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224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
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© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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..yep, it's bad.
Glad I was able to nail that 12 GB 3060 from EVGA for 400 USD (I'm till seeing them being priced anywhere from 750 to 900 USD).
The total cost of the system upgrade for the new Motherboard, CPU, CPU cooler, memory, M2 SSD boot drive, W11 Pro and the 3060 comes to about 1,600 USD.
that is also dirt cheap compared to what Australians pay
I actually would need a whole new computer to mount it too and mine only a year old
(I recycled the 980ti as the Vega onboard graphics are no good for iray)
I cannot buy a computer every year
and don't get me started on Win11 needing TPM which I don't have either
I might need to go back to gardening, sewing, knit and crochet for my hobbies at this rate
got my seniors card in the mail at least today, has discounts at lots of places
...this is the first major upgrade of my main system in a decade. Still retaining the drives (particularly the 2 TB SSD library drive so I don't have to reinstall everything all over again) case and PSU (though adding a new 500 GB M2 boot drive)l
I would not even be considering this if I didn't sock away some of the stimulus money I received during the pandemic and got on EVGA's list for a 3060 early on. 3060 cards alone are going for about as much as the new MB, Memory, CPU, and M2 drive combined.
I'm in the same boat with my 1080ti.
I didn't jump on the Nvidia 2xxx generation since it seemed a bit undercooked and the next gen would likely have a more mature implementation of the features. Boy, do I regret that decision now. So I'm glad KA has decided to keep the old Ghost Lights as is.
Count me as another who would be happy to give Kindred Arts more money for a fixed version.
Sounds nice lol. I just pulled the trigger on a 3070 TI for almost 2 grand....... Kinda kickin myself, I had thought it said it had 10GB VRAM, but only has 8. So once it arrives, I will be having a 3070TI and 2080 super combo for my rendering needs. Probably be like 5 years before I can do any more PC upgrades lol.
I'm using 4.16 at the moment I'm still using a 1050 on my gaming system, and a 1030 on my server, though I rarely do Iray renders using either of them. When I do, it usually just a small quick test render of a character or item to check out the look, not an entire scene. I do use my Dell R710 server for complete scenes but do the render via CPU not GPU. Even when set to Quad HD (2560x1440) or even Ultra HD (3840x2160), it rarely takes more then a couble of hours. I would LOVE to have a high end RTX 3xxx series card with massive RAM, but I'm not sure my gaming computer could even handle one. It's mainboard and CPU are older hardware. I Though it can handle Win10, Win11 is out of the question. And I know the R710 could not handle it. Beside, with the cost one of them I could easly get another R710, or even a R720 or maybe even R820 and have money left over. (Missed out on a R820 with 32GB ram, four 300GB drives and four 8 core dual threading CPU's (64 threads total) for just a little over $600 just last month. (DROOLS!) (My R710 has 64GB ram and two 6 core dual threading CPU's for a total of 24 threads). I currently have my eyes on a R720 with 192GB system RAM, two 8 core dual threading cpus (32 threads) and eight 2TB hard drives for just a little over $700. Now I just got to figure out how I going to afford it since I am a disable Vet living month to month on my disability income. Just the thought of what it would cost to upgrade my Gaming computer gives me migrines. But enough of that, lets get back to Ghost lights and the latest DS.
I love KA Ghost Light Kits. Until I discovered them, I rarely did Iray renders becuse I had so much trouble with lighting. Since then, Iray is almost all I ever do anymore. Yes, it is sad that KA kits has broken but it was only a matter of time before they would. The fact they have lasted has long has they have is IMHO, amazing. That's because thats how long its taken nVidia over 6 years to fix the so call bug in their rendering engine/libraries that they took advanage of. KA I know you are working hard to get them working again, more I know you have bounced back and forth between making them just an upgrade to the excisting Ghost Light Kits or making a whole new product. I not going to say which of those choices I was hoping for, just that I'm glad you have made your decision because it means you can now focus down and really get to work.
Has far has DAZ should had made a button so you can still do ghost lights in the old way, sorry, I hate to tell you this, but that will not work. Why, because the new Iray engene, which DAZ gets from nVidia, not write/code themself, will no longer handle Ghost Lights that way. In order for them to be able to provide a feature like that, they would literally have to include 2 different Iray render engines. One with the latest libraries and coding, and one using the older libraries and coding, which they could only do IF, nVidia lets them and I seriously doubt that.
DAZ and nVidia does NOT have a relantionship like Auto manufactors and their contractors do. With Auto builders, THEY are the center of the web. THEY create and design or hire other parties to design their parts, but it is THEIR parts. If a contractor does provide sub grade or defective parts they will go after them to recover what they lose in repairing your car.
