Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Nvidia has Open sourced MDL now! they announced it at the RTX Quadro announcement https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/08/13/open-source-mdl-sdk/
Thats nice and all but will Studio ever impliment it?
For what? You can already bring a chunk of MDL code into Shader Mixer as a Custom Brick.
Hopefully I can update my current Octane subscription to V4 when it comes out...
Some would like to render a scene in the OctaneRender for DAZ Studio plugin with the materials looking identical to the iray version.
Currently there is an autoconversion that converts DAZ Studio material parameters into Octane material parameters based on a manually coded set of rules.
Users were asked to provide feedback to improve that conversion here:
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=58442
There is conflicting information going around what can be done with MDL in the Iray version of DAZ Studio.
3rd party developers commented more than a year ago that even when Otoy would support MDL they would not yet know how to easily gather the MDL information from the DAZ Studio API and transfer it to the octane plugin.
Maybe the DAZ Studio Iray SDK and the DAZ Studio API were updated in the last two years and now all that is left is to wait until Otoy finds the time to implement MDL on their end?
- - -
In any case the latest statement about MDL in Octane may have been on Sep 15, 2018
"Sbsar and MDL are definitely on the to do list, but there are quite a few things that will happen before them. Namely layered material node and spectron features that were shown in SIGGRAPH 2018."
Source:
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=68770&p=345891&hilit=mdl#p345891
- - -
Spectron features are shown in this video:
Life After Octane 4: Introducing Vectron, Spectron and...Octane 5?
- - -
Well, DS certainly can export MDL, since that's what gets ssent to Iray (internally and using the Iray Server link) - but I'm not sure how you would get MDL sent to a file that could then be passed to another application.
You (or someone) could probably create a script to extract the MDL info from the scene data and create a file and export that for other apps to use.
MDL support would have to be built into Octane. to translate MDL to octanes format. So the Daz Plugin would have to pass the MDL shader info over to Octane 4. Daz studio has MDL support already in it.
Just got the Octane Rander Kit and thought I'd check on toon shading capabilities. Would toon shading be possible with the Render Kit?
Wish it wasn't a subscription software
Toon shading is possible. I didn't use the kit to do it though, I just changed the material type to Toon Material in the Nodegraph Editor:
There's a free version, which I use.
There's two toon shader examples included in the kit, I didn't go too much into it for more possibilities and variety as there's currently issue with toon ramps (not working properly) that devs are familiar with. Also we don't have the option to use Toon Lights in the plugin which I also hope get included in some future versions of OcDs for toon effect.
V.
Hi, V! Do you know if there is a known issue with the Materials Tab visuals? The space on the left side where the materials zones should be listed it keeps getting messed up visually and projecting information from a previously visited tab. Is that a known issue?
If you have issues of that sort (tabs not refreshing or showing accurate information, settings in preferences not getting memorized and similar) it's suggested to delete
C:\Users\[username]\OctaneRender\Data\OctaneRender_settings.oczdb
file, this resets settings to default and helps with some common issues :) Edited to note: Daz needs to be closed to be able to delete this file :) Hope that helps.
V.
Thanks, V! I'll try that! :)
...isn't the free version somewhat limited in available tools and render size?. I know it only allows for one GPU. Also my concern is having to be online while using it as that seems to be the case:
Whenever I work in programmes, like Daz, Blender or Carrara, I shut down net accesss and put my AV software into silent mode to maximise system resoruces as I have older tech.
I also have Maxwell generation GPUs so not sure if they are CUDA 10 compatible. (hardware information on the Nvidia control panel indicates CUDA 7).
You're most welcome, I hope it helps :)
Other than having to be online and being limited to one GPU, there are no other limitations that I have personally experienced and I used Prime extensively testing different features and doing renders for different purposes. I rendered images 4000px and up in Octane since the release so size is definetly not limited, nor any of the quality parameters :)
I understand however that some folks don't prefer being connected at all times, but it seems to have been the trend for activation most of the software in 2020, Zbrush and MarvelousDesigner too to name a few.
V.
...but once a new licence is "activated" you should be able to work offline afterwards, With Octane it sounds like you need to be online throughout the session, hence the dongle for the Annual and Enterprise subscriptions that allow you to work offline.
Requires being online which makes it unusable
...yeah kind of sad. Was saving up for a perpetual licence before they went full subscription. Out of core rendering sold me at the time as it splits the load rather than simply dumps completely to the CPU like Iray does
Blender's Cycles id also capable of CPU+GPU rendering but it's a path tracing rather than PBR engine..
Not only did that fix the visual issues I was seeing with the Materials Tab but it also fixed the issues I was having with Octane frequently crashing Daz Studio. Thank you so much! :D