Eevee for DAZ Studio?
marble
Posts: 7,449
I always use OpenGL in the DAZ Studio viewport because my system, although adequate for most of my needs, does not perform well with IRay working in the viewport. I've been watching a few YouTube videos of Blender 2.8 and Eevee in particular so I wondered what would prevent DAZ from adopting Eevee instead of OpenGL? Blender is Open Source so I assume that Eevee is too. The real-time rendering in Eevee looks far superior to OpenGL (at least to the OpenGL version running in DAZ Studio). I think animators in particular would enjoy something which is both realistic and quick instead of the protracted render times of IRay.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I think it would be great, but I think daz is in some kind of agreement with nvidia to not use other render engines. I could be wrong?
Or just export to blender and work there .. I do.
I understand that you do but for us mere mortals, exporting to Blender and trying to get to grips with that frightening node system is a bit daunting. I'm already exporting to and from Marvelous Designer. I do export to Blender for simple morphing/sculpting tasks but I'm not confident enough to export a full scene, set up the materials and lighting ... I'd rather do all that in DAZ Studio. Also, I often need to tweak poses, etc., and I'm not sure that posing in Blender using the DAZ rigging is a simple matter, is it? Actually, it would be educational to know your workflow if you wouldn't mind sharing it.
I don't mean for Eevee to replace IRay - only to replace OpenGL. Both are Open Source aren't they?
No reason others cannot make plugins
Octane has one and there are two for Luxrender
I´m on the same boat here. As a relatively new user of 3d software i´m simply affraid of even giving it a try.
I tried using Octane for Daz Studio but exchanging every single material to make it work propperly was a pain in the ass and so i stopped using it again. Not to speak about things like geoshells wich simply seem to not work really well with other engines.
Posing - as mentioned - could take ages i think. I have quite a big library of predifined DAZ poses that i use very frequently. Doing every pose and expression by myself in Blender wouldn´t help speeding up things at all.
But who knows. As is said i´m relatively new to all this and i may be wrong. Tutorials don´t help that much either because they´re telling you different things on how to export propperly and most of them are not answering the above questions. So as marble allready mentioned, any advise would be greatly appreciated.
Considering DS includes 2 other render engines, I highly doublt it.
And? That doesn't mean they do the same thing, or work in the same way... Eevee looks pretty cool but it's a rather recent development, while OpenGL is a widely supported standard.
Besides Eeevee apparently has its own material system, so there's no guarantee it could use those DS uses today. And introducing a 3rd set of materials just for preview doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
I was suggesting Eevee as a replacement for OpenGL, not an additional one although, as has been pointed out - there are already other engines like Reality/Luxrender and Octane so I'm not sure why Eevee should be a non-starter. However, if it can't handle the materials in a similar fashion to OpenGL, then that would indeed be a big problem. OpenGL has a problem with transparency which is an issue - especially if we try to use it for animating hundreds of frames. Perhaps one of the real-time render engines used in game software might be another possibility?
I just use the diffeomorphic plugin. It imports jcms so G3-G8 work the same as daz. Material conversion is quite good though sometime may need some tweaking. It also can import poses and animations from daz so you can use your daz library. Rendering in cycles is usually faster and better than iray. Because the denoiser does work. Then eevee is not so good with hdri shadows and refractions, but overall it's awesome anyway.
Of course to learn blender requires some time but there are lots of tutorials on the web.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/
Clearly time I took another look at Diffeomorphic. Does it work with G8 and 4.11? I have to say that I would be a lot more inclined to get into Blender (especially 2.8) if I was convinced that I could pose characters as easily as in DAZ Studio.
As an example here she is the g3f first rendered in iray then in cycles. I used studio 4.11 and blender 2.80. The plugin also imports cameras, lights and the hdri environment. That's why I can make the two pictures with the same lights and camera angle. Before exporting I converted the g3f materials to the iray uber shader because this is what is best converted for cycles. This is also what works best for iray so it's a win win anyway.
That apart I really just exported and rendered that's all. No materials tweaking was needed in this case.
Thank you for this info and demo, Padone! That settles it - I will have to learn Blender 2.8!
The Realtime renderers, in game engines, are an integral part of the game engine and not some stand alone component that can be simply copied and dropped into the Daz studio code as a "replacement" for open GL in Daz studio.