With Iray, nVidia is at the center of the web, NOT DAZ. DAZ did not go to nVidia and hire them to create a render engine for their software. nVidia develop it all on their own. DAZ has only requested and gotten permission to inculde it in their product. Because of this, they are subject to the whims and dicticts of nVidia on how nVidia Iray product can be included and if they say, you will only use the latest version in your latest release, then DAZ has no choice but to comply. And since this newest release repairs/removes the bug/hole/flaw in the nVidia coding which allowed Ghost Lights to work the way they did, there is nothing DAZ can do about. Since the old coding which allow them to work that way no longer excists in the libraries/engine then a switch would be uslesss because the bugged coding is no longer part of the rendering engine...... and they can't included a copy of the bugged coding without nVidia permission since it belongs to nVidia, NOT DAZ.
Basicly, DAZ hands are tied. Either use the new coding, or don't include Iray support at all.
It like like when the new Apple/MAC's OS with Metal came out. There is no way to make a program which requries Open GL to run on them because their is no Open GL support libraries for the Metal OS's.. You have to completely recode the program to instead use Metal, not Open GL. (Hince the reason their is now a 674bit verson of Sim 3. though only for Apple/MAC with Metal, not for Windoze.) If I am remembering corectly, they also do not support 32bit programs, only 64bit, though I could be wrong there. And all the developors which have written programs up till the change over, are basicly Shi* Out Of Luck if their programs use/require Open GL. Either they adapt to Apple demands and changes or bow out and quit. Tough I do ot know if this is the reason for it, but the people who devloped the Plant's VS Zombies games, choose to make PvZ 3 Windoze only. Same with the game Knock Out City, Windoze only.
Has far has DAZ making it diffucult to backgrade to an earlier verson because you have to open a ticket and request an earlier verson, yea, it like well working vacumn, it suc*s. But you know what, I've been around a LONG time and when it comes to computers and their software, it has always made sense to me to back up your installers. This has been IMHO opinion, both common knowldege, and common sense, for has far back has the early Atari's, Apple and Commadore computers back in the late 70's early 80's.
[sighs]
Hi Kindred Arts,
Just wanted to swing by and say thanks for continuing to work on your product, and the tips you gave us, and cheers for bringing us an update some time in the future. This update completely stuffed my work flow because I use your product so much. I have (hopefully temporarily) started using a work around involving a combination of what you said and Jay's latest video on the matter. I highly encourage everyone to go and watch that to understand what on earth Daz actually did and how to fix it in the short-term.
Thanks so much.
Cheers
I am happy to see that the Iray Camera Light product is going to be updated. Because I bought it because you can't see the lights in the mirror or the windows, etc... Which is perfect for my work (I'm a 3DX artist).
I hope the Iray Camera Light product will be updated soon.
Thanks for the update and your work to resolve this issue. I can't begin to tell you how important Ghost Lights are to my use of Daz Stufio.
Nearly all of my indoor scenes use Ghost Lights and I have had to roll back to version 4.15 until this is resolved.
Thanks again for the great work and the updates.
I had to contact Daz support and complain my ghost lights stopped working. I got NO warning about upgrading to 4.20.
After a couple of weeks, Daz support sent me a link to manually install Daz 4.16, the older version. I did so.
Breaking backwards compatibility is serious, doubly so for paid-for products sold in Daz Shop.
I saw no warnings. Not warning people you are breaking their existing work is even more serious.
I am in a dilemma. Do I stick with new versions, or do I stay, forever, on Daz 4.16, and be able to work with my existing scenes (which feature ghost lights).
My understanding is, Daz will not make the old ghost-lights work again. Is that a correct assumption?
This is so important. It's quite astonishing we were not warned about this point release "upgrade" that is not backwards compatible. How depressing this all is...
Jim - You can keep any number of Studio installations active by simply renaming the directory your current version is in before installing the new one. You'll obviously have to re-do any shortcuts you've made to executables but I've got 4.16 and 4.20 installed side-by-side with absolutely no problems at all. It's been said again and again but always, always keep a downloaded .zip version of the Studio version you currently use to reinstall at any point as, for some reason yet to be explained, Daz will not make older versions readily available, unlike the major game engine companies. Daz had your back with the link to re-install 4.16 but, disk-space limitations aside, there is nothing to stop you installing and using any number of versions simultaneously and linking them to your content. If a future version of Studio, due to Daz or (more likely) something beyond their control, breaks existing content you can go back to what you had before.
