Poser vs. DAZ

Rashad Carter

crocodilian said:

nonesuch00 said:

To use these elsewhere is to export them in a format that a 3rd party program can use whether that be Poser, Unity, Max, Maya, Blender, and on & on. If a game engine were ever support DAZ Studio figures or Poser figures natively then that is a coup for that product,

A strong reason that the world needs to break away from the old Daz/Poser architecture. V4, the flagship of the Poserverse was built on massive geometries, with massive texture maps. That's how you got good looking things, back in 2006.

But that's a million miles away from any game engine, or indeed from modern renderers. The 70K poly figure with the giant texture maps, transmaps, that's never going to work well with a game engine, and its a waste in a world with powerful modern renderers. Displacement, subdivision surfaces, instancing -- these are the technologies that enable low poly figures to to render beautifully, and yet remain practical.

Bottom line is that adhering to "state of the art circa 2006" doesn't get you what you want. No one's building a game engine to manipulate 70K poly figures, because its a waste of cycles and there's no need to.

There really is a need for a more modern geometry and shading system. Look at what Zbrush does-- now 15 years old. Simply stunning levels of detail, without crippling geometries . . . but getting that kind of performance inevitably means an architecture beyond "lotta polys and big bitmaps"

There is another side to looking at this.

Gaming is not the only thing that matters in 2016 CG artwork. In fact, if you ask me, most games look like total crap from a technical standpoint. Seriously, I wouldn't find most of the frames I see in games as acceptable if they were still images. Poor lighting, strange shading, all in the name of speed. Unless one is truly dedicated to building games, I think one should almost completely avoid mention of it. I just don't think there are THAT many DS users building games at this point in time. And there are also the new Morph3D models which are streamlined for gaming purposes.

The ONLY place Genesis 3 outperforms V4 is in DS itself. Simple reasoning is, that for Genesis 3 to look good it requires Daz Studio specific technologies, such as HD morphs. Do not take HD for granted. Its been observed since nearly the first week of G3 release that spinnning dials on Genesis 3 doesnt look nearly as awesome as spinning dials on V4 due to the severely reduced polygons available in Genesis 2 and 3. The fact that Bryce, not even Carrara or Poser, can take advantage of HD morphs, means that Genesis 2 and 3 simply don't look as good when rendered outside of DS. V4 on the other hand, with her heavier geometry, allows for much more morph detail without the need for Studio-centric technologies like HD morphs. As a person who only uses DS to pose figures and to morph them so that I can send them to other engines like Bryce for final rendering. I've been stuck on Genesis 1 and previous figures if I want to do any real morphing. To my mind, this is a terrible shame. And the reason for this is that Daz3d hasnt updated Bryce nor Carrara nor Poser to take advantage of the tools these new models were designed to rely upon. Genesis 3 literally becomes 1/10 as useful without the HD morphing. Without HD, you have nothing.

Also, I'd like to address the issue of environments. All an application needs to become decent with landscapes is 1. Sky Model or HDRI Dome equivalent    2. Sunlight Model    3. Atmospheric Scattering Model   4. Instancing Technology for vegetation.

The new Fern Lake and Through the Woods products demonstrate that point. Stonemason could have easily developed these landscapes for Carrara or Bryce, but it's become obvious that most DS users want to do their final renders in DS if they can. So it's smart to start making more detailed landscape content for use directly within DS itself, which the new Instaning Technology allows. That trend will continue and the necessity of outside tools like Carrara and Bryce will fall to the wayside provided people find themselves happy with the available environmental content being produced in the future.

j cade

Rashad Carter said:

There is another side to looking at this.

Gaming is not the only thing that matters in 2016 CG artwork. In fact, if you ask me, most games look like total crap from a technical standpoint. Seriously, I wouldn't find most of the frames I see in games as acceptable if they were still images. Poor lighting, strange shading, all in the name of speed. Unless one is truly dedicated to building games, I think one should almost completely avoid mention of it. I just don't think there are THAT many DS users building games at this point in time. And there are also the new Morph3D models which are streamlined for gaming purposes.

The ONLY place Genesis 3 outperforms V4 is in DS itself. Simple reasoning is, that for Genesis 3 to look good it requires Daz Studio specific technologies, such as HD morphs. Do not take HD for granted. Its been observed since nearly the first week of G3 release that spinnning dials on Genesis 3 doesnt look nearly as awesome as spinning dials on V4 due to the severely reduced polygons available in Genesis 2 and 3. The fact that Bryce, not even Carrara or Poser, can take advantage of HD morphs, means that Genesis 2 and 3 simply don't look as good when rendered outside of DS. V4 on the other hand, with her heavier geometry, allows for much more morph detail without the need for Studio-centric technologies like HD morphs. As a person who only uses DS to pose figures and to morph them so that I can send them to other engines like Bryce for final rendering. I've been stuck on Genesis 1 and previous figures if I want to do any real morphing. To my mind, this is a terrible shame. And the reason for this is that Daz3d hasnt updated Bryce nor Carrara nor Poser to take advantage of the tools these new models were designed to rely upon. Genesis 3 literally becomes 1/10 as useful without the HD morphing. Without HD, you have nothing.

I disagree that Genesis 3 is crippled without HD. I like HD mind you. But, especially when it comes to ladies, its effects are minimally different from a Normal map. (which makes sense for the figures given that the normal map is probably baked from the same highres sculpt that is imported as the HD morph). On the other hand there are a lot of areas where gen3 outperforms v4 IMO more modern textures for one thing, bending for another

mtl1

Cybersox13 said:

If you really want to get into Poser cheap, you can currently buy Poser Debut

diomede said:

Neither Studio nor Poser can make the models that they assemble, rig, pose, and render.  Neither can make the environments in which the models are placed.  In the past, Studio-based figures had a dependable bridge to Bryce, Hexagon, and Carrara. 

