Is it possible for a 3rd party render option for DS4?

donniekeidic

I was thinking how great it would be for something like Blender Cycles to be added to Daz Studio. But a lot of people, myself included have a lot of content, plug-ins etc for Ds4. So is it possible for a Dev to somehow add a Cycles render option to DS 4.24? I know cycles is open source. I don't know about Daz or if they would open up DS4 so that others could add more abilities to it. IS this possible, likely or just a pipe dream?

Leana

It is technically possible for a third party to integrate another render engine, there were third-party plugins to use luxrender, for example. That would be a lot of work though.

DrunkMonkeyProductions

It's possble, but if history is any indication, highly unlikely.

The main problem is going to be product support.

Are PA's/content cretors going to develop for two different render engines?

Are Ds users going to even use it?

And, are devs going commit to it?

 

Prior to Iray coming along, we had acces to Lux Render(which is also open source), via Paolo Ciccone's Reality plug in, and later Luxus by Spheric labs.

AFaik, neither received any support from other PA's, and both had been developmentally dead for years prior to their removal form the daz store in 2021 and 2020 repectively.

Relaity went open source long before it was NLA'd and is up on github.  I've seen a few attemptes to update it, but those have also been dead for years.

Not sure if Luxus still works, but it's NLA and locked to an almost 10 year old version of lux render, iirc.

 

We currently have accesss to Octane render, and again, PA support is basically non-existent, with 3 whole products that come up when i search the daz store for Octane render.

 

3delight support had massively declined prior to it's removal, with very few(if any) products having 3delight presets for several years.

 

Filament(which is open source) is an iffy. it's gotten some PA support, but it's not all that much for something that's been around for ~5 years.

 

Coming from a user perspective, the only thing that matters is if it's signifiantly faster at rendering on the same hardware than iray(wth indistinguishable results),  that render savings isn't completely lost in the conversion process, and, ti's stupid easy to convert the assets(one click, done).

Short of that, user support is going to be non-existent, except for some of the more hardcore types.

 

 

 

Padone

The real stopper is iray doesn't work on intel or amd gpus. For that a more general renderer as cycles would be good, but it had to be compatible with the iray shaders and that's the difficult part, a good automatic conversion for iray shaders. We did some in diffeomorphic that could also work for cycles in DS, but it is limited to the DAZ iray shaders, not custom shaders by PAs.

However, at least iray works on cpu as well, though it's slower, so people without a nvidia card is not completely cut out. Furthermore, there's always the bridges including diffeomorphic to get out of DS.

Silver Dolphin

There is a Daz to Blender bridge. You could use cycles there. I would just use Opengl or Filament  with Daz Studio 4 and use ComfyUI to fix your renders with Qwen Image edit. Locally don't spend any money. If you can't afford a 16gb video card you can use a  SXM2 Nvidia V100 tesla 16gb of vram with a SXM2 to PCIE adapter. This card does not have video out but if your PC has built in video you are golden. If you can find one a 3090 is a great card but they are hard to get now.

Masterstroke

Silver Dolphin said:

There is a Daz to Blender bridge. You could use cycles there. I would just use Opengl or Filament  with Daz Studio 4 and use ComfyUI to fix your renders with Qwen Image edit. Locally don't spend any money. If you can't afford a 16gb video card you can use a  SXM2 Nvidia V100 tesla 16gb of vram with a SXM2 to PCIE adapter. This card does not have video out but if your PC has built in video you are golden. If you can find one a 3090 is a great card but they are hard to get now.

Quite honestly, although I am not a PC newbee and I have done several installations like Poser to VUE or C4d, DAZ to Zbrush or Hexagon, all the DS Bridges to Blender are to complicate for me.
Not that I won't make it in the end, but it takes too much effort. with a new Blender release, you'll have to do it all over again.
I like what I can do with Genesis 8 in DAZ Studio, but I don't like the limitations coming with IRAY and dforce.

jmucchiello

Silver Dolphin said:

There is a Daz to Blender bridge. You could use cycles there. I would just use Opengl or Filament  with Daz Studio 4 and use ComfyUI to fix your renders with Qwen Image edit. Locally don't spend any money. If you can't afford a 16gb video card you can use a  SXM2 Nvidia V100 tesla 16gb of vram with a SXM2 to PCIE adapter. This card does not have video out but if your PC has built in video you are golden. If you can find one a 3090 is a great card but they are hard to get now.

Aren't the SXM things targeted at AI? Do they have IRAY in them?