You've been heard. Response re: 4.9 and Encryption
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Dual quaternion skinning/weigh mapping isn't actually "LIMITATIONS deliberately" used to impeade backwards compatibility. It was actually implimented to improve compatibility with modeling programs and game engines that use it.
anyone motivated enough to do so , could have done the same thing on their own. So this is probably a bad example of a useful hack. It's not even really a hack, above average skill level maybe, but not a hack.
Oh dear, I hope Jen isn't in hot water :) . I think some were file placement on naming updates (which would have downloaded presets but not asset or texture files) and some were metadata updates (which are handled automatically on log-in with DS 4.9).
Thanks Richard!
Just cannot resist to post a picture of pretty girl here :)
Look at the scene, it's pretty simple with only DAZ Original items used and it's obvious that even 'official' items do not always play together well. The fix was also obvious and took only 20 seconds of my precious time and required text editor only as .dsf wasn't even compressed. I cannot even imaging how many time it will take would the content be encrypted, probably months. And I'm not joking - I've filed the ticket #198217 about G3F bones good 6 months ago and still got no solution from DAZ (well, I also did it myself finally, for G3M I even not bothered with the ticket).
Currently any scene I render uses the content that was modified by my hands in one way or another. So for me the answer to whether to buy encrypted-only items or not is clear - never.
I downloaded it in DIM at least 6 times... because I had to check the file contents before I deleted the previous folder each time.
Your work totally and completely rocks hard as stones... I'm not complaining there!! And I figured folks were fixing bad texture callbacks or something so I was happy to download them each time. Not a knock on your fabulous work at all... I'm just saying... if something is fixed multiple times... is it a problem.
The average user ( Customer ) is concerned with how they can use their assets. G3F was made to NOT work with previous figures... correct? Some 3rd party vendor made a WORK AROUND... which is what will happen with encryption. A WORK AROUND will occur. Am I wrong? We will see NO encrytped products from DAZ being pirated? This is what you are saying?
let's go old school. MAT Poses were a hack. Injection morphs were a hack. ERC poses were a hack. Heck, there were a number of hacks along the way to where we are today. Not against deliberate limitations, but limitations of the software nonetheless. Imagine how slow content development would have been had Poser used closed encrypted formats and you had to rely on tools from the maker to create content. Given the state of things back when I first came across the software at Poser 4... We'd be lucky if there was still a market.
(Heck, I recall how it was considered a godsend when they moved away from that weird .bum format for the bump maps.)
Wrong. Actually the implementations of DQ skinning in game engines are so wildly different that content HAS to be produced for particular implementation and will be hardly usable in others. That's why UE4 doesn't have DQ at all. I've tried to use G3F in Tesseract that also has DQ skinning and had to start work on another solution.
Next, G3F uses JCMs to fix bending and that's another show stopper for game engines - in most time you'll need to write your own extensions for character controller and content import pipeline to handle it and then come conforming clothes :) Basically, DAZ is doing that for Unity with morph3d but again it's single implementation for particualr engine, not general solution.
Modelling programs are equally happy with any mesh being it V4, Genesis, G2 or G3 :)
If DAZ can say across the board... this encryption is worth it because it will stop pirating of ALL encrypted DAZ content... that will be worth it to me as a customer to go through any hoops and whatever else down the road.
This entire effort WILL stop pirating 100% of all future encrypted material? And thus we the customers are just blowing hot air
I will see ZERO encrypted materials being shared anywhere on the web. DAZ?
That has not been claimed -the intent is that it will slow, not stop, warez.
I'm absolutely certain you will. The work around path was described by one of Daz's own people. All you need to do is export the product and reassemble it in another program.Thats not going to be something the average user will be able to do, but it can most certainly be done. It already has been if I understand correctly. The results were less than professional, but it was still accomplished.
I still think that trusting some random thief on the internet is a bad idea just to gain access to unencrypted versions of content. Why would that random thief not target you or me as well as the company they are stealing from?