BUT

Genesis 3 reveals a troubling trend.  Because Bryce has not been updated, the bridge does not work for everyone because of evolving operating systems.  If not addressed eventually, new users will not have equipment that can rely on the Bryce bridge to place the posed figures in environments.  Because Carrara has not been updated, Genesis 3 figures and content are useless in Carrara, and that channel to environments will also close.

So, if you want to pose a character under an HDRI dome, Studio might be fine in the long run.  But if you want your models to interact in an environment, Studio has some questions.

Not to mention that there's a disturbing new trend of DAZ products that only work with the Iray renderer, ignoring the fact that many customers either cannot or prefer to not use Iray only products. Ironcially, it brings to mind the huge rift that occured in the Poser world way back when Poser 5 changed the default material settings.   

I want to address this -- and this is directly related to another 3Delight thread a couple of days ago too: Iray is *orders* faster and efficient in getting a good render. There are simply too many tweaks to do in 3Delight, which end up slowing the render down to a crawl. The only exception is if AoA lights and other similar products are used.

Havos

j cade said:

Rashad Carter said:

There is another side to looking at this.

Gaming is not the only thing that matters in 2016 CG artwork. In fact, if you ask me, most games look like total crap from a technical standpoint. Seriously, I wouldn't find most of the frames I see in games as acceptable if they were still images. Poor lighting, strange shading, all in the name of speed. Unless one is truly dedicated to building games, I think one should almost completely avoid mention of it. I just don't think there are THAT many DS users building games at this point in time. And there are also the new Morph3D models which are streamlined for gaming purposes.

The ONLY place Genesis 3 outperforms V4 is in DS itself. Simple reasoning is, that for Genesis 3 to look good it requires Daz Studio specific technologies, such as HD morphs. Do not take HD for granted. Its been observed since nearly the first week of G3 release that spinnning dials on Genesis 3 doesnt look nearly as awesome as spinning dials on V4 due to the severely reduced polygons available in Genesis 2 and 3. The fact that Bryce, not even Carrara or Poser, can take advantage of HD morphs, means that Genesis 2 and 3 simply don't look as good when rendered outside of DS. V4 on the other hand, with her heavier geometry, allows for much more morph detail without the need for Studio-centric technologies like HD morphs. As a person who only uses DS to pose figures and to morph them so that I can send them to other engines like Bryce for final rendering. I've been stuck on Genesis 1 and previous figures if I want to do any real morphing. To my mind, this is a terrible shame. And the reason for this is that Daz3d hasnt updated Bryce nor Carrara nor Poser to take advantage of the tools these new models were designed to rely upon. Genesis 3 literally becomes 1/10 as useful without the HD morphing. Without HD, you have nothing.

I disagree that Genesis 3 is crippled without HD. I like HD mind you. But, especially when it comes to ladies, its effects are minimally different from a Normal map. (which makes sense for the figures given that the normal map is probably baked from the same highres sculpt that is imported as the HD morph). On the other hand there are a lot of areas where gen3 outperforms v4 IMO more modern textures for one thing, bending for another

I agree with this. Except when shown untextured, I often struggle to see any real difference of a HD render compared to a normal one (normal being subd 1, not base resolution). The superior bending of Genesis 3 I can see very easily.

Cybersox

mtl1 said:

Cybersox13 said:

If you really want to get into Poser cheap, you can currently buy Poser Debut

diomede said:

Neither Studio nor Poser can make the models that they assemble, rig, pose, and render.  Neither can make the environments in which the models are placed.  In the past, Studio-based figures had a dependable bridge to Bryce, Hexagon, and Carrara. 

BUT

Genesis 3 reveals a troubling trend.  Because Bryce has not been updated, the bridge does not work for everyone because of evolving operating systems.  If not addressed eventually, new users will not have equipment that can rely on the Bryce bridge to place the posed figures in environments.  Because Carrara has not been updated, Genesis 3 figures and content are useless in Carrara, and that channel to environments will also close.

So, if you want to pose a character under an HDRI dome, Studio might be fine in the long run.  But if you want your models to interact in an environment, Studio has some questions.

Not to mention that there's a disturbing new trend of DAZ products that only work with the Iray renderer, ignoring the fact that many customers either cannot or prefer to not use Iray only products. Ironcially, it brings to mind the huge rift that occured in the Poser world way back when Poser 5 changed the default material settings.   

I want to address this -- and this is directly related to another 3Delight thread a couple of days ago too: Iray is *orders* faster and efficient in getting a good render. There are simply too many tweaks to do in 3Delight, which end up slowing the render down to a crawl. The only exception is if AoA lights and other similar products are used.

1 - But Iray isn't faster if you're not using an Nvidia card and you are using AoA lights.  On my particular setup, 3DL is usually at least 4 to five times faster.  2 - Not to mention that the vast majority of the DAZ catalog is set up for 3DL, which makes that content plug and play, whereas Iray means a lot more tweaking and adjusting textures.  Especially when you're also mixing in items with Poser materials, and 3 - Some of us find that the look of Iray frequently tends to run too far over into the realm of the uncanny valley.  This is especially true when doing renders with toon, anime or videogame style characters, where the uberglossy realism of Iray skin frequently makes the stylized characters look more like those awful Japanese ball joint dolls rather than living characters.  If Iray works for you all the time, that's great, but I prefer to have the option to have a choice of renderers (3DL, LUX, Iray, Firefly, Bryce, Vue) depending upon what I'm rendering, and with some of the products now shipping with Iray textures only, that option just isn't available.               

lx_2807502

Cybersox13 said:

mtl1 said:

Cybersox13 said:

If you really want to get into Poser cheap, you can currently buy Poser Debut

diomede said:

Neither Studio nor Poser can make the models that they assemble, rig, pose, and render.  Neither can make the environments in which the models are placed.  In the past, Studio-based figures had a dependable bridge to Bryce, Hexagon, and Carrara. 