The ghost light issue really isn't something Daz can correct. It's Nvidia correcting an oversight in Iray which allowed virtually invisible objects to emit light which, if we're honest, couldn't happen in the real world and Iray is designed to be exactly that - a real world, photo-realistic renderer. Keep your 4.16 installation. Re-name the directory it's installed to and also install 4.20. The only thing you won't be able to do is mix and match features... i.e., no volumetrics with ghost lights, no ground fog with completely invisible lights.
It's not ideal, no, but if you use DIM to download and keep your Studio versions (copy them onto an external drive or a USB stick as a backup) you will, subject to HD space limitations, be able to pick and mix between the versions. It's not a perfect solution but it's the best there is.
If you don't want to do any of this, stick with 4.16 for now. It's easy to make ground fog using existing capabilities as I'm sure you're aware and, unless you really, absolutely 100% have to have volumetrics support, you're not missing out on that much. I can't say this won't change in the future but for me, personally, I'll be doing most of work in 4.16.
Jim,
I run a tiny little company of four people. We make Android/IOS adventure/mystery/escape room games so believe me I understand your frustration. Pre-rendered content for our games is our income. Any change that borks existing assets costs us time and money as we try to find workarounds. It's not a disaster though - there are said workarounds. However, where I agree with you is that Daz must have known about the incoming problems, and didn't highlight them, and I too would have appreciated a heads up.
The thing is, though, this has happened before and it will no doubt happen again. This is why we keep our two production machines on the existing version until we've had a chance to try out the new one on a completely separate PC. I understand you may not have multiple PCs lying around to use for this, but a rollback is not difficult. It's an annoyance at best as long as you've kept a previous installer. Should you have to do this? No. As a self-declared power-user should you be aware of this? I think so.
We've not found any of our plugins breaking but we only use two - Ultra Scenery Accelerator and dForce Companion - so I can't really comment on your issues relating to that. We undoubtedly don't have the issues you do but I'm not sure why plugins for 4.16 that previously worked in that version didn't work when you rolled back to it from 4.20.
I'm not a Daz apologist - they really could work on their communication especially as a fair few of us (I suspect) use it for our livelihoods - but you have to roll with what you've got. No, 4.20 is not 100% backwards compatible (see various PAs scrabbling to update their content) and Cinema 4D (and Unity) did the same to us as well. It's infuriating but shouting at the trees isn't going to achieve anything except increase your blood pressure. You're a power user, you have knowledge and experience. 4.20 brings you little you couldn't achieve anyway with your own skill.
You can always have what you always had with a little bit of careful version management. I don't even know why I'm saying this to you because you already know it. If a new version comes out with must-have features for you which breaks other functionality (inevitable) then you face a choice. It's one we'll face too and make a decision on at the time.
I honestly don't see why 'it's a disaster'. You can keep 4.16, which you had and were, presumably, happy with and not upgrade to 4.20 with its limited additions. At some point, though, 5.0 is going to come out. Those of us who have hung on to the installs we like to use (and I hope this includes you) may well be relieved we did so! We're not on opposite sides on this Jim, but you can either accept reality as it is or shout until you're blue in the face.
There have been warnings in the forums, the first betas using this version of Iray have been released months ago and the changes in emissive lights have been discussed since then. There was even an announcement before the new general release saying it would soon be available and would include those changes. But obviously many people missed that.
As for making the old ghost lights working again, it's not up to Daz. Nvidia develops Iray, not Daz.
Leana - all of this is true, but if you're in the middle of a release cycle or not an installer of Betas it is easy to miss. A general announcement would have helped, rather than being confined to certain forums, but we're used to this. I think a lot of people weren't. We don't install Betas or upgrade to the latest version without thorough testing first but I suspect we're in the minority. New version! Must be better! Well, yes, in some ways. Not in others. It took a lot of people by surprise judging by the feedback and scrabbling I've seen from content producers. If many people producing content weren't aware of the implications until it actually happened, despite the beta discussions and the availability of the beta software, you do have to question the effectiveness of the communication.
I am so used to this from Unity and modelling software upgrades which, if implemented, could break what we've already done, but Unity et.al generally do freely offer pretty much every previous version of their software for download to avoid those issues. Daz doesn't. That's their choice and we have to work with it and mitigate as we can. Most people who use Studio are hobbiests, I suspect, not professionals, so there is no inbuilt suspicion of new versions of software which is embedded in anyone in the software industry.
