Daz inc. innovating,imitating or stagnating??
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Comes down to one simple question...
Are you a betting man(woman)?
Side A of the coin: Change springs from within to be shared with the world around us...
Sure, Daz3d as a company needs to take risks now and then and innovate to some degree. I personally have called for it many times with Bryce and Carrara development. However I'm aware that the company must also play it safe and keep risks low enough that they don't destroy themselves on a whim. Innovation can be tricky. It can work in your favor or to your detriment. If you're Microsoft or Nvidia, and you decide for the masses of consumers in your given industry that they need a new feature...like unrevokable weekly updates or RTX Tensor cores, you can force feed those "innovations" onto the people against their will... as we've all seen many times; ensuring the eventual success of these said "innovations." In the end we complain but the companies know that they are the only game in town and thus can control the general direction of innovation for entire industries at large. Fact is. We the masses eventually play along, or just stop using computers all together. But since we're obviously here reading this thread...Go Nvidia!
Smaller companies that try to innovate against the main industry currents, like maybe Daz3d has done with the Genesis line of figures means that you need to wait and see if your particular version of innovations ever catch on to the world at large. That waiting game is like a deadly gamble. Sure you could win....but you could also lose! Even if you do eventually win, if it takes too long to reach those ideals, you've already lost at least partially. Currently, I do NOT see the Genesis line of figures taking all aspects of the digital world such as gaming and Hollywood by storm, unfortunately. This could be in part to observations made by many that the DS figures aren't production ready by industry standards of proper innovation in the animation and physics details. Maybe Daz had the right idea, but a lack of the necessary resources to realize these goals fully. A similar analogy could be like saying the kid is smart but that he would score even higher on the exam if he had a good tutor.. a tutor that the parents simply cannot afford...so its back to hoping the kid really is as smart as we all hope he is. Just because Daz3d as a company isnt innovating to the degree we wish might not be because they don't also wish to advance in there areas' but their hands may already be tied in various less than obvious ways...such as aging and antiquated platforms as was detailed in the highly informative but still somewhat what the hell why are you riding a bike while making this video thing that was uploaded.
Blender is a great example of a huge risk that seems to be paying off. Blender is entirely about innovation and forward thinking, in a very modern sense, and that is darned sweet. So great, the universe still grants wishes and rewards risk takers now and then. But how long has it taken Blender to get this point of familiarity and popularity? Its funded by people who have stated that they don't care about money...which simply isnt the vast majority of people. Most people care quite deeply about money. This new niche literally arrived just a few months ago with 2.8. Most people cant afford 20 years of losses on investments before recouperating any profits at all.
How many other Blender'esque upstarts can you name who no longer exist at all, swallowed up by Max and Maya and C4d and now Blender itself since its now a big time application?
Side B of the coin: Changes don't necessarily start from within but could in fact be due to external stresses...
Playing it safe and refusing to innovate can also be deadly from a Darwinian standpoint. But then there are the examples of crocodiles and sharks...ancient designs yet to be outdone so they remain..happily consuming more recent additions to the animal kingdom. Is DS a shark / crocodile type of entity? Is it already perfect enough in its niche to survive there for a time more or less unchanged so long as the general environment remains more or less unchanged?
Is the digital world changing such fundamental ways that it puts DS under any real stress to innovate or evolve greatly within a short time frame? I don't know enough about the industry at large to have any real clue, but my guess is no. Probably for a good time more (5-8 years) DS can keep doing what its doing and still remain viable. Anyhow that's all I have to offer; just more questions!