BUT

Genesis 3 reveals a troubling trend.  Because Bryce has not been updated, the bridge does not work for everyone because of evolving operating systems.  If not addressed eventually, new users will not have equipment that can rely on the Bryce bridge to place the posed figures in environments.  Because Carrara has not been updated, Genesis 3 figures and content are useless in Carrara, and that channel to environments will also close.

So, if you want to pose a character under an HDRI dome, Studio might be fine in the long run.  But if you want your models to interact in an environment, Studio has some questions.

Not to mention that there's a disturbing new trend of DAZ products that only work with the Iray renderer, ignoring the fact that many customers either cannot or prefer to not use Iray only products. Ironcially, it brings to mind the huge rift that occured in the Poser world way back when Poser 5 changed the default material settings.   

I want to address this -- and this is directly related to another 3Delight thread a couple of days ago too: Iray is *orders* faster and efficient in getting a good render. There are simply too many tweaks to do in 3Delight, which end up slowing the render down to a crawl. The only exception is if AoA lights and other similar products are used.

1 - But Iray isn't faster if you're not using an Nvidia card and you are using AoA lights.  On my particular setup, 3DL is usually at least 4 to five times faster.  2 - Not to mention that the vast majority of the DAZ catalog is set up for 3DL, which makes that content plug and play, whereas Iray means a lot more tweaking and adjusting textures.  Especially when you're also mixing in items with Poser materials, and 3 - Some of us find that the look of Iray frequently tends to run too far over into the realm of the uncanny valley.  This is especially true when doing renders with toon, anime or videogame style characters, where the uberglossy realism of Iray skin frequently makes the stylized characters look more like those awful Japanese ball joint dolls rather than living characters.  If Iray works for you all the time, that's great, but I prefer to have the option to have a choice of renderers (3DL, LUX, Iray, Firefly, Bryce, Vue) depending upon what I'm rendering, and with some of the products now shipping with Iray textures only, that option just isn't available.               

I thoujght AoA lights didn't work anymore? Personally despite no current Nvidia card I'm back to Iray rendering because any sort of complexity murders speed in 3DL and if renders are going to be relatively equal in speed, Iray gives much more acceptable results more easily/faster for me. Yes, 3DL can be set up to do amazing things (especially when you have a billion cpus handy) but if you just want a figure rendered for drawing reference or whatever then Iray is lightyears ahead. Others' needs will differ of course.

I asked this earlier but do LUX Firefly Bryce Vue all work using 3DL materials, or do they also need converting like Iray? Not trying to suggest anything just curious.

That said, thinking about it, it seems normal to me that vendors only make material settings for the most popular render engine, because people who care enough for in depth settings and choosing their renderer probably also want to set up their own materials in many cases (also most Originals Iray settings are garbage so it doesn't matter that it comes with them since they need to be redone anyway.) The problem with Iray/3DL is the lack of an efficient converter to go to between them (there's Iray UberShader for Iray but it kind of mangles settings; doesn't seem to be one at all for 3DL?)

 

mjc1016

Yes, all the various renderers available for Studio have one thing in common...materials MUST be converted before rendering.  Whether that process is manual or automatic depends on the exporter used...

Havos

The AoA lights work perfectly with one exception, you can no longer flag SSS surfaces, a feature I personally have never used. You can still flag using diffuse and other settings. I still use them in pretty much every 3DL render I do.

mjc1016

Havos said:

The AoA lights work perfectly with one exception, you can no longer flag SSS surfaces, a feature I personally have never used. You can still flag using diffuse and other settings. I still use them in pretty much every 3DL render I do.

And you should be able to 'flag' an SSS surface in a round about way...

Cybersox

lx said:

Cybersox13 said:

mtl1 said:

Cybersox13 said:

If you really want to get into Poser cheap, you can currently buy Poser Debut

diomede said:

Neither Studio nor Poser can make the models that they assemble, rig, pose, and render.  Neither can make the environments in which the models are placed.  In the past, Studio-based figures had a dependable bridge to Bryce, Hexagon, and Carrara. 

BUT

Genesis 3 reveals a troubling trend.  Because Bryce has not been updated, the bridge does not work for everyone because of evolving operating systems.  If not addressed eventually, new users will not have equipment that can rely on the Bryce bridge to place the posed figures in environments.  Because Carrara has not been updated, Genesis 3 figures and content are useless in Carrara, and that channel to environments will also close.

So, if you want to pose a character under an HDRI dome, Studio might be fine in the long run.  But if you want your models to interact in an environment, Studio has some questions.

Not to mention that there's a disturbing new trend of DAZ products that only work with the Iray renderer, ignoring the fact that many customers either cannot or prefer to not use Iray only products. Ironcially, it brings to mind the huge rift that occured in the Poser world way back when Poser 5 changed the default material settings.   

I want to address this -- and this is directly related to another 3Delight thread a couple of days ago too: Iray is *orders* faster and efficient in getting a good render. There are simply too many tweaks to do in 3Delight, which end up slowing the render down to a crawl. The only exception is if AoA lights and other similar products are used.

1 - But Iray isn't faster if you're not using an Nvidia card and you are using AoA lights.  On my particular setup, 3DL is usually at least 4 to five times faster.  2 - Not to mention that the vast majority of the DAZ catalog is set up for 3DL, which makes that content plug and play, whereas Iray means a lot more tweaking and adjusting textures.  Especially when you're also mixing in items with Poser materials, and 3 - Some of us find that the look of Iray frequently tends to run too far over into the realm of the uncanny valley.  This is especially true when doing renders with toon, anime or videogame style characters, where the uberglossy realism of Iray skin frequently makes the stylized characters look more like those awful Japanese ball joint dolls rather than living characters.  If Iray works for you all the time, that's great, but I prefer to have the option to have a choice of renderers (3DL, LUX, Iray, Firefly, Bryce, Vue) depending upon what I'm rendering, and with some of the products now shipping with Iray textures only, that option just isn't available.               

