DAZ partnership with FlippedNormal
juvesatriani
Posts: 561
in The Commons
This is good new right ? Personally I hope they will release useful tutorials to finally enhancing my skill than just Load - spiining light and camera > Render
Awesome partnership . Kudos to DAZ !!
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Comments
Yes, we need more tutorials about creating NPR art (Non Photo Realistic Rendering)...
Does anybody bought https://www.daz3d.com/introduction-to-blender
If so, could you please share your opinions about it. Thanks.
That was the most interesting tutorial for me.
Interesting news. Watching the video, I can't help but wonder if DAZ is trying to get users to use something other than Daz Studio since that seems to be the focus and something they talk about alot in the video (with the bridges). I personally don't want Daz3D to become just another content store, but I do understand you have to go where the money is since this is a business. I would hope flippednormals focuses more on the DS userbase and getting the most out of working in DS, rather than exporting everything to other apps that many here don't have access to due to cost.
I am all for more skilled, professional artists having a new look at DS and DAZ content, but not at the expense of those that are from this community and made this community what it is
This 1000x
+10K
I've seen the work of Flipped Normals guys on YT. They're good, but their attitude makes me wonder why they care anything for Daz community.
What makes you say that? Have they said anything disparaging about Daz before?
I mean, Blender people admittedly do have a... smugness about themselves that seems to vary from person to person on YouTube (save for Ducky3D, he's cool), and I say that as a Blender user myself.
it's probably not that they have said anything bad about DAZ, but that they are from the high end professional side of 3D and history has shown that the hobbyist, plug and play aspect of DAZ3d isn't looked at favorably from that side of the 3D world. Hopefully since there is money involved, that will not be the case.
That's a very good way to say it. Happily, you can learn a lot from their tutorials. They're definitely worth a watch. That's the important part.
Panzer Emerald, I think Grant Abbitt and Imphenzia (among others) both seem pretty down to earth. Josh Gambrell was nice when I contacted him with a question. The Other Site has some cool Blender people, too - Not as famous, but good folk. I haven't spent any time on Blender Nation or anything, so I can't say about that.
I can and will say, Sickleyield is a Blender-Daz person. She's also among the most generous, supportive, helpful people I've ever encountered. So, there's that.
If anyone has the new Substance Painter tutorial from FlippedNormals, does it contain any information at all about using it in conjunction with DAZ Studio (like export settings, bump and specular conversions, etc)? Actually, do any of them (the Blender or Zbrush ones either?
Found that statement yesterday https://youtu.be/eimvpruoOkk
For me was something new, I have discovered, from their statement.
"FlippedNormals will be partnering with Tafi Co, the makers of Daz 3D."
I always thought, that Daz 3D made Tafi Co...
scroll down to the bottom of the forum page and look to the left, under DAZ 3D
I got the reverse impression. I think Daz is trying to reach out to the 3d community outside of the Daz-sphere. Possibly in an attempt to bridge the two communities together somehow??? I'm not quite sure what their intentions are. FlippedNormals has a massive outreach in the outside 3d community. I can see why Daz wants to partner with them. As for Daz's store, it's already a content store. It's just that the content is Daz-specific. I don't think we'll be seeing much more of FN's stuff in the shop. It feels like it was a one-time thing, but I do imagine that FN will be adding Daz content to their marketplace.
Non-Daz artists have recently taken an interest in Daz as a concepting tool— This was prior to the partnership, by the way. From that perspective I believe that's why, of all the times they could have chosen to tap into the rest of the 3d community, they chose to do it now. The Daz community will still continue as the Daz community, but I do think that we'll be seeing more and more Daz content being used out in the wild.
I believe being able to get Daz content into other applications *easily* is key to the company's survival long term. But it does make one wonder about where the Daz Studio software itself will be in the future.
While Studio has been updated they have used a lot of 3rd parties for many of its features. None of its render engines are in house. Dforce came from the outside. The bridges were also acquired from 3rd parties. So Daz is always depending on something outside of their control. If Nvidia ever decided to kill Iray, which I am not saying they will...but they have killed render software before, what would Daz do?
Hopefilly Cycles... hopefully soon
I've had the feeling for awhile that we're (hobbiests here mostly), are about to be abandoned for more "serious" 3D artists. We have prices going up and all these bridges and little happening on the DS software lately. I think because of having to rewrite the software for a new version of QT, Daz as a company is at an impasse. I look for them to concentrate more on the exporters and less on their software. I'm sorry to see a hobby I've had for over 20 years die, but since the NFT crap I haven't been buying much if anything lately, so I've been weaning myself off of it anyway. C'est la vie.
