Could a DAZ Studio app be possible?
Botdog3
Posts: 10
Purchased an ipad recently and was wondering how an app for DAZ studio could be developed. Maybe a multi-level subscription service that would use cloud storage and cloud-based rendering capabilities? Would this be something people would invest in, not downloading to their hard drives necessarily but to cloud storage. Tablets don't seem to have the rendering abilities for something complex such as DS or Bryce but couldn't that be solved by having a rendering engine available online that would be much faster than my poor old slow pc? :coolsmile:
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That would be interesting for sure
The question is: why?
I second that question.
Isn't it bad enough that MS seem to want to make WIndoze behave like a silly tablet or whatever, and now you want to join in the decline.
And I for one don't want to live up in the clouds, How many cloud flare errors would we get then. Ugh and double ugh I say
...Are people under the impression tablets do something different from running an OS and then separate programs? :-/
Given that Apple has, in the past, been hostile to frameworks and application builders I would be slightly surprised if there was an IOS version of the Qt framework that DS uses (hhm but a quick Google says Qt for iOS is due later this year). Quite aside from the question of what version of OpenGL and iPad might offer (it seems to support a limited version of OpenGL, OpenGLES for embedded systems, which appears to be cut down from the full OpenGL so that would look more doubtful).
http://xkcd.com/934/
Stand-alone computers are disappearing - or so the cloud-computing folks would want you to believe.
I think stand-alone computers are still good for things like rendering. (Mind you, I think mainframes are better than server farms because you can run more virtual machines on a mainframe for a lower total cost of ownership than you can on a server farm, and never mind that they aren't sexy shiny new tech. As one can probably guess from my forum avatar, I don't stop using something just because there's something newer out there.)
Gee that sounds like a great idea. Assuming somebody is making a quad core 16 GB of memory tablet these days. You do understand what processing power creating 3-D rendering takes, right?
Er, never mind, cloud based. That would still require one hell of a lot of processing power and memory on that cloud based server. Frankly, I can't see it happening at any reasonable price.
I'd have to echo the sentiments above: "an interesting concept, but why?"
I don't really trust clouds for mission-critical processing. Never really understood the rush to go there, either — why should we have to send masses of data zooming through the Intertubes when a dropped connection can mean corruption of a scene and the loss of hours of work? Considering the file sizes we work with, the whole thing's useless anyway, if you don't have an unrestricted high-speed connection. Ever heard of bandwidth charges?
And if the CloudFlare service DAZ uses now is typical of cloud systems, I'm not really all that impressed. It can be a bit flaky. The problems we get on CloudFlare are weirder and less easy (or possible) to figure out than when DAZ held everything on their own servers. When it all goes worng I usually just do something else and try again in half an hour... or an hour... or two... or...
I'll leave it to people who understand these things to figure out whether the controls available on the average tablet are up to the task of controlling DAZ|Studio like a conventional desktop or laptop. The whole thing might end up in the "neat idea, but it can't be done economically with current systems" category.
If one can convince 100,000 people to do this, one could put the back-end on a $10,000,000 mainframe, charge each person $100, and break even. Rendering times would shrink dramatically. (However, no current mainframe runs Windows - they'd have to port Daz Studio to Linux. So this isn't likely to happen any time soon...)
I'm sorry, I just don't see it without online render engines, and I do NOT see THAT happening at all! Sure, renderman compliant render engine that's eating CPU time on a server designed to serve hundreds of people... NOT happening! The whole point of 3D is to produce a final render (at least for the most part of what we do here, Gameguys notwithstanding)...
It makes no sense at all to me to do anyting on a tablet unless it's editing animation, and on a professional level, that would mean editing mocap... that's a MAYBE...
Can you imagine, I need to load this V4 set, 3x 4096 PNG or TIF files, plus plus plus, add morphs, it all has to come down to my tablet over high-speed internet... which really isn't fast enough to load in anything but an annoyingly long time...
Bottom line is: Tablet 3D? Uh... Gamer, sure, 3D ARtist, not any time soon.
. . . . . and I would be whinging about yet another iPad app not available for android. %-P
remember they WERE floating the idea of a web based version of the program btw.
Xtranormal does it
and one could use that on ANY browser, even your phone.