I thoujght AoA lights didn't work anymore? Personally despite no current Nvidia card I'm back to Iray rendering because any sort of complexity murders speed in 3DL and if renders are going to be relatively equal in speed, Iray gives much more acceptable results more easily/faster for me. Yes, 3DL can be set up to do amazing things (especially when you have a billion cpus handy) but if you just want a figure rendered for drawing reference or whatever then Iray is lightyears ahead. Others' needs will differ of course.

I asked this earlier but do LUX Firefly Bryce Vue all work using 3DL materials, or do they also need converting like Iray? Not trying to suggest anything just curious.

That said, thinking about it, it seems normal to me that vendors only make material settings for the most popular render engine, because people who care enough for in depth settings and choosing their renderer probably also want to set up their own materials in many cases (also most Originals Iray settings are garbage so it doesn't matter that it comes with them since they need to be redone anyway.) The problem with Iray/3DL is the lack of an efficient converter to go to between them (there's Iray UberShader for Iray but it kind of mangles settings; doesn't seem to be one at all for 3DL?)

 

As Havos and MJC said, the only thing that's currently broken about the AoA lights is the SSS flagging.  And not only are they blisteringly fast in 3DL, they offer a level of lighting control that's normally acheivable only via multi-pass rendering with other lights.  Couple it with progressive rendering and it makes for a very streamlined production process that produces extremely consistent results.  Iray is certainly the hot new toy and it can produce amazing results under optimal circumstances, but I have over 5 TB of content that's already been optimized for 3DL and Poser, and as the thread on the lecture hall shows, an Iray only product can be complerely unusuable outside of the last three versions of DS.  For those who frequently port over to other renderers and software, an Iray only product is therefore a lot less usefull. As an analogy, if you live in a town where the roads are made of asphalt, concrete, dirt and macadam, how much sense does it make to buy a car that only runs properly on a certain grade of concrete?  That said, if an artist wants to release only for Iray, that's up to them, but I think the DAZ store should put a big IRAY ONLY stamp on the description under software compatibility to make it clear that that's the case.                                

 

lx_2807502

Cybersox13 said:

lx said:

Cybersox13 said:

mtl1 said:

Cybersox13 said:

If you really want to get into Poser cheap, you can currently buy Poser Debut

diomede said:

Neither Studio nor Poser can make the models that they assemble, rig, pose, and render.  Neither can make the environments in which the models are placed.  In the past, Studio-based figures had a dependable bridge to Bryce, Hexagon, and Carrara. 

BUT

Genesis 3 reveals a troubling trend.  Because Bryce has not been updated, the bridge does not work for everyone because of evolving operating systems.  If not addressed eventually, new users will not have equipment that can rely on the Bryce bridge to place the posed figures in environments.  Because Carrara has not been updated, Genesis 3 figures and content are useless in Carrara, and that channel to environments will also close.

So, if you want to pose a character under an HDRI dome, Studio might be fine in the long run.  But if you want your models to interact in an environment, Studio has some questions.

Not to mention that there's a disturbing new trend of DAZ products that only work with the Iray renderer, ignoring the fact that many customers either cannot or prefer to not use Iray only products. Ironcially, it brings to mind the huge rift that occured in the Poser world way back when Poser 5 changed the default material settings.   

I want to address this -- and this is directly related to another 3Delight thread a couple of days ago too: Iray is *orders* faster and efficient in getting a good render. There are simply too many tweaks to do in 3Delight, which end up slowing the render down to a crawl. The only exception is if AoA lights and other similar products are used.

1 - But Iray isn't faster if you're not using an Nvidia card and you are using AoA lights.  On my particular setup, 3DL is usually at least 4 to five times faster.  2 - Not to mention that the vast majority of the DAZ catalog is set up for 3DL, which makes that content plug and play, whereas Iray means a lot more tweaking and adjusting textures.  Especially when you're also mixing in items with Poser materials, and 3 - Some of us find that the look of Iray frequently tends to run too far over into the realm of the uncanny valley.  This is especially true when doing renders with toon, anime or videogame style characters, where the uberglossy realism of Iray skin frequently makes the stylized characters look more like those awful Japanese ball joint dolls rather than living characters.  If Iray works for you all the time, that's great, but I prefer to have the option to have a choice of renderers (3DL, LUX, Iray, Firefly, Bryce, Vue) depending upon what I'm rendering, and with some of the products now shipping with Iray textures only, that option just isn't available.               

I thoujght AoA lights didn't work anymore? Personally despite no current Nvidia card I'm back to Iray rendering because any sort of complexity murders speed in 3DL and if renders are going to be relatively equal in speed, Iray gives much more acceptable results more easily/faster for me. Yes, 3DL can be set up to do amazing things (especially when you have a billion cpus handy) but if you just want a figure rendered for drawing reference or whatever then Iray is lightyears ahead. Others' needs will differ of course.

I asked this earlier but do LUX Firefly Bryce Vue all work using 3DL materials, or do they also need converting like Iray? Not trying to suggest anything just curious.

That said, thinking about it, it seems normal to me that vendors only make material settings for the most popular render engine, because people who care enough for in depth settings and choosing their renderer probably also want to set up their own materials in many cases (also most Originals Iray settings are garbage so it doesn't matter that it comes with them since they need to be redone anyway.) The problem with Iray/3DL is the lack of an efficient converter to go to between them (there's Iray UberShader for Iray but it kind of mangles settings; doesn't seem to be one at all for 3DL?)