They'll integrate another renderer, there are a ton of them out there.
I rather fear that DAZ Productions is trying to lure the "more serious" artists into their NFT business.
Since Tafi is providing the direction of DAZ 3D, everything circles around the opening of new sale opportunities with enhanced pricing and decreased quality.
And as Tafi cannot provide the quality "more serious" artists are used to, it can only be to draw their attention to their NFT marketing place.
dForce is in-house, the previous OptiTex system is licensed.
The bridges may have begun as external projects, but their development is now being carried out in house (though as OpenSource projects other can contribute).
Although it does look as if a lot of development work is in the 4.15.1.x branch (presumably the new build for MacOS Big Sur that is going to break plug-ins cross-platform) and doesn't go into detail there has been internal development of the 4.15.0.x branch, with some fixes and features added since the last Public beta thata re not obviously related to the bridges. http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/change_log
That is how I feel also. I come from the other side of 3D having worked on games, in studios and having legit access to high end apps. Honestly, unless you are in school, have deep pockets or are using pirated copies (many are unfortunately) high end software like Maya, or C4D is out of reach, so catering to these apps is basically catering to those using pirated versions, having deep pockets, in school or working professionally in the 3d world.
I like how proprietary DAZ content is and would love it to be more so. If they improved the animation capabilities and made robust importing bridges, more and more would be taking Daz Studio more seriously than they do. It's too bad more people aren't playing with the SDK to add support for more render engines like we had in the past with luxus and reality. I would rather see bridges in the store to more render engines and not software that would negate using Daz Studio all together. Seems DS is just becoming a middleman plugin to other apps now.
It would be suicide to abandon the hobbyist market for Daz, I would expect that to be the vast majority of their sales. But at the same time, it would also be suicide to go further proprietary.
Daz never has to worry about people going to other apps and making content. Never. There is a reason why places like Jiffy Lube are big business with oil changes. I would imagine most of the people reading this thread probably know how to change their oil. But millions of people choose not to, and happily pay somebody else to do it. Daz improving accessibility to other 3D applications in no way impacts people from buying Daz content. Daz customers choose to buy Daz content for many reasons, and that includes 3D artists who possess all the skills to create these products themselves. Daz is your convenience store for 3D content because it takes time to do build this stuff. IMO the factor of time is the largest reason Daz exists today. There will always be people looking for premade 3D content, and that audience is only growing.
The issue that Daz is going to have to face is ever growing competition for this content, as well as its rendering software. After all, if other render engines leave Iray in the dust, that becomes a problem if Daz lacks a way for users to export to faster software. It becomes an even bigger problem if those other engines start growing their own asset ecosystem...like Epic. At that point, why bother with Genesis at all, if you can get great assets from Unreal itself and render them instantly? That is why going more proprietary will end in failure for Daz. They cannot compete on that front for too long. Plus people tend to hate the word proprietary. Proprietary only works for industry leaders who can force people to accept it.
So I can understand and appreciate the export options. It would be nice if Daz could add some more import options, which would bring us full circle. One of the reasons why Blender has become the destination of choice for many is because it practically supports everything. Being free obviously helps, but even people in the indrusty with access to the pricey 3D software will use Blender for tasks and formats their expensive software doesn't handle.
And that won't upset the PA's at all will it...
I am not knowledgeable enough in that matter to give any prediction, but it is plausible that something like this could or will happen in the future. However, I do not think that Filament or PBR are replacements on the same level. Both have issues and look "toonish" for my taste. Filament is just a viewport mechanic, but nothing more. And PBR seems too complex for software like DAZ Studio and its typical users, and even if you finally manage to get the knack of it, it still looks unrealistic "toonish" - like SuperFly.
What do you mean by "PBR"? Because Iray IS PBR.
I was referring to the shader that comes with DAZ Studio 4.15 and Genesis 8.1; as far as I understand, there is a difference to Iray, as I see a lot of people struggle with it.
PBRSkin can't "replace" Iray, because it's only a shader, not a render engine. It works within Iray, and if you know what you're doing with it, it works very well. It definitely works differently than Uber base, but it's much more narrow in focus.