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Yeah of course, that makes sense. Quite a dilemna then really. You do need and deserve funding for this though. I'm not really on any other community platform for this sort of thing, other than Deviant Art, but that's not just for renders, although there is a lot of that on there. I'll mention it anyway and on Discord. I hope you set up a Discord server soon. :)
Just figured I could create a Patreon with only a free tier for starters and let that cook for a while.. Could do Discord right away too, I mean why not.
Maybe do the Kickstarter thing instead. that way if it falls through, the money gets returned and there are no hard feelings. Or do the Patreon route, but maybe also create some other exclusive content for Patreon subscribers, so each month maybe they get something little, a item of clothing, a texture add on, a character morph, whatever, as well as ongoing funding of your plug-in. This might be more than you want to handle though, but I'm just throwing ideas out there. Or it could be a new better way to support all your content. I know there are a few niche Daz creators on Patreon that do very well. Could be something to look into.
That'd be brilliant yes. :) For Patreon you could still maybe create at least one paid tier with a disclaimer saying that it's not 100% guaranteed BJ Cycles will be properly released. I think people would still buy into it. I know I would and every little helps. As for Discord, let me/us know the server name as soon as it's set up please and I'll be there for sure.
Yeah I don't know about Kickstarter. It's such a platform for screwing people over. It's basically set up so that you make promise after promise to extract more and more money with tiers you'll never be able to deliver. And it's soooo much work to create a Kickstarter. I went through this once on a project I helped on. Just ended up being a nightmare.
I'd rather tell people to subscribe and you get the thing. And if you stay subscribed or subscribe again later you'll get the updates. End of story.
Also adding characters and stuff or other plugins is an interesting idea though. Worth considering.
Yeah don't do kickstarter as that often comes with a promise to deliver in future, a patreon or Ko-fi page for donation is the way to go cause we don't know how much time this will take.
While the project is intriguing, I wouldn't depend upon the semiconductor industry to invest in capex to ease the shortage - the problems that are ongoing are due to we, the peon consumers being cut out of the loop as all of the sales are becoming BTB. Now, should there be an AI bubble burst, that might lead to a glut of memory silicon, but GPU pricing isn't going to be dropping to... let's say reasonable levels again for the forseeable future, and improvements in the consumer GPU space are likely to be minimal/incremental while the prices will probably stay high or even increase due to the lack of supply. The world of AI, NVidia in particular, envisions a user base of thin clients. No place in that vision for we PC users to maintain a hobby like this, unless it eventually morphs into a server/client/cloud model. Personally, I hate the cloud... and I don't hate much - it wastes time and energy that can be better spent on far more productive enterprises.
I really love the idea of a cycles render option inside DAZ Studio.
I just cannot do Blender, not at all under no circumstances.
Blender is from head to toe an enigma to me and will always be.
I cannot go to cycles, so Cycles has to come to me ;-)
Actually, I saw a video about "token shock" pushing corporate consumers toward local AI models. Thin clients are not a fait accompli. Predictable costs are necessary in business.
@bluejaunte
Personally I think Daz should have used Cycles right from the start, and that's coming from someone who is really quite fond of the Iray renderer.
As with yourself, my own situation has gone from bad to absolutely catastrophic just recently, so I'm currently hanging by a thread so to speak, at least until I can get things sorted. At the moment I've no idea what I'm going to do regards GPU, and to be honest I'm not even sure I'm going to bother with 3D at all any more. I'm thinking of giving-up on it and getting back to previous passions like audio and photography.
I wish you the very best with this venture, and to be fair I doubt you could fail all things considered. As was pointed out, Daz Studio is crying out for such a thing, and personally, I wish Daz would employ you so that you can have the renderer update as you navigate the viewport.
Hear hear!
