[RANT] Sick and tired of the lack of support from daz!
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Thank You Slosh! I've been biting my tounge on this one all day, but you just said it for me.
First of all the grip is not really with Daz but actually with the PA's who create products here to sell at Daz.
"Because you like Iray, doesn't mean I have too Scorpio, so why force me to use something I don't want to use?"
Let me just turn that around and as a PA say ask why you would force me to use something I don't want to use and do not feel will give the results or create the product that I am visualizing?
Frankly I'm just wierded out that people use provided materials without tweaking regularly, is that normal?
Even back in the days when I used 3delight I dont think I ever used the provided materials vanilla, for instance, I preferred the look of ubersurface2 for skin (it handles sss really well, and predated the aoa one by quite a while) do you know how many skins came with ubersurface2 presets? 0. So I made myself a bunch (I do that for Iray too BTW)
Straight out of the box?
Just as they come?
That is sooooooooo weird! People really do that?
(No, you are not alone in that j cade...I'm sure there are a lot more of us around.)
Remember, the presets are more like guidelines, than laws...
I've said it before, and will probably repeat it every thread like this...I wouldn't mind at all if everything came without ANY presets. Just give me the raw maps and be done with it.
BTW...when was the last Iray shader put in the store? The last 3Delight one?
I'd love to hear your advice about using UberSurface2 to do skins, J Cade. ;)
Hey, some of us are still frantically peddling up the path toward the vanilla foothills with our normal stabilisers skudding along the non-ubersurface0.5, trying not to fall flat on our aoa.
I should get there just in time for DAZ to change the render engine...
I use "one" as the third person pronoun, as in: "One does not behold the face of the Gorgon and live." Or, "One can not beat Mother Nature". Or, "One can do that quite easily on one's own.
And of course the 2nd person plural pronoun is "you-all" or "y'all" if one has ever lived south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Don't you just love English?
Actually I'm learning Russian and I see lots of gotch'a that make no sense at all. Some simple things like the ideosyncratic word stem deviations one uses when counting to 100. But then again in English why do we spell "4" as "four" but spell "40" as "forty"?
And why in the world do some languages assign sex to things like numbers?
English may be complex and obtuse but in some ways it's way simpler than others.
"One does not simply walk into Mordor..."
i guess im weird and abnormal by your standards. I'm okay with that. :-)
Same here. If more were like us we would have a whole lot less posts about whether a product is Iray or 3DL
Got to admit that I'm one of those that seldom leaves shaders alone, I kinda thought most people tweaked their shaders
I leave shaders alone for human models. If it's cloth, I might change the color.
About support for 3DL -- it'll be the market that decides what's supported, and what's not. Sell it, and they will come.
Might as well roll with that. Life is easier that way.
Got to agree with the OP regarding Carrara and Hex. It would be nice to see them get a little attention. It would also be nice if DAZ would give us official word on their status, but I've kinda given up on that. Progress and lack of desire/funds/time often leaves things behind. It seems that Carrara and Hex (and Bryce) are not considered to be profitable for DAZ to invest in anymore. Rather than continuing to complain, I have decided it's time to move on. I've actually had Vue Studio for several years (kept updating too) and not really used it. The DEM importer used to be poor for my needs, and a plugin for Carrara worked much better. Due to the lack of Carrara moving forward with DAZ, I gave Vue Complete 2015 a try on a project I'm working on, and it imported my custom DEM, and gives me better view port response, and faster renders. So it looks like for custom landscape work Vue may be my go to app, which would mean fewer $$$ spent here, especially if it works well as I'll need to upgrade to Vue Complete (limited budget means $$$ spent somewhere else are dollars not spent here).
I guess the moral of the story is that in the world of computers and CGI, nothing stays the same. For me, progress, and lack there of with Carrara at DAZ has sort of forced me to move forward .... somewhere else. because they aren't moving their similar tools forward. This probably will ultimately be a good thing for me, but a loss for DAZ (not that they will probably miss my modest spending anyway). I may also give Blender a serious go now, which would save me money, and the frustration of not knowing the status of Carrara in the long run.