 

As Havos and MJC said, the only thing that's currently broken about the AoA lights is the SSS flagging.  And not only are they blisteringly fast in 3DL, they offer a level of lighting control that's normally acheivable only via multi-pass rendering with other lights.  Couple it with progressive rendering and it makes for a very streamlined production process that produces extremely consistent results.  Iray is certainly the hot new toy and it can produce amazing results under optimal circumstances, but I have over 5 TB of content that's already been optimized for 3DL and Poser, and as the thread on the lecture hall shows, an Iray only product can be complerely unusuable outside of the last three versions of DS.  For those who frequently port over to other renderers and software, an Iray only product is therefore a lot less usefull. As an analogy, if you live in a town where the roads are made of asphalt, concrete, dirt and macadam, how much sense does it make to buy a car that only runs properly on a certain grade of concrete?  That said, if an artist wants to release only for Iray, that's up to them, but I think the DAZ store should put a big IRAY ONLY stamp on the description under software compatibility to make it clear that that's the case.                                

 

Honestly I have no idea how AoA lights work or what they're capable of or even what the difference is or which type I'm making when I add a light to Studio, because surprise surprise, there is no proper manual. 

I'm not saying everything should be Iray only, just that I can see why a PA would do that when it's the simplest option to get to the largest percentage of their audience which from all signs appears to be some invisible market who only want to load and click render various pinups. Personally I don't really use Studio as an end result most of the time so that doesn't really effect me. I have no inclination to get more in depth using various things in it because there's never any real documentation and Daz seems entirely focused on the latest shiny thing on any given day.

"For those who frequently port over to other renderers and software, an Iray only product is therefore a lot less usefull." This was the reason for my original question - is it much easier to port to another renderer and software with 3DL mats? None of the user programs I use use 3DL materials or renderer, although Substance now uses Iray (not sure how compatible with Studio materials it is.) As far as I'm aware, if I want to completely set up a scene in Blender, I'd have to redo all of the materials manually anyway regardless of which of the two engines the product was set up for. As I said, it's not something I really do, which is why I'm asking about the difference with 3DL to better understand it. 

Havos

All of AoA lights come with a PDF file that explain how they are used. I personally feel these lights are a must buy for anyone that uses 3DL to render. A render lacking some sort of ambient/indirect lighting often looks poorly lit IMHO, and using the UE2 lights to do this massively slows down the render time (although I have read UE2 lights can be configured to run faster).

lx_2807502

Havos said:

All of AoA lights come with a PDF file that explain how they are used. I personally feel these lights are a must buy for anyone that uses 3DL to render. A render lacking some sort of ambient/indirect lighting often looks poorly lit IMHO, and using the UE2 lights to do this massively slows down the render time (although I have read UE2 lights can be configured to run faster).

Until you said that I didn't even know AoA lights were something you need to buy and not a default part of the program. I have loads of products that refer to them or UE lights but nothing in Studio says anything about what any of that actually means. So for users that haven't been around for years to learn this through common knowledge, there isn't even a natural entry point to knowing where to get started, before even getting the how to set those specific things up part.

mjc1016

lx said:

 

"For those who frequently port over to other renderers and software, an Iray only product is therefore a lot less usefull." This was the reason for my original question - is it much easier to port to another renderer and software with 3DL mats? None of the user programs I use use 3DL materials or renderer, although Substance now uses Iray (not sure how compatible with Studio materials it is.) As far as I'm aware, if I want to completely set up a scene in Blender, I'd have to redo all of the materials manually anyway regardless of which of the two engines the product was set up for. As I said, it's not something I really do, which is why I'm asking about the difference with 3DL to better understand it. 

Sort of...

For Blender, for example, Casual does have a materials export script.   It is based on the 3DL materials.  The Luxrender exporters are also using the 3DL materials for conversion.  Octane too...

So the ones with conversion scripts are using the 3DL materials...anything else is going to use the export format limited materials or require manual materials setup.

But it isn't even really a '3DL materials' thing...it's more the specific shader used.  Not even all the 3DL shaders are directly transferrable...the Ubersurface and AoA shaders are not using all the same internal names as the Daz Default Surface or each other, so switching between the two will require SOME (not much as most things are the same) checking/fixing...

Cybersox

lx said:

Havos said:

All of AoA lights come with a PDF file that explain how they are used. I personally feel these lights are a must buy for anyone that uses 3DL to render. A render lacking some sort of ambient/indirect lighting often looks poorly lit IMHO, and using the UE2 lights to do this massively slows down the render time (although I have read UE2 lights can be configured to run faster).

Until you said that I didn't even know AoA lights were something you need to buy and not a default part of the program. I have loads of products that refer to them or UE lights but nothing in Studio says anything about what any of that actually means. So for users that haven't been around for years to learn this through common knowledge, there isn't even a natural entry point to knowing where to get started, before even getting the how to set those specific things up part.

One of DAZ's greatest weaknesses for years has been the lack of decent, up-to-date documentation.  For years the generic answer seemed to be "well, all of that can be found in the forums an online tutorials," but a huge portion of that accumulated knowledge has been flushed and lost forever, either through the loss of the old forums or the sites hosting the online tutorials ceasing to exist.  And to make matters worse, the few commercial publications that have purported to be "complete" guides to DS have been, at best, introductory manuals while most of the more complex aspects have only been touched upon or simply not mentioned.  I would GLADLY pay a large chunk of change for a decent DAZ manual, but unless someone locks someone like Richard in a room and refuses to let him out until we have one, I doubt that we'll ever get it.  :( 

That said, yes, the AoA lights are one of the single greatest sets of tools ever developed for DAZ.  They're cheap, the documentation that AoA has made for them is quite good and the ability to light individual elements of a scene with entirely different lights and hit modes in a single pass makes a lot of lighting that would otherwise be acheveable only via multiple passes both incredibly fast and dirt simple.

   

lx_2807502

Cybersox13 said:

lx said:

Havos said:

All of AoA lights come with a PDF file that explain how they are used. I personally feel these lights are a must buy for anyone that uses 3DL to render. A render lacking some sort of ambient/indirect lighting often looks poorly lit IMHO, and using the UE2 lights to do this massively slows down the render time (although I have read UE2 lights can be configured to run faster).