Greetings,
To all the folks asking, 'Why?!' I'll answer simply:
Convenience. I'd kill for an app that I could sit in a bus station, or a coffeeshop, with my unobtrusive tablet, and do poses. Even if that's ALL it did, make poses that I could export to D|S later, I'd be pretty happy. But if it can take a simple scene, and allow me to place characters in the scene, roughly pose them...? I don't need all the power in the world to do rough blocking of my scenes.
Sure, I don't render it on my tablet, or even on some cloud of render systems, but when I get home, it's already synched (via DropBox) to my desktop, and I load it in D|S, tweak things for details, do test renders for lighting, etc., and then render overnight.
Don't think of an iPad or Android Tablet as a shrunken computer; if you do, you'll be left thinking about rendering, and lighting, and crazy stuff like that. Instead find the parts of the tasks that you do on larger systems that can be broken out, and are valuable in themselves, and build a tool that just does those things.
It's about convenience, efficiency, doing light work on light systems, and heavy work on heavy systems.
An iPhone app that just allowed me to explore creating properly IK'ed poses, expressions, etc., and export them to a D|S format (preferably directly into a DropBox folder) would be great. For the iPad, a more complete scene designer would be the expectation, with D|S format compatibility of course. You can't light, or render, but you can design, and that's enough!
It's a pipe-dream, and I know it, but it'd be amazing.
-- Morgan
http://www.xtranormal.com/watchmovies/
It took three full minutes for the above link to load... imagine waiting that long for your Genesis file to load? My connection right now is at 110 mbps.
Hmmmmm... Do these tablets have remote-desktop capability? (My Playbook doesn't, but that's a BlackBerry tablet, not something mainstream.)
If you could use the tablet as a remote desktop, and your ISP allows you to publish your IP address, you could "call home" into your own computer, and work on the road. Your home computer would be doing all the work; you'd just be giving it commands and seeing the results from a distance.
I've never tried running a graphics-intensive application through a remote desktop, so it might be slow, but if the infrastructure exists, then I can't see why it wouldn't work...
someone on the Carrara forum did it with Android and Carrara
edited. to add, remote desktop that is.
Well, there you go. Problem solved... assuming the tablet has the right software.
Cloud based render engines? What render engine are you willing to pay for and how much?
Check out pricing for 3Delight and Octane.
DAZ would not be able to use LuxRender because of the GNU.
Yikes!
It took about 6 seconds on my iPad from the time I entered the link to when the movie was playing; what type of device are you running?
-- Walt Sterdan
Google Chrome.
You're also not doing it during business hours :)
That's the thing. I have spent a few hours at Starbucks and a couple of cafes doing "light work" on my laptop, even though I always got to a point that i needed to do more and wasn't able to because of lack of power or the files I needed, the main point was that I was out for a reason, otherwise i would have been home working on my PC
It's funny, I have an Ipad, laptop and PC along with my phone and see these commercials that have couples watching a movie on some mobile device at the park, or in their car parked on a vista and I can't even imagine doing that when i can do it so much more comfortably at home. Entirely to much connectivity to electronic devices these days and my teen wonders why she doesn't have a cell phone or why there will never be a DVD player in our vehicle..
As far as what we'd use it for, and how possible it is, on the old forum DAZ did a shout-out for Unity programmers interested in using DAZ characters. The proof-of-concept they showed was a program they had running on an ios device that had Genesis characters (I think I remember Freak, the Girl, and a few others) and an early version of the Genesis supersuit. Nothing overly fancy, but it looked like something I'd pay for.
A year or so ago, Tamajii Inc (http://tamajii.com) put out a couple of programs using Poser/Daz models for movie storyboarding (Storyboards 3D) and a program for kids that allowed them to write their own storybooks using 3D models (Bookabi).
Me? I'd love to use it to load a mess of lower-res models and use them for building webcomic art on the go. I have laptop and desktop for doing "big renders" but for a lot of the toony stuff I do for fun, I'd kill to be able to do it on my iPad.
Autodesk has a few 3D programs out for iOS, including 123D Creature (worth looking at) which a modeller could use to build a 3D creature for rigging on their desktop computer.
