carrara and and an improved Hexagon handle the modelling aspect . The Daz programme itself pretty much focuses on character development. All three software products support animation.
Granted, it would mean a heavier workload for the development department (which as I understand is rather small) to update and maintain all four programmes (or even three) on a constant basis. Sad, as I still feel there is some real potential here..
Software development is really expensive, and I suspect they would need to hire at least 3-4 extra developers in order to develop and support those 2 apps. At a cost to the company of 100-150K each after wages,health care,office space etc is considered, then you are looking at needing a lot of new users in order to fund that.
Good question, I have an opinion, but that's all it is, is just an opinion. First we need to look at what seems to be the DAZ 3D business model ..... selling content. A large portion of this business model is to sell content made by others, i.e. people who don't work for DAZ. Then DAZ isn't responsible for the extra costs of real employees (employers share of taxes, benefits, management overhead, etc.). In order to sell content, there has to be a viable platform (software) to use that content in. So the software needs to be easy to learn/use to attract new users, and needs to be easy to maintain and add features to. Of course, right now that software is DS. Now, with the newer DS specific (Iray) content, using DS is really close to a "make art" button (maybe not a make good art button, but getting great 3D results is pretty easy).
I don't know much about Bryce, so most of my comments will be more Carrara specific. Carrara is definitely more difficult to maintain than DS. The programing/UI environment is older, and presents it's own unique set of challenges. So DAZ can't easily have programmers move between DS and Carrara (my guess is that Bryce suffers from similar, or possibly worse legacy code issues compared to Carrara). Additionally, DS is a product of DAZ, so they have the institutional knowledge of DS that they don't have with Carrara or Bryce. This all simply means that 1) modernizing (adding new features) Bryce and Carrara could be significantly more expensive than DS, and 2) a lot of the knowledge of why things were done the way they were in Bryce and Carrara is gone, so the programmers will need to spend more time chasing bugs introduced with new code, therefor the cost of development will be more than DS. Now this cost could easily be offset if they brought in enough additional customers/sales to offset the costs. But that's also where the difficulties begin. Because Carrara is a full featured 3D software, and inherently is also more complex. Greater complexity means it's more difficult to learn. Therefor it simply is not as attractive to the "load, pose, render" user base that has made DS so popular. It is also very poor at doing a great job of converting DS/Poser materials, so most products need a bit of help to look good. Again, this is a strike against the possibility of users adopting Carrara, when all the recent products for DS look really good straight out of the box. I'm quite amazed at the number of DS users who never try to modify surfaces, and have no idea how to, but that also shows why Carrara is a difficult sell for the majority of the DAZ customer base. Now, DAZ could fix the shader import quality in Carrara, especially for Iray materials, but the question here is why do it, if the vast majority of the user base is happy with the ease of use in DS?
As a Carrara user, I used to find it difficult to understand why DAZ dropped Carrara development, until I changed my point of view to the outside looking in. Carrara has so many tools integrated into a single software, and could easily be a very popular prosumer alternative to Maya, 3DS Max, Cinema 4D, etc. if it got some serious love from DAZ. But, IMHO DAZ doen't want to compete with any full featured software (they would also have to compete with Blender, which is free, and has a lot more features/capabilities than Carrara). Their business is to sell content for people to easily make pretty pictures with. In it's present state, Carrara doesn't do this, but DS does. So in essence, to update Carrara to use their content as easily as DS does, they would be duplicating their efforts and increasing costs, and in a very simplistic view, lowering their profits (yes, I know all the arguments that Carrara could actually expand their user base, which I kind of agree with, but it's also a lot more risky than doing what has been working, and working well). Now given the fact that there could actually be a viable alternative software/market to DS/DAZ with Renderosity acquiring Poser, I think the possibilities of sending development dollars to Carrara and Bryce are even less than a year ago.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the Carrara render engine while very very good, is more difficult to get great renders out of than Iray. So DAZ would need to either invest in improving the internal render engine, integrating Iray or another similar render engine (working a deal with Otoy for Octane would be the best option IMHO) to compete with their own product. That is where, looking at things from an external investment/profit point of view, continued investment in Carrara and/or Bryce doesn't make corporate sense. They would be spending additional development dollars to basically compete with themselves (yes, they both provide features that DS doesn't, but those are also features that the majority of their customers may not really care about).
DAZ has been slowly, but surely adding more features to DS, and even though it's not Carrara, or even close to it, it has features that the majority of the user base want/need. In the areas where DS falls short, they have Carrara and Bryce for users who really want those features (even though they can't easily use all new DAZ content). Or, people with more advanced skill sets are also free to use other tools, such as Maya, Blender, Unreal Engine, iClone, etc. (you don't get the same ease of use of DAZ products, but more advansed 3D users typically have the skill sets to over come most or all of the limitations, and if they are using those other tools, they are most likely doing more than static images, or very simple animations, and need a more robust environment.
Bottom line, I still love Carrara, but DAZ is unwilling to continue development as it probably doesn't fit into their business model very well. Once I began trying to look at it from an outside point of view, not as a Carrara user, I realized that probably no amount of complaining or trying to show DAZ how great the software is, would ever change their view of Carrara related to their business model. As a result, I'm now using Blender more, and quite happy I am. I'm no longer stuck in a software that isn't moving forward. Blender has everything Carrara does, and more, except for easy use of DAZ/Poser content. Right now if I want to use DAZ content, I'll use DS (sometimes Carrara), otherwise I'm using Blender. Blender now fills the prosumer niche for me that Carrara used to fill.