EEVEE itself is essentially a realtime game engine built into blender 2.8
Short of exporting your scene completly into another environment, the only way you can sit in Daz studio and have your scene being previewed in a Game engine, is via a "live link "such as the one that Maya has for Unreal4
Or the $1000 USD Live link plugin Reallusion is about to release next month for Iclone pro to Unreal4.
Thank you @Padone. Can we assume that G8 works as well as G3? I still use G3 Males but I now have several G8 females. I'll try to find an easy-to-follow tutorial (or video) for Diffeomorphic because when I tried it previously it had me scratching my head trying to follow the blog instuction pages.
Going back to the posing question, is it possible to import a scene with character(s) and then choose and apply a pose from the DAZ Studio content library directly on to the character already in Blender? Or is it a case of pose in DAZ Studio and then export to Blender?
A follow-up to that would be - if I find I prefer doing my posing in DAZ Studio but want the scene (perhaps a room with furniture) to remain in Blender, can I switch the character in and out of the scene between DAZ Studio and Blender? What I'm assuming is that DAZ Studio will be far easier for me to do precise posing than Blender because DAZ Studio is, at heart, designed for that task.
Well, I wouldn't say that the OpenGL preview is anywhere close to a being good indicator for the IRay render either. Even the IRay preview in the Viewport falls somewhat short of the finished article. But your points need be taken into consideration nevertheless and I'm now less encouraged to move my scenes to Blender for Eevee/Cycles. As for RTX - isn't that something which comes with the latest generation of NVidia cards? I was kinda hoping my 1070 would last a couple more years at least.
Pity they cannot just update the OpenGL as it has been improved in the last couple years and am pretty sure shadows could be supported and a few other things for fast animation game quality rendering, often iray or 3Delight is overkill for simple story telling and presentations etc.
Yep, that's a good point too.
Yes G8 works fine. A different story is V8 though because she uses the chromatic sss mode that's not supported, so you'll have to tweak the skin yourself.
Yep.
I'm not sure I understand your question. If you mean to import back the character from blender to daz then no. The plugin only works from daz to blender. You can't pose in blender then import the pose to daz. I mean unless you find some exporter in blender that daz can read, but that's not the plugin itself. And I know daz is not good importing collada or fbx.
I guess I didn't think that through. What I really mean is to have a scene with characters, do the posing in DAZ Studio and the rendering in Blender. Then change the poses of the characters for the next scene. But the obvious way would be to delete the characters from the Blender scene and export the same characters, with different poses, again from DAZ Studio. So no need to export back from Blender to DAZ Studio.
You know if someone would made a bridge for daz studio into Blender 2.8 it would sell like hot cakes. It would need a script that converted shaders for both evee and cycles but it would be worth the effort just for animations alone. I do like http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/ it is a great freebie.
you don't need Eve for previewing in viewport when you have more than 1500 Cuda Cores and +8Gb of Vram for iRay on your Nvidia Card.
Sorry but I beg to differ - IRay preview kills my viewport performance. I can't pose characters or move the camera around without a massive lag. I just can't work like that. Fibre hair also causes a lag - the more hair the worse the lag, and that is with OpenGL. Hate to think what IRay preview and fibre hair together would do - probably a stand-still.
There's a difference between real-time and "fast enough". It is true that a good card may be enough for a rough iray preview in the viewport. Especially for small scenes with just a couple of characters. But what real-time pbr really is for is animation, other than viewport preview of large scenes. There you'll get much faster rendering times at the cost of a lower pbr quality. You can pass from some minutes per frame that you get with cycles and the denoiser to some seconds per frame that you get with eevee.
I can't count iray in the fast engines simply because the denoiser does not work. Because it doesn't support the albedo and displacement buffers needed to preserve details so it is more a selective blur filter than a denoiser. Apart iray having other problems such as not supporting motion blur and splines for fibers. And having refraction issues with objects far away from the world center that's just ridiculous for a pbr engine.
I do like iray and daz studio though to get still pictures, especially in small scenes with a few characters where it works great and fast enough. Then again gimp or photoshop may be needed for effects. Yet effects is another point where blender is awesome compared to daz studio that's just making the first steps with dforce. But there's time to improve things I guess ..