Speed-wise, my iPad scores a little higher than a Power Mac G5 circa 2004 on the Geekbench tests, a far, far cry from what we're all using these days, but also a lot better than what I was using with the first versions of Poser and Daz Studio.
Storyboarding, web comics, or even using it for what Poser originally was meant for: creating simple reference scenes for an artist to refer to or add postwork to. There's more than enough decent paint and drawing programs available to make it worthwhile.
As I mentioned, I'd willingly pay the price of Poser to have a stripped-down Daz Studio on my iPad, even if it could only use something like Toon Generations and was limited in render size (I'd settle for 1024x768), but sadly, I don't see very many people wanting or using it at any price.
-- Walt Sterdan
Technology isn't there yet. Display, rendering, bandwidth, servers, software, demand.
That doesn't mean it won't be available in the future and then farther in the future we can all afford it when those with lots of dough (or super-dedication) are willing to spend money to be super beta testers and popularize the new tech and create demand. It's the only way it will, or can, happen (which is why I support the rich and free markets). 'Make it so' just doesn't happen.
Right now I can view my renders on my Kindle by dragging a picture into the Amazon cloud on my desktop.
Baby steps. But I love it. Renders backlit on a portable screen you can show anyone anywhere.
I play around with 123d creature on my ipad .. :)
a web based version of Daz studio could work on just so many levels
if they could magage the bandwidth!!
like Xtranormal they could have a limited free version
but for content owners, anything in their IOH could be accessable for online posing and render with a paid print option too!
could be done lunchtime on work computer, your android phone on the bus, at the internet cafe, etc
What? They would be able to use it without any cost to themselves because of the GNU. Unless there's some terminology in there I've been completely misreading this whole time.
What? They would be able to use it without any cost to themselves because of the GNU. Unless there's some terminology in there I've been completely misreading this whole time.
My understanding is not when there is profit involved. It was the reason Legal told us we should not use Lux. Maybe they're wrong and maybe they're just erring on the side of caution. We have licenses for Vray, Maxwell and Octane.
My understanding is not when there is profit involved. It was the reason Legal told us we should not use Lux. Maybe they're wrong and maybe they're just erring on the side of caution. We have licenses for Vray, Maxwell and Octane.
If I understand correctly, you should be able to use it for anything, as long as if you redistribute it you provide the source code and license. You can do with it as you wish. Pretty much the closest thing to 'free software' there is.
Legalities make my teeth ache (maybe that's why I never became a lawyer... lol)
However, speaking from a strictly tech POV, I do not see any major roadblocks to setting up a cloud-based remote rendering service for iPad/tablets/smartcells/etc. Due to the nature of my work, I am accustomed to working via remote desktops, and (depending on your connection settings) this is not a very bandwidth intensive connection. As I understand it, Genesis is something like an auto-adapt res char (meaning D|S changes the res of character depending on distance from camera). If this assumption is true, then D|S can be set to provide a low poly version via the connection (for my example I am assuming a RDP connection). As a further bandwidth saving, it can be set to display via individual "windows", where each control (or set of controls) be kept static, and only updated when changed. The main working graphic window can also be set to a manual update process. Import of props can be displayed as series of bounding boxes.
Granted, what I am thinking of most likely will not work for fine detail work, but can be fairly easy to use for 'gross level' stuff, eg: create (and possibly morph) character, raw placement of character in scene, import props into scene. Basicly do most everything via low res objects (as stand ins), maybe use a lot of spot renders, w/ the "real detail" being kept server-side/cloud-based. When full/final render is desired, it can be done and then displayed when finished on the tablet, or just stored someplace like dropbox, or even emailed.
In theory, the possibilies are very interesting...
All that said, in reality, I would be shocked if something like this came about... but I am more than willing to be very pleasently suprised...
Hello guys, this is my first post here.
The device which is capable of this could be - Wacom Mobile Studio Pro 16 or the smaller one. They are Win 10 tablet computers with no restrictions of any kind but some enhancements due to their tablet capabilities, camera and other sensors. You could use the device as a tablet when working on the workstation and as a stand alone computer when you are at travel. I think the DS functionalities are granted due to the OS and the hardware, but my opinion is the device is useful for a lot more tasks. For example - digital sculpting from the nature - Photogrammetry + Z Brush..