Sorry for the long post, but back to the original question, IMHO the only thing that could persuade DAZ to continue development of Carrara and Bryce is to have a large enough user base (at this point it would need to be an increase in the user base), that buys as much or more content compared to the DS user base, to warrant Carrara and/or Bryce development again. I honestly don't see how that could happen without a lot of "help" (updates and marketing) from DAZ. That's why I decided to move on (my only use of Carrara wasn't just to use DAZ content, Blender can all the other work I did with Carrara, only better).
LOL!
And of course the awards are being held in a temple ot tomb???
The acquisition of those softwares was done under daz's old managment, when they thought expanding their software library would help the company grow....it did not...so they focused back on what they do best, and since then under the new management, they have really grown strong again.
Money. Pure simple money.
Exactly. There was a point in time where it might have made sense to try to combine the different packages into a cohesive system, but there would be a tremendous amount of redunancy and.... most importantly... it would divide the store and PAs attention between far too many different and often incompatible products. The introduction of DS 4 and Genesis were really about starting to step away from being betrothed to all the conflicting legacies of Poser's erratic devbelopment and with Genesis 3 they broke the bonds entirely to focus on a single universal toolset.
I'm afraid that probably wouldn't get anything like what the OP hopes for done, since Daz would be under no obligation to follow through on kickstarter promises made by anyone who doesn't represent the company.
I don't use either and never really have. I can't think of any additional selling points.
...the bottom line is Daz Studio does not natively support creating or handling large scale environments as well as it does character development and posing while Carrara does not natively handle characters very well, but is more ideal for generating and supporting large scale environments.
So apparently it will be impossible to get the two to fit together seamlessly, thus requiring less than ideal compromises be made one way the other.
At the very least it would be nice if there was a stable bridge between the two programmes. I've had far to many crashes trying to import a custom character of mine into Carrara (even using Genesis and G2) which I didn't experience back in the 6.0 - 6.3 days.
I think DustRider covered things pretty well.
As for patreon or kickstarter - I don't think there are enough people willing to contribute even if DAZ would give the go-ahead. Just a real rough guess, based on the age and complexity of the programs, I'd think two programmers/designers minimum, three maximum per package for two years. As contract programmers, probably $50 K each per year - so between $200 thousand and $300 thousand for each package. Patreon wouldn't work - there would need to be a guaranteed minimum dollar amount per month for the duration, and patreon just isn't set up for that.
Maybe the question needs to be "how can we create hundreds of thousands of new Bryce/Carrara customers?". What could make this software become insanely popular to hordes of people? Can software go viral? If it was promoted by a celebrity, would people buy it just because? If it was included by default for free with some other product that was purchased by millions of people (a phone, airpods, laundry detergent, netflix subscription, college tuition) would a certain percentage just start using it, and how many people would that be? Could Tesla be convinced to offer it as a built-in car dash feature to while away the free time while traveling and thus foot the bill to get development restarted? Could virtual Vicky influence anybody to try them? Am I getting enough sleep?
There is no money in selling software period! This was what adobe and microsoft has learned once the software is sold and people don't want little updates and little features, some people don't need the new features and this causes a loss of cash flow! Consequently, the business model changed to subscription. Now all companies are moving to this model they want you to sign up and pay each month for service. So no, daz does not want to update software this costs money for programmers to fix software. If it was opensource you could crowd fund and the more you paid the more the programer would be lured to handle your fixes or your suggestions for upgrades. Too bad for good software that is closed source all software needs to go opensource but this is just my opinon. Just so you know, daz makes money not selling content but a 2d license! You do not own anything but a license to create a 2d image of the stuff you license. The models that you download from daz are the property of daz and the content creators. Consequently, if you use daz models in animations or games you need a seperate license for this. Good luck with your quest.
It's probably a whole lot cheaper to take a fork of Blender and mimic the UI / workflow / Capabilities of Carrara and Bryce than to update the older software, unless you have the original developers of those programs. Who were the latest devs on those programs anyway?
You'd need to spend about $3 million on each of them to bring to up to modern techniques and not be guaranteed it would be a success if they did.
Hmmph They still have features that other programs don't have, even now, and have you seen what we can do with them Do not dismiss the Brycers and Carraraists that lightly. Wait till DS is over 20 years old and see if it is still holding it's it's own in the then current market.
During sales I have come into possession by way of sales of both Bryce and Carrara and occasionally open them and stare at the screen. I don't have a clue where to start. I have gone to the forums for them and I believe I found a list of tutorials on one.
One overriding question I have though is what would be the best investment for packages to buy initially to get started? Today, David Brinnen's store is on sale, but what should I start with? After buying a lot of stuff in Daz initially, not understanding how useful it really was, I wasted a lot of money, I am cautious.
So maybe the two forums could have a 'welcome and what you need to know and baby steps' thread for Daz users to their products?
Bryce, you have enough in Bryce without buying anything else until you get used to using it. However David and Horo are both really good Bryce PAs. David of course also does stuff for DS as well nowadays, and even Poser (YAY I use Poser as a polug-in for Bryce). David has also got a lot of you tube videos and some are for Berginners. The best set of Tuts for beginners are the ones by Robin Wood, listed in the sticky list of tutorials in the Bryce forum (hundreds of tutorials there) And Brycers nad also Carrara peeps don't bite and do like helping new users if they post in the dedicated forum.
Not really a good comparison, DS has been updated regularly Bryce and Carrara have not so in 20 years time if they continue to update DS it will still be holding its own. Bryce is still 32 bit which really hampers doing all most anything in it.
BTW this image from my Gallery here was actually designed to have a double meaning
Bryce Rocks
@Chohole
That is so lovely. Thank you for pointing me to it.
Mary
Nice image but there's nothing there that can't be done in DS.