A wee bit off topic, is there a tutorial about this somewhere on the forum that I am missing?
As has been stated in the Hexagon forum... Hexagon is not dead. There is an update in the works. Please check the Hex forum ;) As for Carrara, I'm fairly certain that's not dead either. You might want to check the Carrara forum.
OK, I don't do this often. Hard data.
DG Iray Brocade and Satin day 1 sales 69
DG 3Delight Brocade and Satin day 1 sales 8
Which one are you going to do more of?
3DL users, myself included, have had to create their own materials for years with converting Poser surfaces. 90% of the time the Iray mats will render with really good results anyway in 3Delight. Push the render button and see what happens.
I suspected the stats would be something like those, which sort of explains why Iray is the prefered shader by vendors. The same reason that nothing has been made for the Mellinium Baby for about 8 years. Market forces.
Are you sure it isn't just because it's an ugly baby :D ?
That too... for sure.
I actually loaded the little guy up about a year ago... took one look and didn't have the heart to press the render button.... just quietly put him back to bed and said goodnight MB :D
I would love a watercolor mode rendering whether in iRay or 3DL doesn't matter to me.
I find iRay easier to create toon style claymation characters - just strip out the textures and maps and assign colors to suit your desires. iRay isn't more realistic the 3DL it depends on the input you give it to be realistic or not just like 3DL does.
I wasn't aware til recently that DAZ doesn't require a help user guide for PA products and was it a surprise. LOL. Really, that is not peanuts these prices being charged for new products. We spend all that money but we're supposed to guess on how to use the product based on what? Clicking around and adjusting sliders and other values in the DAZ UI in a colossal waste of time when years of experienced talent already know how to do these things and should be producing the documentation for their products? We are supposed to buy these products and then blame our lack of talent when we fail to utilize them as wondrously as the ad copy in the store kiosks? Never mind all the post work, all the different products that when into making that ad copy, or even a walk-through help document that shows how to set up & use the product with DAZ Studio Essentials and the relevant Genesis or Millenial model essentials. Such a manner of distributing products puts all the burden and the blame on the customer and it's totally unreasonable.
And DAZ itself needs to get serious about their own documentation. They need to settle on whether they are going to expand the core feature set of DAZ Studio with those 'neglected products' and start documenting the more complex things too. What's a wondrous 3D program if the makers of it don't bother teaching the customers how to use it?
That said, I really enjoyed the 'yellow' walk-through tutorials I have done that DAZ have created. So concise and to the point.
What products are you speaking of? All the plug-in's and scripts and such that I have bought at Daz came with at least some form of documentation...
Oh, God, my stomach!!!!
Not for nothing, but people do tend to make unconscious decisions about what they will and will not purchase and it is often not until they take the time to consider the issue consciously that they derive the reasons for their actions. Today I realized that I had passed on the baby because as stated, it is kinda ugly. I wasnt aware of this consciously, but unconsciously I was thinking exactly the same thing.
Wow!
If a model has 30 different texture zones within it as many of the more complex environments tend to, I seriously don't want to have to edit all those shaders to get an item to look as expected. So from that angle, I can appreciate what the OP is asking for. But in my own case my only reason for not editing shaders is time (aka laziness), not desire. Whenever I have the time (normal levels of drive and ambition), I almost always end up altering shaders, even on those complex environments. But admittedly, this is moreso in Carrara and Bryce, not as much in DS because I've never done a final render in DS 3DL that I was willing to publish. I use DS as a staging ground, all rendering is done in other apps so I accept the challenge of editing shaders to fit my current needs. I suspect that if I was doing my final renders in DS, I'd be editing shaders like a madman.
Quite simply, just because the vendor assumed this surface needed this much specularity doesnt mean I will agree. I will trust my own assertions before that of the vendor, so I end up tweaking the shader. I'd wager that most of us are that way after a few years of experience.