You're confusing the Genesis 3 UDIM UV mapping (which maps the three-space polygons on the figure to two-space polygins on one or more texture maps) with the dual quaternion skinning (which deforms a three-space object based on joint parameters). There's no quarternion "skinning", at all. That's a volumetric technique that is not used in texture mapping (although it theoretically could be used in volumetric shaders).
That's neither here nor there, because when you separate the UDIM UV mapping and the dual quaternion weight mapping, your statement is still not true. UDIM UV mapping is a technique used to break a UV map down into a series of tiles of UV maps. It is a highly inefficient system, which sacrifices efficient storage of UV maps, compatability with editing tools, quality of editing, and hand editability all to gain more rapid decoding by a game engine. There was no practical reason for DAZ to switch to it, and it certainly does not "improve compatibility with modeling programs". You may be thinking of PTEX, which, in a rational world, is the "next generation" of UV mapping. (And, as an aside, were there actually a practical reason to switch to UDIM, it was possible to do it in an manner that preserved the existing material zones with nothing more than rescaling of textures for certain material zones, a process that would have been invisible to the end user. The need for entirely new textures was down to the particular way DAZ implemented UDIM, not the change to UDIM itself).
As far as dual quaternion skinning, as I recall, when DAZ introduced their Tri-ax weight map, they claimed superiority over formula based deformation techniques (such as the more standard dual quaternion skinning) because you could have arbitrary deformation based on individual hand-painted weight maps for three three separate joint axises, instead of formula deformations based on quaternions. So, yes, they did backtrack to something more "game engine" ish.
I'd say, based on using words to mean what they're commonly acknlowedged to mean, rather than redefining them to fit your own purposes, the use of overlapping shells to remap the different material zones was indeed a "hack", and a rather clever one.
Ah ok, 6 is better than 15 at least.. ;) and thanks :)
Updates are part of the product life-cycle, so shouldn't be any problems no.. :)
You have got to be sh*tting me. DAZ knows there's a workaround that is as easy as pie but is going to make customers deal with all the possible eff ups? That is ccompletely insane. I wish you hadn't told me that. What in the hell is this group of encryptors doing if this is the truth?
You know... I don't care. That is insane... but whatever. Good luck with that folks. Damn. I was going to your side until you said this
Your work is sublime. I've used it and used and used a thousand times over the years. Sorry I ever mentioned it, man. I meant no disrespect. Your work totally rocks
None taken, it's ok.. I just wanted to clarify that just in case anyone reading thought it was totally broken :)
Of course, there is also a negative experience i personally had, and also the reason i do not put my faith into a "poison pill": Before the MP3-players ruled the music-world, there was a thing called a minidisc. It was from SONY (probably the most notorious DRM-advocate of all time). The minidisc could store and play music downloaded from a computer. You had to use a special program to transfer music with it and use all features it offered. Technically the minidisc was better than MP3 in all aspects. However SONY build a DRM mechanism into it that restricted copying of music in various ways. You could not copy a song more than twice, for instance. But apart from that it worked really well. That is: it worked really well until until a new Windows version was released (i cannot remember if it was XP or 7). The SONY software i had did not work on that new Windows anymore. So i had to get an update. But at the time that happened, SONY had decided that the market for minidisc in the western world was too small and so there was only a japanese update available for the Windows application. So i had to use a japanese application for the minidisc. Did i mention that the japenese application, of course, refused to install on an english Windows? Well, i had to use a japenese Windows just to get the minidisc working. Really annoying. There were some attempts to break the encryption and to work around the DRM, but they failed. Even technically fine and quality-wise better than MP3, i discarded the minidisc, because it was just too hard to use.
Lessons learned:
On my posts - sorry folks I was stream of mind. I appreciate the helpful counter posts. Richard, Icecrmn and Tom! Thanks for stating your points!
I'm still fairly new to 3D art in general, so I don't know much about the differences. Thank you for correcting me. It's not my intention to mislead anyone.
Backwards compatibility was broken, and if a new product has fixed that with the use of shells then, yes, that is a very clever use of them. I would rate that above a hack as far as skill evel goes though. That took some experience and skills to come up with.