Until you said that I didn't even know AoA lights were something you need to buy and not a default part of the program. I have loads of products that refer to them or UE lights but nothing in Studio says anything about what any of that actually means. So for users that haven't been around for years to learn this through common knowledge, there isn't even a natural entry point to knowing where to get started, before even getting the how to set those specific things up part.

One of DAZ's greatest weaknesses for years has been the lack of decent, up-to-date documentation.  For years the generic answer seemed to be "well, all of that can be found in the forums an online tutorials," but a huge portion of that accumulated knowledge has been flushed and lost forever, either through the loss of the old forums or the sites hosting the online tutorials ceasing to exist.  And to make matters worse, the few commercial publications that have purported to be "complete" guides to DS have been, at best, introductory manuals while most of the more complex aspects have only been touched upon or simply not mentioned.  I would GLADLY pay a large chunk of change for a decent DAZ manual, but unless someone locks someone like Richard in a room and refuses to let him out until we have one, I doubt that we'll ever get it.  :( 

That said, yes, the AoA lights are one of the single greatest sets of tools ever developed for DAZ.  They're cheap, the documentation that AoA has made for them is quite good and the ability to light individual elements of a scene with entirely different lights and hit modes in a single pass makes a lot of lighting that would otherwise be acheveable only via multiple passes both incredibly fast and dirt simple.

   

This is why I get upset that they put all this time and money into designing stupid new overcomplicated features and try to make everyone buy into it, instead of taking the time to instead properly document all of the things you can already do in Daz Studio. The "check the forums" answer is also a joke because not only has much of it been lost as you said, but also searching the current forums is a lottery at best, assuming you don't use its built in search function to try and find anything. There is some amazing info in threads here and more posted all the time (sales coupons and offers too for some reason) but if you aren't reading that thread at the time to come across it, you'll probably never see it.

I mentioned this earlier but even now there are a couple of youtube videos appearing on the Daz channel with helpful random tutorials - and they're REALLY GOOD. But it's not mentioned anywhere that they're being released. Daz emails me EIGHT times a week and has never bothered to tell me about them. Why.

You guys have got me interested in learning more about AoA lighting for 3DL now and Daz has put these amazing features in its program but if it hadn't have been for the twists of this discussion I never would have known about them.

Kendall Sears

As someone who uses whatever tool does the job, I'll hop in here as well.  I'll admit that I was never a huge Poser user.  The Poser interface just never "worked" for me.  I will use Poser when a need arises without heistation.  I hop to and from packages constantly, for a number of reasons.  However, I find that I end up using DS for scene composition a great deal of the time mostly because it is lightweight.  I can get in and out quickly with what I need to do.  Using the "bigger" packages, it just takes so much more time and effort to get anything done.

 I *DO* find it infuriating to not be able to use the Genesis tech in other packages (the Poser DSON importer has helped numerous times).  I was so hoping that the genesis importer for Maya would get completed.  In many cases it is just quicker to "create" using DS, and in many of my projects unique human figures are necessary.  Not having to model a new figure every time is a HUGE time saver.  I do end up exporting a posed finished model many times as OBJ for import into other "bigger" packages for use simply because the other assets that I am provided are not easily manipulated outside of their native environment.

In *every* case, the materials and lighting need to be redone for the render engine.  Even when going between 3DL for the different packages.  This has always been the case, and I don't expect (nor want) it to change.  Each rendering engine has its advantages and they do end up "pushing" the others along.

Kendall

Oso3D

Agreed re lack of documentation. And yeah, I left 3dl behind when Iray did realism faster. I've come to render in both now that I have aoa lights. As for how to use them, for the most part all I need to do is create it, set an intensity and shadow softness... and that's it. I've also found that converting everything to ubersurface speeds things even more.

Oso3D

My usual lighting is aoa distant and/or spotlight, aoa ambient, and ue bouncelight. Typically creates pretty solid lighting.

Cybersox

timmins.william said:

My usual lighting is aoa distant and/or spotlight, aoa ambient, and ue bouncelight. Typically creates pretty solid lighting.

I've got a custom action that drops in a standard set of an AoA Distant light balanced warm and an AoA Ambient blanced cool and set at infiniti into my scenes for setup and testing, so everytime I do a test with a new figure or character skin, I'm using the exact same lights.  Of course, the niftiest thing about the AoAs is that you can duplicate the same light multiple times and have each version affecting the scene differently with little effect on render time.  Being abIe to set the diffuse, specular and shadows of the "same" light separately for the skin, eyes, hair, etc. of the same figure makes for nearly photoshop level control, with one of my favorite tricks being to have an extra ambient light that only subtly illuminates the teeth for that perfect "Pepsodent" smile that people expect to see in a photo.          

Cybersox

timmins.william said:

Agreed re lack of documentation.

Or even advertising/word of mouth that some things are even possible.  There are so many useful scripts like "Come on Down" and "Poser Glossover" that I've only come across by accident, while incredibly useful built-in DS functions like Puppeteer, Powerpose and Geometry Shells wallow in obscutiy.  And at this point I'm convinced that getting decent info on actually using the weight map brush is going require sacrificing a chicken.  

lx_2807502

Cybersox13 said:

timmins.william said:

Agreed re lack of documentation.

Or even advertising/word of mouth that some things are even possible.  There are so many useful scripts like "Come on Down" and "Poser Glossover" that I've only come across by accident, while incredibly useful built-in DS functions like Puppeteer, Powerpose and Geometry Shells wallow in obscutiy.  And at this point I'm convinced that getting decent info on actually using the weight map brush is going require sacrificing a chicken.  