This "art" stuff is all fun and games until one day someone sees your work and then commissions you to provide something for them. It's then, that suddenly, you realize the price of lack of knowledge and dependence on others. While Mec4d might be masterful at PBR shading, I don't want to have to rely solely upon her to provide me the things I suspect I might need for a given project. The main purpose to my mind behind purchasing a set of PBR shaders for Iray for example would be to use them to learn how to make more such shaders for myself down the line if needed.
If people have been using 3DL for years, even if all the materials until now have been supplied by vendors, even by mere happenstance most people should be familiar enough with DS to edit their own 3DL textures at this point, so long as they find that type of work to be fun, which they should because it gives them more control over the final appearance. There are the newbies who would really require the hand holding, but the veterans, with a few years under their belts, should be secure enough to step out on their own as needed.
Editing shaders can be fun, and can relieve us of the potential of all producing work that looks exactly alike...a major personal concern of mine.
To the OP, now is your chance to demonstrate how much skill you've accumulated over the years. We need people to show us what 3dl can do since fewer and fewer people seem to know these days. Let your compelling renders make your statements for you.
Regardless of the rendering engine, there are certain universal considerations for shaders.
1. Diffuse
2. Specular
3. Transparency
4. Translucency
5. SSS (if provided by the engine)
6. Bump
7. Normals
8. Displacement
As long as a user has a vocabulary robust enough to understand these 8 channels described above, creating and editing shaders in any engine should be approachable, one would not be lost without a paddle. This should be do-able.
oh, and lastly......Bryce is THE PROGRAM. Never forget it. I spend hours with it daily. Still use it along with Octane for all my final renders. Just sayin.'
Well those are the same product aren't they?
I'm not taking that bait again. The PAs that aren't doing their job know it. So suffice it to say I searched in my content directory for the documents, looked in the usual places, and looked at the 'Info' tab in the Content Library and am only led to an offsite advertisement for he product I'm refering too and other products that PA vendor sells.
The more and more I buy from the DAZ Store the more and more I want to see 'DAZ Originals' on the list of artists or it be some architectural model that's quite easy to judge on face value of the ad copy. LOL, landscape & architecture those are the next things on my wish list but will have to wait.
OK Slosh,
Let me try it this way to see if it makes it clearer. I am NOT looking for unrealistic shaders, what I said was they DO NOT have to be Iray realistic. I am happy with the current level of 3DLite shaders. Also I am asking daz to continue supporting not only 3DLite but the other programs mentioned (That everyone seems to have ignored to take up the Iray banner). I am not saying that the PA that creates the set also create the 3DLite material files per say, there are alot of PA's that created extrodinary shaders, have daz utilize thier talent to contnue support for the render engine that they include with thier software.
This rant isn't JUST ABOUT Iray and 3DLite, its about daz offering programs then tossing them to the wayside for something new while they currently continue to market them. If daz had dropped 3DLite as a render engine or quit selling Hexagon. Bryce, Carrara and even Power Pose I wouldn't have posted this.
Software getting tossed....sad indeed. I've already started saving up so I can buy the rights for Bryce from Daz. I'm sure its expensive. Got a few hundred saved up so far. Three more lifetimes and I think I'll be able to afford it.
Makes you wish you could just write up your own application, doesnt it?
Just out of curiosity ... what is the issue of using something straight out of the box? Does it offend your flipping elitest attitude? What is wrong with someone doing art thier way here? Everyone seems to think that people HAVE to conform to the way they do it. And BEFORE you say I am out of line ion that, take a look at your comments! Joking or not the comments are unwarrented.
If you're changing the lighting in the scene, the materials need to be adjusted as well, especially wnen you're not using a physically-based renderer. Also if you're including multiple materials in a product for different renderers, the settings need to be similar or they simply won't pass QA. There's no such thing as doing settings one way for one renderer and giving a totally different set of settings in another.