I Give Up! I Can't Keep Track of this Anymore.

MADMANMIKE

Fauvist said:

MADMANMIKE said:

Fauvist said:

MADMANMIKE said:

You mean the base figures, or each of the canned characters? Or maybe the base figure with all of it's canned characters standing next to it? If the latter, Genesis 1 would blow all of the other figures out of the water, as it has far too many possibilities....

I don't know anymore - now with charcters being based on characters based on a base figure.  I'd like to see something like, all the teen DAZ figures together, not necessarily the characters based on each of them - so I can see the difference in their body proportions. Like, teen Josie #whatever standing next to the other generations of Teen Josie.  The differences between Callie and Kieko and Aiko #1-6 and Giselle and Yasbou and Girl #1-7.

So, something like this?  Male Genesis Comparisons

Sort of like that - although I don't understand why Genesis Hiro 5 is so huge compared to Genesis Base, or why Genesis Freak 5 is twice as big as Freak 3, or where Freak 4 is.  Does Genesis Hiro 5 really show up as a giant in the scene?

 

I just took Genesis 1 and turned the dial for the character, Hiro 5 is absurdly big next to the others, as is Freak 5. Freak 4 I never bought as it was bundled with Girl 4 and I have no use for that character..

I joined the Platinum Club just under 10 years ago.. back then I had a very good paying job and built my library significantly with generation 3.. By the time Gen4 came out I was loathe to switch, but eventually caved as they abandoned Gen3.. Genesis I adopted more than a year in when I finally upgraded my computer to be able to use DazStudio beyond 2.5.. Like others I've picked up Genesis 2 items as they've gone on dirt-cheap sale, and will buy the occassional outfit as it will retro-fit to Genesis 1, but I haven't felt the need to use Gen2 figures directly..

Looking at your  comparison renders, I honestly don't see any difference between them so significant that I couldn't play with the morph dials on the base Genesis and make them myself..

Daikatana

wiz said:

Havos said:

I think the biggest problem with DAZ's move to an nVidia solution for its renderer is the lack of options for MAC users, and whilst I believe MAC users are only around 10% of the overall desktop users (correct me if I am wrong on this), I suspect they are a much bigger percentage (maybe 30%, I am guessing) of users of 3D apps like Studio, as MAC has always been strong in the graphics/design sectors. I have a mac mini myself, which I need to create the IOS version of our games, but I use a Windows box for all my graphics work. I was fortunate that iRay appeared just as I was upgrading my PC, so I ensured the new box had a decent nVidia card.

DAZ didn't have much choice in the matter. I doubt this move to IRAY happened overnight. Figure 6-12 months before the first Studio 4.8 public build hit, a good year ago. What was the state of OpenCL accelerated unbiased rndering at the time? (heck, what was the state of OpenCL biased rendering at the time? What was the state of OpenCL itself at the time?) I tried making LuxRender work on my OpenCL AMD with exported jobs, and got nothing useful. Octane has been talking OpenCL for 6 months, but hasn't launched yet.

I suppose they could have tried Cycles, but if you look at the OpenCL support for that, you see a lot less cards with a simple "works" than cards noting "works, but not all features", "crashes", "works, but CUDA is faster", or "works, but CPU is faster".

It's not the fault of the Octane, Blender, LuxRender, etc. teams. It's pure and simple the state of OpenCL compared to CUDA 18 months ago, and, of course, the state of OpenCL compared to CUDA today. This is something you see across the whole industry: video editing, image processing, 3D modelling, rendering, scientific analysis, you name it, CUDA just works better (when OpenCL can trouble itself to work at all).

Apple has basically screwed over the high end graphics community. You should see the sort of things that people put together to make Mac Pros do GPU acceleration. Get a Thunderbolt to PCIE converter, an enclosure, a power supply, and a good NVidia board and stick that monstrosity next to your pretty over-styled Mac Pro. I love, love, love the idea of OpenCL, but unless Nvidia or Apple pumps some big $ into it, it's not going to match the optimized commercial product like CUDA.

I have to agree with this basically because the logic is sound.  To remain competitive, a company has to grow its products.   In this case, Iray was the option that would give the most benefit to the larger amount of parties involved : 

a) The hobbyist 3D market ( which is pretty sizeable) gets access to better tech without a prohibitive cost barrier. 

  b) DAZ3D gains a competitive edge over the competition and an increased customer base as people move to using their product.  Yes Studio is free but there is alll that lovely content to purchase.  More people using Studio equals more sales of content

c) NVIDIA gets to show their tech off to more people and gain many customers that they would not have been able to do so before.

 

Dont blame DAZ for making the decision that would bring the greatest benefit to both the health of its company and the majority of its user base.  Yes.  a large amount of graphics arts professionals use Mac/Apple tech.  But with the recent advances in computer hardware and software that number is decreasing.  The Windows based PC has always had a greater market share based on both the wider range of software that works natively (without the need for emulators or dual booting) and the lower price of hardware.  Unless Apple alters their practices, I don't see that changing anytime soon.  

Also, when they made Studio a free product, DAZ opened the doors to the hobbyist in a way that had not been done before.  There are many more hobbyists than professionals and  both hobbyists and professionals will buy content.  Furthermore, when they included Iray with Studio , DAZ more than likely saw another wave of customers either getting into the hobby for the first time or transitioning over from other products.  I can personally state that when several of my friends saw what they could create by use of Studio/Iray, they immediately downloaded Studio and joined the PC+ program to further maximize what they could do.

IF the OpenCL development community or Apple had made different decisions starting many years ago, maybe I would have been buying a different video card several months ago.  Or, perhaps I woudl be typing this post on a Mac Pro.  But those things did not happen and here I am typing this on a PC I built myself and enjoying the Iray render engine with my Nvidia card that is a recent upgrade.  Either way, I would still likely be a happy customer of Daz3d and happily spending the bulk of my discretionary funds on this wonderfully complex hobby I discovered.

No need for blaming anyone. Its just how it all played out.

 

 

 

 

fastbike1

All choices have consequences.