I honestly don't think anyone's in the wrong here. Daz had a new version of Iray foisted on them, people discussed it on a fairly niche forum, lots of people missed said discussion. These people are somewhat miffed that some of the content they paid for doesn't work properly after the upgrade and they don't have the skills to fix it. Some PAs have stepped up with fixes, some haven't. Not an issue for us...we're running previous versions and we know how to sort out any issues should we feel the need to upgrade but I can understand the kickback from some people. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I understand it.
But we are so often told that its only a minority of users who use the forums. Daz must have known that the priducts they were selling were a result of a bug, there perhaps could have been a warning with the released products, when released.
Why would they have known that? It isn't the only non-physical thing that Iray does (for example, the option to turn off the rendering of light sources or the ability to emit negative light) so it would not have been immediately apparent that it was a bug that nVidia would later decide to fix.
I find the whole making opacity work like the real world argument pretty absurd when you consider that the opacity setting itself is not remotely related to real world behaviour. Last time I checked invisibility was something that was only possible in sci-fi movies. Transparency is a real world aspect, but that is handled with properties like refraction index, you don't need opacity to make glass or water. If nVidia are so concerned with making Iray behave like the real world, then I assume in the next update they will be removing the opacity setting altogether.
One can argue that an opacity setting of 0 makes sense in that it is a convienent way of knocking a hole into something, but where does opacity 0.5 happen in the real world?
Independently of the break of ghostlights, the fact that the luminance is multiplied by the opacity is a great improvement. It can lead to new interesting effects, for instance if the opacity is defined by a map and is combined with a luminance defined by an image. IMHO the nvidia motivation was more to open new possibilities by introducing this feature than to have a strict conformance to physic.
And honestly the ghostlight behavior is easy to fix (but, yeah, it is tedious).
The opacity is - as its full name, Cutout Opacity, implies - intended for hiding unwanted parts of a mesh in cases where modelling would not be appropriate. As you say, other proeprties should really be used for making objects transparent. This is somethign that was clear from the outset but not widely adopted.
The answer to this is extremely simple. Don't update Daz Studio. And for Daz3D, they need to supply users with the ability to download past versions of Daz Studio for reasons like this. There is no excuse whatsoever for Daz Studio to prevent its customers from downloading past versions of DS. There never has been a good reason for this anticonsumer practice, and right now is exactly a case in point in just how anticonsumer this practice is. An anticonsumer practice is defined by removing options to customers, and denying customers the ability to simply roll back Daz Studio is exactly the definition of such practice. There is no security threat like there might be for Windows or mobile phones. But even Windows gives people a chance to roll back if something goes wrong. I can also go to Blender and download any number of versions going back years, as well as Nvidia drivers. If I really wanted to be insane, I could download the last drivers from Nvidia that ran on a Mac and use a Pascal based GPU on specific versions of Mac with an external GPU. Except for one tiny problem. I cannot get the version of Daz Studio that is compatible with that combination. Not that I want to, as I cannot stand Apple, but those Mac customers have no choice here. If different versions of Daz can cause conflicts, why? Why is that not addressed and fixed? We dealt with a multiple instances of Daz a while back. Why does Daz Studio even need to install the way it does on a computer? I can install literally a hundred versions of Blender without any conflicts, and oh hey, it can render stuff pretty fast with its cool OptiX render engine, like the one that Iray uses. Yet somehow, some way, Blender figured out how to have multiple versions and multiple instances of Blender running on the same machine decades ago. Sometimes I really have to wonder what decade Daz3D offices are in. Because it sure is not 2022.
To Richard, not everybody can comb the forums for every topic and beta thread about this to stay informed, thus why we have this problem in the first place. It is just not cool to blame anyone who failed to find the forum posts about such an obscure topic. These forums are super hard to navigate, you know, and threads get quickly buried never to be seen again. And who actually reads a beta forum? Even I don't look at those very often even though I have some 3000 posts now (how did that happen). Some people just want to make art and do not spend massive amounts of time in the forums. Is that a crime? Daz Studio is practically founded on the principle idea that people can just jump in and start making art really quickly without a lot of fuss. I would consider this idea to be Daz Studio's key selling point to anybody who has never used 3D software or is allergic to Blender. Why is it that Daz blames customers for not scanning the forums for every detail like this? Shoudn't the blame be on Daz for not giving any warning while hyping about how great Daz 4.20 is? Where was the fine print? Daz felt that blasting 4.20 on every banner was a big deal, but could not bother mentioning that 4.20 might adversly effect some things created before 4.20? Come on.
While a script exists to help make Ghost Lights usable again, that script is not a 100% conversion. Scenes made in past versions of Daz will look different no matter what anybody does, even if KA is able to update the product, things will probably look different.