I've been learning a lot about Powerpose and active posing in Studio this week thanks to that randomly discovered official youtube video as a starting point, and it's been good fun. I'm vaguely aware of what geometry shells are and how useful they can be but with no real idea on how to get started, I've been putting it off and doing things in other programs instead. 

j cade

What do you want to know about the weight map brush?

 

(Oh and this is not facetious, I'm more than willing to answer questions/give a basic rundown. I love the weightmap brush and think everybody should use it)

kyoto kid

nonesuch00 said:

crocodilian said:

nonesuch00 said:

To use these elsewhere is to export them in a format that a 3rd party program can use whether that be Poser, Unity, Max, Maya, Blender, and on & on. If a game engine were ever support DAZ Studio figures or Poser figures natively then that is a coup for that product,

A strong reason that the world needs to break away from the old Daz/Poser architecture. V4, the flagship of the Poserverse was built on massive geometries, with massive texture maps. That's how you got good looking things, back in 2006.

But that's a million miles away from any game engine, or indeed from modern renderers. The 70K poly figure with the giant texture maps, transmaps, that's never going to work well with a game engine, and its a waste in a world with powerful modern renderers. Displacement, subdivision surfaces, instancing -- these are the technologies that enable low poly figures to to render beautifully, and yet remain practical.

Bottom line is that adhering to "state of the art circa 2006" doesn't get you what you want. No one's building a game engine to manipulate 70K poly figures, because its a waste of cycles and there's no need to.

There really is a need for a more modern geometry and shading system. Look at what Zbrush does-- now 15 years old. Simply stunning levels of detail, without crippling geometries . . . but getting that kind of performance inevitably means an architecture beyond "lotta polys and big bitmaps"

Poser has moved far beyond 2006, even if you didn't with them. In the modern DAZ Centric world of Genesis you are liable to get left behind too. Already the conforming clothing look is a glaringly antiquated DAZ Studio look. I don't know how much of that is they are waiting for consumer level HW to be powerful enough to support more realistic cloth vs the cost of licensing or writing the code for that technology.

The standard exchange format is FBX and if it's not supported in FBX you can consider it non-portable and there goes much of DAZ and Poser features out the window, not that some of it makes sense to support in a game engine as they are modeling aids.

When your characters are used in a game you shouldn't be able to say whether it was a Poser, DAZ Studio, or other 3D software character maker. 

...I built a system for Daz 4.0+ and it has since been left far behind. Now it seems unless you have a fast hyperthreading hexacore CPU at least 32 if not 64 GB of DDR4 memory in Quad Channel configuration and at least one (preferably two) 6 - 12 GB GPUs with 3,000+ cores you are in the backwater of the 3D world.

kyoto kid

Rashad Carter said:

crocodilian said:

nonesuch00 said:

To use these elsewhere is to export them in a format that a 3rd party program can use whether that be Poser, Unity, Max, Maya, Blender, and on & on. If a game engine were ever support DAZ Studio figures or Poser figures natively then that is a coup for that product,

A strong reason that the world needs to break away from the old Daz/Poser architecture. V4, the flagship of the Poserverse was built on massive geometries, with massive texture maps. That's how you got good looking things, back in 2006.

But that's a million miles away from any game engine, or indeed from modern renderers. The 70K poly figure with the giant texture maps, transmaps, that's never going to work well with a game engine, and its a waste in a world with powerful modern renderers. Displacement, subdivision surfaces, instancing -- these are the technologies that enable low poly figures to to render beautifully, and yet remain practical.

Bottom line is that adhering to "state of the art circa 2006" doesn't get you what you want. No one's building a game engine to manipulate 70K poly figures, because its a waste of cycles and there's no need to.

There really is a need for a more modern geometry and shading system. Look at what Zbrush does-- now 15 years old. Simply stunning levels of detail, without crippling geometries . . . but getting that kind of performance inevitably means an architecture beyond "lotta polys and big bitmaps"

There is another side to looking at this.

Gaming is not the only thing that matters in 2016 CG artwork. In fact, if you ask me, most games look like total crap from a technical standpoint. Seriously, I wouldn't find most of the frames I see in games as acceptable if they were still images. Poor lighting, strange shading, all in the name of speed. Unless one is truly dedicated to building games, I think one should almost completely avoid mention of it. I just don't think there are THAT many DS users building games at this point in time. And there are also the new Morph3D models which are streamlined for gaming purposes.

The ONLY place Genesis 3 outperforms V4 is in DS itself. Simple reasoning is, that for Genesis 3 to look good it requires Daz Studio specific technologies, such as HD morphs. Do not take HD for granted. Its been observed since nearly the first week of G3 release that spinnning dials on Genesis 3 doesnt look nearly as awesome as spinning dials on V4 due to the severely reduced polygons available in Genesis 2 and 3. The fact that Bryce, not even Carrara or Poser, can take advantage of HD morphs, means that Genesis 2 and 3 simply don't look as good when rendered outside of DS. V4 on the other hand, with her heavier geometry, allows for much more morph detail without the need for Studio-centric technologies like HD morphs. As a person who only uses DS to pose figures and to morph them so that I can send them to other engines like Bryce for final rendering. I've been stuck on Genesis 1 and previous figures if I want to do any real morphing. To my mind, this is a terrible shame. And the reason for this is that Daz3d hasnt updated Bryce nor Carrara nor Poser to take advantage of the tools these new models were designed to rely upon. Genesis 3 literally becomes 1/10 as useful without the HD morphing. Without HD, you have nothing.

Also, I'd like to address the issue of environments. All an application needs to become decent with landscapes is 1. Sky Model or HDRI Dome equivalent    2. Sunlight Model    3. Atmospheric Scattering Model   4. Instancing Technology for vegetation.

The new Fern Lake and Through the Woods products demonstrate that point. Stonemason could have easily developed these landscapes for Carrara or Bryce, but it's become obvious that most DS users want to do their final renders in DS if they can. So it's smart to start making more detailed landscape content for use directly within DS itself, which the new Instaning Technology allows. That trend will continue and the necessity of outside tools like Carrara and Bryce will fall to the wayside provided people find themselves happy with the available environmental content being produced in the future.