No thank you. We don't need another engine that would need new shader definitions and cause the PA's to have to choose between 3Delight, Iray, or Eevee. There might be a product idea for someone who wants to create a converter / exporter / bridge to Blender. But that could be opening a barrel of monkeys a developer wouldn't want to hassle with.
My original proposal was to suggest Eevee as a replacement for OpenGL in the Viewport - not as a 3rd. or 4th. render engine. This idea came from watching Blender videos which show a level of realism in the viewport while manipulating the figures in realtime. That's all. Probably a better suggestion was to update OpenGL itself which has had a few incarnations since the version we are saddled with in DAZ Studio.
The conversions for Blender (Eevee or Cycles) to render DAZ Studio scenes is a somewhat separate discussion though possibly more interesting. But, as I understand that discussion, nobody is suggesting that the PA should include shaders for use in Blender. The discussion has been around some kind of bridge including material conversions - possibly based on the Diffeomorphic freebie or similar. Again, the PA would not be expected to produce products with his in mind.
Technically EEVEE is a render engine like the one in Unity or UE4 so the Iray materials you are pre veiwing in the veiw port will have to be supported by the engine or instantly converted on the fly somehow.
Indeed realtime or even near realtime viewport display
is highly desirable.
You would probably get better IRay performance with a more powerful GPU configuration though, if you can afford to upgrade.
I dont ever use Daz studio IRay as I am not invested in NVIDIA
I do Like the fast VPR (Veiwport renderer) I have in my seat of Lightwave 2015.
My next major film project will likely be rendered in LW ,instead of My old C4D ,since My obj /MDD workflow for Genesis is completely transferrable to Lighwave as it has a robust MDD importer as well as Alembic along with FBX of course.
Don't lose sight of the fact that all of this hardware and software technology is evolving, and we haven't seen the beginnings of what RTX can/will become. And assuming that most of this software technology is designed to be implemented by many platforms and applications, don't think that it's an either/or thing. Eevee is just a name for some software techniques that are evolving, and are used in games and elsewhere. It's just code and hardware, with lots of ways to have "interoperability" between different API's and systems.
Which is why I'm hoping that if Iray continues in coming years (which is a bit of a question, IMO), it will likely include any or all of this stuff. Especially since it is native to NVIDIA, the folks who are doing a lot of this research and development on both the hardware and software. And presumably their goal is to rule the world of gaming and 3D and AI and so on. So don't think Eevee is just a Blender thing. It's a group of sofware techniques that, guaranteed, NVIDIA is all over and has probably written research papers about.
IMO the biggest question going forward is what will Studio use in coming years? Will Iray survive, or will we move to something else?
I do agree. That is, it is clear that daz studio is meant more to play premade content from the shop, with some extra features for content creation for the more "advanced" users. But it is also clear that if you want to be serious about content creation and animation you need another more professional platform to work with and export there. Someone choose blender, others maya, others lightwave. But you have to go off daz studio. So no, the average daz users that just want to play with the shop assets don't need another engine.
Unfortunately as always there's a "brand war" out there. So everyone wants to monopolize. That's why apple discards opengl and opencl, nvidia goes to proprietary rtx that's not supported anywhere apart some demos, while amd and intel seem the only ones interested in open standards.
As for daz studio we have iray realtime that's out there from a while now but they never showed any interest about it. As I said above personally I believe daz is just targeting a player for the shop content so daz studio will never be a "professional" platform to work with. But I also believe this is fair enough since more advanced users can always export to more advanced platforms.
Fair enough but that shouldn't be a reason to hold back improvements such as a better viewport display, even if that only means an upgrade to OpenGL. The skills of users represent a continuum, not a sharp divide between "advanced" and the rest. Some of us just want to make nice pictures and if we can do that in DAZ Studio, then we don't go off looking to get to grips with "advanced" packages like Blender. However, if imagination takes us in a direction that demands more than DAZ Studio can deliver, then we find ourselves in discussions like this. Sometimes it is just a case of "I wish I knew a better way of doing ... (x)" but quite often the response is "Sure you can: learn Maya or Blender over the next six months." Eventually, the (x) list will become so big that we outgrow DAZ Studio and knuckle down and learn Blender, etc., just like you "advanced" users.