Moreover, KA is not to blame here. They have been put in a horrible position. Ghost Lights are a 3rd party product, not a Daz Original. If Daz releases an update that breaks their or anyone else's products, it places a huge burden on them to update the products for free when they should never needed to in the first place. And again, these products are old. They have stuff to do, and their time has value to them as well. That KA is working on it is fantastic, but I do not expect it to be free, especially if the product is expanded upon its original capabilities.
I use Ghost Lights, not a lot, but I do use them because I like the soft light they can add to a scene that you cannot get just by tone mapping or adding more normal lights. So what choice did I make? I chose not update Daz Studio. I can also download and install Daz Studio to a different location, or use the beta instead. So I can have multiple versions of Daz going. This allows me to enjoy the new features of Daz 4.20, I guess fog, while also being able to use my older Daz Studio with ghost lights. I suppose it would be a problem if I wanted to use both ghost lights and the new fog effects, but I am not too concerned.
To anyone talking about a shelf life on a product...what? No seriously, what? Not to sound flippant, but this is a fast moving industry. The introduction of Iray made many pre-Iray products less attractive. Sure they can be updated manually, but that takes work to do, and 3DL based light sets are useless in Iray. Every few years a new Genesis comes along and that changes everything. Windows can change things. Nvidia has obviously changed Iray. Iray can update to no longer use older GPUs. This is not exclusive to Iray, either, folks. We also went through these situations before. Remember when Iray fixed a glitch with SSS that made things redder than they should be? That "fix" resulted in several characters looking like they had turned into corpses. That is not a joke, some characters that once had a lovely warm skin in Daz 4.8 looked like death in 4.9 or whatever version it was that fixed the glitch. It did not kill all characters, just ones that had a certain material set up. But it sure did suck for people that were using those characters in a series who updated without knowing what would happen. Just like now, there was a huge uproar over the situation. Just like now, Daz3D displayed anticonsumer behavior by not allowing users to simply download Daz 4.8 so they could get back to their artworks with those characters. Sure...sometimes Daz support would give a customer a way to go back, but only in certain cases, and this was never guaranteed. I know...because I was denied by customer service any chance of going back.
So every time there is a big change to Iray, Daz3D has demonstrated a complete lack of faith towards their own customers by denying them a way to just download the previous version or roll back. I will never understand this, and I will never let it go until policy is changed. It is beyond stupid at this point in time, and I do not care how that sounds to people reading this, I call it like I see it and I do not mince words whether they be good or bad. So many problems could be avoided if users could simply roll back their Daz Studio. This has been more than a decade past due, Daz. Get your act together. If Nvidia breaks Iray for people, for crying out loud, let them have a path available to them to revert without needing to desparately ask customer support and potentially get nothing. This will make more people happy than it will angry. I really do not see how being able to roll back could possibly make anybody angry, unless they are just that kind of hateful person that gets angry at everything.
And if they can't? If, for example, the license terms for Iray prohibit this?
We can make lights emit negative light? WOW! That's going to keep me busy trying to exploit that for interesting effects. Thanks for this info. I've been experimenting with negative and extreme values on lots of parameters in DAZ since forever, but never thought to try negative light. I'm really excited about this possibility!
Negative light: https://www.daz3d.com/dark-matter-shaders is one of my favorite shader sets! Note the bottom row center!
@KindredArts
Thank you for the quick update and the option to get it for 90% off owning the old one. Highly appreciated!
Can you tell me where you see 90% off for owning the old one? I own all three Ghost Light sets and am still seeing it at 30% off. Thanks.
EDIT: Never mind, it needs to be added to cart to show the price. Thanks to KA for that offer, greatly appreciated.
Yes, negative lights I found in a scene I was reworking after upgrading to 4.2. I had a similar dark shadow on the shoulder of a character and couldn't figure out why until I realized that lums for the light were in the negatives. Negative Lums was something that use to only affect 3dlight, but seems to be factor in Iray now too.
Holy jumping catfish!
It's $2 for me! 
As for negative lights.... Interesting. We've discovered the Gloom Light!
Very useful. How do I apply negative light numbers, exactly? Just go into the Emissives and set it to a negative number of choice? 
The luminance multiplication issue also effects most fire and magical FX props that employ the cutout opacity field, and those are not so easy to fix. Simply increasing the luminance value causes the visible portions of the prop to wash out and lose all detail. I have had some success with using refraction to achieve transparency for fire props that have geometry, but that does not work with the ones that use multiple flat planes and cutouts to simulate the shape of flames.
I'm only getting 37% off I own 2 of the 3, not enough to get a decent reduction on something I've already paid for. Just another reason for not updating.