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I didn't wish to derail this thread and said so
Cycles however is an engine in an opensource software so the possibility of it using alternative options besides just different GPUs (ie Generative AI to fill in and upscale lower resolution rendering) is something contributers can add. After all iray even uses a denoiser that is semi AI AFAIK.
Dareshiranu, Torquinox:
I hear you on the matter of AI build out driving up prices of consumer electronics, particularly NVIDIA GPUs ... hence this discussion about iRay and a Daz-Cycles alternative. However I do hope you haven't lost sight of larger forces at play that affect the semicondutor supply chain. With all due respect to the Daz Forum TOS, I'm deliberately being terse about this -- I'm talking about the geopolitical trouble brewing around the Taiwan Straight.
A protracted war there affects not just the two belligerent countries across the Straight, both major players in the global supply chain of consumer electronics. That waterway also sits on the energy corridor that supplies the pair of North Asian nations crucial to the very same industry. How are we to cope when there's an all-around shortage of GPUs ... or memory ... or CPUs?
Some are hoping the conflict remains a matter of "if" rather than a "when". Personally, I think thought and action put into avoiding that conflict, or mitigating the fallout, is a better investment of one's energy, rather than repeating dystopian narratives about data centers and the corporations behind them. To that end, if an NVIDIA GPU shortage puts a crimp on iRay usage, then taking up alternatives, such as Blender Cycles, sounds like a wise choice to make.
Cheers!
If they do that, I'm out. Not worth the risk of sudden [o]ligopolist price increases, or arbitrary service cutoffs. I'll drop computer graphics altogether, get a much cheaper machine, and go back to text. No doubt I'll still feel compelled to arrange colors in ways that resemble physical objects. I still have my paintbrushes.
What's a pity is that Daz created Daz Studio instead of improving Carrara. Blender, as an intro to 3D, is poor. A sanely put-together, moderately good modelling program that could also render all this stuff would've been better all around for practically everybody. Too late now.
My Cycles renders of Diffeomorphic-exported Daz & Poser items are generally pretty decent, but I'd really want to get at a texture node editor for the cases where I want to improve the automatic conversions.
... Gaming surpassed movie-making as a revenue-producing activity some years back. How are they proposing to run anything resembling modern 3D gaming on thin clients? They'd have to do all the fast complex rendering remotely and pass updates to each client at least 24 times per second. I realize I hang out in an online 3D setting with an old crowd that's considerably behind the times, but ... is there remote hardware and communication support in place for turning gaming topsy turvy in the near future? Because if it isn't built out before one starts making it impossible for the customers to buy the hardware to game on, what one produces probably does not greatly resemble a major surge in revenue.
Indeed that technology exists, unironically Nvidia itself provides a 'solution' to people now unable to afford Nvidia GPUs: see "GeForce NOW".
The gist is ... more datacenters ... but now you can rent time on cloud hardware for 60fps game streaming. :P
I think cycles plugin would be valuable simply because having alternatives is valuable and folks would surely find creative ways to use it. It's good to measure interest here but keep in mind some folks love the idea of what it might be, and others would love the idea once it existed and they saw people making cool stuff with it. It's a huge undertaking and the whole store uses Iray as an established standard, so it might need patient dedicated effort supported by outside funding to build up enough features/support/adoption that development can pay for itself.
This conversation has become way too speculative for my taste. So I say, all the best to @bluejaunte, and we'll see what develops.
OK. If I can't afford to replace my hardware when this laptop fails, I'm still out.
I've considered buying time on a renderfarm to spare the laptop when I've already built something and want a bunch of variations of a scene I already know works. But buying cloud services to build the scene in the first place is right out. Since I don't know what I'm doing when I start, I could never anticipate how much it would cost me to finish the build.
In that case I won't give a tinker's dam what Nvidia does, because they'll be doing it without me.
But presently I'm still working on my plan for moving more into 3D because I can't tell how it's going to shake it. I've already figured there's about a 50% chance I'll fail for reasons I can't control.
Diffeomorphic automatically converts the Iray materials satisfactorily most of the time, and I don't see why the same couldn't be done for a Cycles plugin in Daz Studio. So I wasn't thinking that had to be a bottleneck.
Escaping Iray isn't my motive for rendering in Cycles. I'm not down on Iray. My motive is to escape Daz Studio, where I can't model, and where they're more than a decade behind in fixing the interface so I can see the text on a HiDPI monitor. Failing to accommodate obviously desireable and relevant tech long after most short-handed open source projects have done so did not impress me as a) a sign of being committed to the software, or b) a sign of its probable longevity.
Once I've exported large portions of my library to Blender, rendering in Cycles is fast and easy, and that's why I've been doing it. I don't consider it the most desireable renderer, however. That's Luxcorerender or Octane, which both have drop-dead gorgeous caustics. I want to use Luxcorerender or Octane for artistic stills. But they also both demand I do some extra setup work and for a while yet I don't have time. I'll get there eventually.
Luxcorerender suffers from Open-Source Understaffing. It's non-commercial software that demands a high level of skill to work on, but developers don't get paid for it, so it has to be done in their spare time. Means there are never enough devs for the project.
A Cycles plugin for Daz Studio will probably face the same shorthandedness, which is ubiquitous for projects that need more than one dedicated dev but can't pay them. That doesn't mean it's not doable enough, if one particularly likes Cycles and doesn't have a problem with Studio itself. That's not me, though.
Here's a Patreon with only a free tier for now:
BJ Cycles - Cycles Renderer in Daz Studio | Patreon
I'd be interested.
1. Which amount of money do you think will be required to get this done?
2. I don't have much experience in Blender/Cycles. Would it beat the performance of IRAY in terms of speed? I mean there are game/render engines out there that can do pathtracing in realtime... and then there is Iray. Just make yourself a coffee while you wait.