UDIM is no or or less efficient than old-style Daz mapping, it just slides the different surface groups onto different UV tiles instead of having them all stacked on to [0,1] tile - a technique used by appplications such as Mari for painting across multiple maps and theerfore a boon to people using such tools. Its main drawback is for things like the paint modes of Garibaldi Express or Look at My Hair which, as currently written, look only at the base unit square. UDIM has nothing to do with the changed Surface boundaries in Genesis 3, those were made to improve bending due to the different polygon boundaries (the old seams run through the middle of polygons in places on the new mesh) and to make more efficient use of the space.
Yes, and because it would have been impractical to assign triple maps (actually, considerably more than triple once scale and bulge maps are added) for all of the Genesis 3 face bones). But the switch did necessitate the splitting of some bones in two, to have diferently mapped bend and twist deformers.
Mmm. UDIM is just the naming scheme that allows to avoid the overlap problem of traditional UVs. Using it UV coordinates larger than 1 may be mapped to particular image tile. It has nothing to do with efficiency of storage as both hardware and software renderers still uses 0..1 UV ranges internally so everything has to be converted to 'old' UVs on load. On the other hand, modelling programs benefit from this naming scheme when you're painting directly on objects your paint goes to correct texels.
Ptex is great for rendering but has the downside - it's not possible to edit the texture using general image editor like Photoshop. AFAIK DAZ Studio supports Ptex too but I've never seen any product that uses it.
Oh, Richard was faster... :)
Ptex also has the drawback of being mesh-dependent. Its main benefit seems to eb that detail can be put where it is needed, leaving other areas low-reolution, but for that to be useful one must know where detail si going to be needed - the content in the Daz store is made for use by others and the creator has no idea which parts will need detailing, so everything tends to be at the same level which makes Ptex less useful. Of course Ptex also avoids the need for UV mapping, but as you said it then requires a suitable projection painting tool.
I don't take this as a lack of trust so much as a way to combat piracy. It seems to have gotten a lot better, but when I started this hobby I'd see links to pirated stuff while just googling "Daz3d."
And it wasn't the best way of doing things as it broke compatability with older poses and animations. (G2F could use poses and anims from V4 with some simple offset applied, G3F cannot at all).
Still do, more's the pity. At least it isn't on the first page of links...
But DRM isn't targetted. It doesn't just affect the pirates. It operates from the base assumption that we're all pirates until we prove otherwise. If that had been the state of things when I got into the market, fine. At least it would be upfront. But to see it applied now after all these years of shopping here, it does feel like I'm not trusted anymore.
All this super technical stuff between G2 and G3 is super interesting but also breaking my brain. I wish I understood it better but technical things tend to make my eyes gloss over when I try.
Also Jack's PC+ environments are amazing and one day I will collect all of the things.
Relevant questions:
1. DAZ_Steve posted awhile back about his plans regarding that first wave of encrypted releases and his thoughts/plans on them. I may be in a minority here, but I thought it helped calm things knowing what the actual thoughts/plans were, and I'm curious to know if there are any new announcements along these lines? Such as some non-supersale type releases appearing as normal items? Dual similar releases to see which type sells better? I know Daz likes to say nothing about the future but it's also nice to have general expectations (no need for specifics.)
2a. Is it likely that the next 'Daz Original' character will be encrypted?
2b. If they are and they're cute I'm going to be sad so will I get discount cookies?
Sorry that should have read 4.9. Becuase of my custom folders in the main content/people folder I will stay with 4.8, there just isn't enough added features to make it worth changing for all the headaches I can see it creating.
Are you custom folders in the content library or smart content, because if they are the content library they will not change at all. Some people have had issues with updates wiping out custom categories in smart content, but updates will not effect orginazation of the content library
Consider that all those years ago you could only download a file 3 or 4 times and had to request a reset after that, whereas now you can download unlimited times on any machine you own. Some sites give you a download key that's only valid for a week and can only be used once, or charge extra for extended download service. And Daz still has a 30-day no questions asked return policy. So on balance, even with DRM Daz is demonstrating in other ways that they DO trust you.