...I might have stayed with Gen4 if there was a viable teen figure (along with appropriate clothing) and clothing cross fitting wasn't so much of a pain (even between different characters within the same "unimesh"). Autofit may have it's flaws, but it performs far better than any of the old third party conversion tools.

mrposer

mmmm... someone starts a Daz vs Poser thread and an Iray vs 3DL discussion broke out ... I do think the fact there are now 2 render engines to support in DAZ Studio has further accelerated the move away from Poser support at the DAZ store... esp. now for even prop sets that no longer have Poser versions or material support.

kyoto kid

lx said:

Cybersox13 said:

lx said:

Havos said:

All of AoA lights come with a PDF file that explain how they are used. I personally feel these lights are a must buy for anyone that uses 3DL to render. A render lacking some sort of ambient/indirect lighting often looks poorly lit IMHO, and using the UE2 lights to do this massively slows down the render time (although I have read UE2 lights can be configured to run faster).

Until you said that I didn't even know AoA lights were something you need to buy and not a default part of the program. I have loads of products that refer to them or UE lights but nothing in Studio says anything about what any of that actually means. So for users that haven't been around for years to learn this through common knowledge, there isn't even a natural entry point to knowing where to get started, before even getting the how to set those specific things up part.

One of DAZ's greatest weaknesses for years has been the lack of decent, up-to-date documentation.  For years the generic answer seemed to be "well, all of that can be found in the forums an online tutorials," but a huge portion of that accumulated knowledge has been flushed and lost forever, either through the loss of the old forums or the sites hosting the online tutorials ceasing to exist.  And to make matters worse, the few commercial publications that have purported to be "complete" guides to DS have been, at best, introductory manuals while most of the more complex aspects have only been touched upon or simply not mentioned.  I would GLADLY pay a large chunk of change for a decent DAZ manual, but unless someone locks someone like Richard in a room and refuses to let him out until we have one, I doubt that we'll ever get it.  :( 

That said, yes, the AoA lights are one of the single greatest sets of tools ever developed for DAZ.  They're cheap, the documentation that AoA has made for them is quite good and the ability to light individual elements of a scene with entirely different lights and hit modes in a single pass makes a lot of lighting that would otherwise be acheveable only via multiple passes both incredibly fast and dirt simple.

   

This is why I get upset that they put all this time and money into designing stupid new overcomplicated features and try to make everyone buy into it, instead of taking the time to instead properly document all of the things you can already do in Daz Studio. The "check the forums" answer is also a joke because not only has much of it been lost as you said, but also searching the current forums is a lottery at best, assuming you don't use its built in search function to try and find anything. There is some amazing info in threads here and more posted all the time (sales coupons and offers too for some reason) but if you aren't reading that thread at the time to come across it, you'll probably never see it.

I mentioned this earlier but even now there are a couple of youtube videos appearing on the Daz channel with helpful random tutorials - and they're REALLY GOOD. But it's not mentioned anywhere that they're being released. Daz emails me EIGHT times a week and has never bothered to tell me about them. Why.

You guys have got me interested in learning more about AoA lighting for 3DL now and Daz has put these amazing features in its program but if it hadn't have been for the twists of this discussion I never would have known about them.

...I love the AoA Advanced Lighting system, rendered fast and gave just as good results as UE (the latter which made a snail look like a speed demon).  However, since the Daz 4.7 release, flagging no longer works on characters with SSS as something was changed in the Shader Mixer (most likely to accommodate the then forthcoming introduction of Iray).

Cybersox

mrposer said:

mmmm... someone starts a Daz vs Poser thread and an Iray vs 3DL discussion broke out ... I do think the fact there are now 2 render engines to support in DAZ Studio has further accelerated the move away from Poser support at the DAZ store... esp. now for even prop sets that no longer have Poser versions or material support.

Definitely.  It's interesting to note that in the less than a year G3F support has exploded over at Renderosity to the point where the 3D Figure Essentials category now has nearly a thousand items versus just a little over 4800 for V4. a number that's taken ten years to build.  By comparison there are just under 300 for Genesis 1, just under 500 for Dawn and just over 1350 for G2F, but since those all work in either DS or Poser, it's hard use those as a gauge for determining software bias.  WIth G3F being DS only, however, it would definitely seem to indicate that there's been a huge move to DS only support by a sizable portion of non-DAZ affiliated PAs in an extremely short period.  Which may not necessarily reflect what people are actually purchasing, of course, let alone what people are actually using in the privacy of their own homes, but where there's smoke there's usually fire.        

Cybersox

j cade said:

What do you want to know about the weight map brush?

 

(Oh and this is not facetious, I'm more than willing to answer questions/give a basic rundown. I love the weightmap brush and think everybody should use it)

What I'd really like is a tutorial on using it with deformers.  I know it's possible, but I've never been able to find anything that actually breaks it down by process.

j cade

Cybersox13 said:

j cade said:

What do you want to know about the weight map brush?

 

(Oh and this is not facetious, I'm more than willing to answer questions/give a basic rundown. I love the weightmap brush and think everybody should use it)

What I'd really like is a tutorial on using it with deformers.  I know it's possible, but I've never been able to find anything that actually breaks it down by process.

Oooh I know how to do that, Its pretty simple.

Add your deformer (select your figure and hit the add deformer button) 

Position it roughly how you want it

Select the deformer (any of the three parts: base, field, or deformer will do)

Select the node weight brush and go to the tool settings panel with the deformer selected

Under unused maps there should be an option called "influence weights" add that map, It should match the fall off of the d-former field.

You can now paint this as any other weight map and it will control the fall off field

below are some crappy pictures hopefully showing what I mean