3. Have you already asked DAZ, if they would hop in this project with a certain amount of money? I mean, this should be in their interest to be able to offer this.
do u think AMD hardware is way cheaper? the problem is that TSMC has increased its prices and that OpenAI bought 40% of all RAM. That is not Nvidias fault. Cycles has the advantage that we need way less VRAM and THAT is the biggest advantage. on top we get OCIO so finally realistic color respresentation.
What makes you think that you NEED a new shiny GPU?
I've actually just technically downgraded from a 4070 Super to a 3080Ti. The reason - the same 12Gb VRAM but around 5k more CUDA cores. It's made one hell of a difference. By the time I put my second 3080Ti in the rig, it'll be flying.
I'm also sticking with 4.24, there's nothing in 6 that I see as an actual benefit in day to day use.
I don't understand why people automatically assume that the shiny new GPUs are going to be better. It's just like when people buy a new iPhone every 12 months - they're just sheep who are suckered by marketing ploys.
Diamonds are forever, GPUs aren't.
thats actually an upgrade, from a 70 to a 80TI :D
Some infos about installers if anyone is curious: Checking the house | Patreon
Personally, I found the experience of using Octane in DS to be absolutely awful, so I think a lot of the success of Cycles in DS will depend on how it's implemented.
in the end it must be implemented by DAZ. cycles is is better in any situation except caustics.
If a Daz version of Cycles would include Light Linking and Shadow Linking, I'm all in.
yes something for later for sure. the benefits of the speed, better denoiser and way less VRAM usage + OCIO is such a huge advantage
Appreciate there's a lot of detail in the 1st post but would appreciate seeing the spec of a minimal proposed first version (accepting some of it might prove unfeasible)
E.G.
Combined with a very high-level minimum functional spec (maybe based on the detail in your posts in this topic) - and again, appreciate some items in that spec might not prove possible
Doing high-level provides 'backers' with a good sense of what they'd be backing while retaining a lot of functional decisions for you
Patreon... Would like to see the free-tier removed (once your ready to get to it) and - depending on uptake and your math - as few paid-tiers as you're willing to run with
Personal: Do think a fully tested 'AMD-version' would be a great plugin (and appreciate part of your cost is then acquisition of a couple of AMD cards etc etc)
Thanks for all the info you have posted here so far
Minimal proposed first version would be whenever Patreons are happy enough so that we could call it a first usable version I guess? I don't really know how to answer that.
A very high-level minimum functional spec, same I'm not sure what you mean. Whenever people can get actually usable renders out of it for a typical scene? Did you wanna know what features need to be in place for that to happen? I think beyond features though it's also a question of when will materials be tuned enough.
DS4/DS6 yes always, developed at the same time and every build will have both DLL's.
Should work on AMD, needs someone with AMD hardware to test. If it works in Blender though there's no reason to think it wouldn't here. At worst I might have to tinker a bit more but right now I'm under the impression that the needed HIP support is in.
Apple no because no such hardware is available to me. Certainly willing to tackle that if I ever do but don't count on it because money.
What's wrong with a free tier? I'd think that's pretty normal to have so people can stay informed/interested even if they don't subscribe or cancel. They won't have any access to the plugin.
Decent start at what I meant
Free tier - experience is it creates a lot of noise and a fair bit of effort for 'you' without any more positive effect than a link to this topic would bring.
Other tiers.... Unless you were to offer something like an Apple-tier (with subscription levels to cover you to get 1 or 2 machines) then I wonder how you'd differentiate enough to have more than 1 paid tier? (Too many 'perks' wastes your dev-time, IMHO)
Thanks very much for the reply -- Hope you 'get it off the ground'
I am quite interested and hope it doesn't go the way of Reality. That was a mess.
Hell of a tier that would be
At the moment it doesn't look like it's gonna get off the ground at all to be honest. Aeons away from anything resembling what you're suggesting here. As far as tiers go the only obvious onesI can think of is access to various builds (monthly/weekly/daily maybe) and possibly access to some other content. For the latter there's some challenges though, like cannot sell stuff outside the Daz store, and HD morphs cannot be distributed outside of the store either. Wether handing out content "for free" but behind a Patreon paywall is accepted I'd have to investigate. Probably not. If not, it would be rather counter-productive to create custom content for Patreon members to justify higher tiers, wasting time on stuff that is not the Cycles plugin and so why did I have the higher tier in the first place right.
Not an irrational concern. NVidia really seems to be pushing "in the cloud" for nearly everything consumer level.
As someone else said, I think Iray being gate-kept to Nvidia's cards is going price out new users and those looking to eventualy replace their cards. Having an alternative would be awesome and I'd be interested in supporting you :)
Yes to your reasonings (tiers and Daz-related included).
When I 1st saw your 'feeler' I thought... that will be a lot of work - that hasn't altered
Your incentive is (using current Pound-Sterling prices): Radeon RX 9070 XT £600 / GeForce RTX 5080 £1100 <-- If it's actually in stock
So, there's £500 - less whatever the Daz Shop charges for your plugin - over a year (if I'm fair, more like two-three years).
I can find few stats/reviews on the 7090 in Blender but what rendering related stats I do find would suggest it would do okay.
I think a plugin would sell. You (probably) think a plugin would sell. Whether you can 'make it work', over a period of (say) 12 months, and how much your 1-tier would bring in over that same 12 months is the bet we're discussing (and you'd be taking).
To a very great extent... you either wanna, or you don't (and, I know, easy for me to type)
What's this then?
I would compare the 9070 to a 5070 ti. but the radeon is going to be WAY slower than the RTX. 5070 TI is 2.2x faster. so the 5070TI costs costs 800. double the speed for 200 more, and way better feature set.