Photography is great and using CompfyUI to fix photos or GIMP is a great way to fix photos that would otherwise not be salvageable. You do not need the 5090 to make decent renders a 16gb or even a 8gb 3060 is enough and relight and tweak your renders to your heart's content with Qwen Image Edit for free. I would recommend this software for homemade comics if you don't want to do the extra work> https://plasq.com/apps/comiclife/macwin/ ; You could also use freeware stuff if you don't want to spend the money. Good luck
that is completely off topic, here
I don't want to do Photography, otherwise, I'd be in a photography forum.
I don't want to do AI, otherwise I'd be in an AI forum.
I don't want to fix all with Gimp, otherwise I'd be in a Image editer forum.
I do want to do 3d still renders and 3d animations, that require the least amount of post work, or to say it better, to allow to have post work as a choice, not as a neccesarity.
Cycles would be a second option and I'd love to have the choice of which render engine to use inside DAZ Studio.
I have terrific respect for what you've accomplished so far, @bluejaunte . I do wonder if the implementation will be in any way better than what we've already got with Iray and Filament. The former is, of course, completely reliant on NVidia gpus, unless one wants to wait a very long time for a cpu render. The latter is very fast and gpu-agnostic but limited in what it can do. Filament requires a lot of work with material settings to get best results. Even with Iray, I usually end up doing additional work to get the desired results. It's a problem! I would not care for another render solution that requires more tweaking to get best results. It's better than having to apply and customize renderer-specific shaders, but it would just depend what your cycles implementation can actually do with existing shaders and how much extra work I would have to do to get results that please me.
Torquinox,
That's a good point and its a recurring theme.
Octane was mentioned earlier in this thread. That too is a NVIDIA-only renderer. A number of us gave that a try after the Daz-Octane Kit came out, and we found out that we needed to customize materials and shaders. I suppose it depends on the user's goals: some really enjoy that degree of customization; others want an expedient, few-click workflow. Perhaps, as a comparison to Filatoons, its worth pointing out that few PAs appear to have picked up on Octane and put forth related products. So, could a new Daz-Cycles kit overcome these challenges?
It's worth mentioning too that for 3Delight a number of users volunteered to share their shaders. Perhaps if a Daz-Cycles alternative could pick on that crowd-sourced trend, there'd be enough momentum to justify this new thrust.
Cheers!
I would be interested in joining a Patreon depending on the cost.
I would even say Cycles is necessary for DAZs survival. Thank you BJ for your awesome work, I hope you can make it.
Subjectively at least I often feel Cycles renders look better. How much of that is down to more skill of the person or more control of the shaders in Blender I don't know.
As far as features, I know at least one we're missing completely in Iray: motion blur.
IRAY also requires a lot of "work" for best results. The only difference is IRAY is considered the defaul. All asset makers do this work for you. If asset makers supported Filament to the same level, the amount of work for the user would be the same as IRAY. Whatever engine you might try that isn't IRAY will have this same lack of support out of the gate. Filament is only an afterthought because there's no push for it. I give priority to assets that come with Filament support. I love the way it looks. But it's a losing battle at this point.
I tend to agree that a Cycles render, in Blender, looks better as well. I do think this is down to the shader and geometry nodes available which make short work of turning a 'brand new' Daz asset into something that looks a bit more lived-in and real-world. It's far easier to light interiors and, whilst previously I would have given Daz's sun/sky environment the nod over Cycles, the new multi-scatter option in Cycles takes the prize now. I think it's safe to assume you have no plans to bring those shader and geometry nodes over to Studio (!) and therefore I would expect the final results to be virtually indistinguishable from each other.
One thing that's missing from Cycles that iRay has - section planes; I find these quite useful on occasion. Many moons ago I had a trawl through the iRay programmer's documentation - a page turner it is not - and it can do motion blur. That option is not exposed in Studio though. There's quite a few iRay features we don't get to play with.
I am guessing but correct me if I am wrong, this is for still images, not animations
that was my gripe with Reallity too as well as Lux Render being as slow as a wet week
iray is not exactly fast as it is, I don't want to try animated renders in an even slower engine
it's great you are committed to doing this, don't get me wrong, just asking a bit about it as I am probably not your target customer
Cycles with its denoiser and more comprehensive control over light sampling will be faster per frame given the same quality as iRay. Not hugely faster though. There is a commercial version of Blender called K-Cycles which we use and it is very fast, making animation doable in a reasonable timescale. Vanilla Blender users would tend to use Eevee for animation, a near real-time engine more akin to something like Unreal's renderer, rather than Cycles.
Cycles and iRay are both ray-tracers, so whilst I reckon Cycles would be quicker, it's not going to be tortoise and hare.
Could still do an animation and render 1 frame to get motion blur on something. Have not researched that in any way, just theoretically how motion blur works. Cycles needs to know "this object moves this much this frame to the next so it should blur this much" presumably.
@jmucciello I covered extra work in iray in my post.
It's unfortunate that the filament renderer has not received more attention. In DS, the biggest single drawback for me is the way it doesn't handle layered transparency. It's most evident in the popping effect seen in card hair. And no, filatoon didn't fix the problem. It simply sets hair to full visible. I found one can selectively set hair surfaces so they are opaque and leave the tip surfaces transparent. It's a compromise. Short hair seems to work better than long hair.
The only alternative is to use dedicated anime hairs where the hair is modeled as an opaque sculptural 3d form. Folks looking for maximum realism will likely be dissatisfied with all that, but it can work for some situations.
It's my observation that, no matter what the tool or feature, someone somewhere is using it to do something awesome.
I've seen/heard about the token shock. Corporations can, typically, afford far more robust hardware solutions than consumers. The most recent CES and Computex were far more corporate centric than consumer, and apparently have been trending that direction for a few years now. The culmination of which, in corporate rhetoric and production will likely result in 1) Higher prices at the consumer level. 2) Lowered expectations for innovation or improvement in hardware, despite the higher prices. 3) Consumers using older generation hardware longer, or reissued hardware to throw said consumers a bone while the corporate customers get whatever improved hardware actually hits the market... Look at the increases in the cost of not just RAM, or GPUs, but storage. All driven by AI datacenters that have largely yet to materialize. Still, it's these datacenters that by design will sell, or rather rent or lease, what we once did ourselves on our own metal. Unless, of course, the AI bubble bursts. But if that bursts it will take the economy with it and things will get very interesting. Hopefully we'll all still be able to worry about which 3D render engine we can use then. I'd still approve of Cycles as an alternative despite having a 5090. I made the mistake of building a new PC that can only support a single GPU, so I can't have a 30 or 40 series alongside the 5090, so I can do a limited amount of work in 4 using tools exclusive to that version before moving to 6. We'll see how it goes I guess.
@Dareshiranu you have described perfectly how we are all already paying an ai tax, and as consumer level 3d artists, we and gamers are among the hardest hit. But all consumers will feel the pinch as even Apple has pending price increases for their phones due to the ram shortage, among other things.
I don't want to derail this thread but there is always the possibility that an alternative to current hardware for VRAM and CPU rendering may yet be developed, maybe with or without the help of those AI agents they are embracing to solve everything. Alternative materials that are not scarce for manufacturing computer components and can be mass produced cheaper for both their data farms and consumer use..I actually suspect it already exists but a false scarcity is created for profit.
The thing is open communities such as Blender one do exist so there is always hope technology can be shared that is not kept from the public by patents and corporate greed.
+1 Wendy!
Agreed! Would be awesome to not be married to NVidia for rendering, and something for people with limited funds to be able to get into the hobby. GenAI would be a decent concept for it, even if it was in an enclosed ecosphere. It'd be easy enough to image-2-image a render and could even achieve nearly realtime rendering. Playing around with local models, you can even take a filament or texture shaded image, run it through certain models with low image creativity (so the AI just copies the exact scene nearly 1:1) all it does effectively is replace the textures to make it look...well, however you want. Want hyper-realistic? Put that in the prompt. Cell-shaded? That works too, etc.