Maya is free with the education subscription (very liberal conditions, just sign up for a 3d course) and is currently the BEST choice for anyone who wants to use Daz figures with professional features mentioned by others on this thread. There is absolutely no barrier to using state-of-the-art hair, dynamics, cloth along with the best character animation tools in the industry and whatever else you feel you might need with Daz figures, except your imagination and willingness to learn. I really don't know what the big whoop is. Blender is nice, but it doesn't handle Daz figures as smoothly. With the G8 for Maya plugin, a Daz figure smoothly goes to Maya with morphs and JCM's intact. There is even a plugin by the same author that automatically handles the material conversion to different renderers (Redshift, Arnold, and Vray). It's ridiculously easy now, and did I say its practically free? In Maya, I have choices of 4 or more hair simulators (aftermarket and costly) or the very good built-in systems (there are two of them, both pro quality). Want explosions and FX like liquids? Also built into Maya (FREE) and there are aftermarket plugins, all very good. A hobbyist can play and play until their heart's content. A real pro is having very little to do with Daz Studio anyways (unless they enjoy working more slowly). I used to lament over Daz Studio not being up to the task of animating Daz figures - until I discovered Maya. I never looked back and suspect I never will. Subscriptions are for pros who can pay for them with earnings from their work or their studios. For those who are learning 3d, Maya is free.
*edited to say Blender doesn't handle Daz figures as smoothly
To clarify, my proposal about having old and new monitors isn't solely due to software that scales bad; it's mostly because i dont want to sacrifice all that old content that looks bad on modern displays. Retro 2d games, no matter how many shaders and filters you attach on them to imitate true look, never looks good on high-res monitor, ideally you need sony bvm/pvm or commodore display, with rgb cable etc. Old movies, that will just never get blu ray treatment, so they exist only on DVD, or even vhs, those also look shit on modern tv with modern players comparing to how they look on tech from 2004 which they fit natively. Old photos and images and drawings and whatever, that you keep since 90s and early 00s, also either they ll look small on your modern display or, eh, what, put them on phone screen? as with rescale they look awful. Etc. etc. etc.
And yeas i kind of hate (too quick and too rapid) progress in some way. 768p on my laptop is still good enough for me. And 1080 on desktop will be nice for me for a long time. Just like 480p tv was good for decades before that. As for scale, i remember setting res to 1152x864 on 1280x1024 monitor cause everything was too small on max res for my eyes. That was around 2006 and monitor was not very big though. Now i'm on larger monitor which helps.
As for original question on Carrara/Bryce UI, while for me it's acceptable on my 1080p, i can imagine that on 4k or even qhd it will be just not working at all for our eyes :(
I still wonder to know all those cases when D|S actually find a place in pros' pipeline/workflow.
Can you elaborate please ? What's in the maya plugin that blender doesn't get ? As for G3 and G8, morphs and jcms are imported fine in blender. And materials conversion is quite good too.
you can probably do all of that, using d-force tweaking the gravity, and animated textures https://www.daz3d.com/animated-textures-script-pro-for-daz-studio-3-4, or just animate the defuse base color on the timeline using graphmate for switches and blends
I might be mistaken, but the last time I checked, the best ways to get Daz into Blender was Diffeomorphic and Teleblender. Neither of them are as easy as pie as Genesis 8 for Maya. Literally in 3 clicks I can import a figure, attached to an IK control rig with morphs already attached with sliders. Want a full face rig with support for iPhone facial mocap? There is a script for that. I'm not sure about Teleblender, but Diffeomorphic involves more steps to get that and you still won't get the IK control rig for animation (which is the reason you're importing from Daz, right?) As I said, Blender is nice and it's free, but Maya is the best and free.
It is true that diffeomorphic usually involves more steps to import a character, but it is just because it has many options. Indeed you can also choose among different ik rigs for animation. Or you can even convert a G3 rig into a G2 rig for better mocap. I guess you either didn't take your time to try it out or you're not up to date.
Yeah i thought that school/university/courses should be certified by autodesk and/or some global program, therefore it's not something that truely works worldwide, so, ahem, people outside of USA and Europe might not have possibility (?)
wolf359, thanks for telling details of your workflow.
I also remember that you were creating clothes for your characters yourself in Marvelous Designer.
I don't know. I was trying to export Howie Farkes Yuletide Cottage out of Carrara the other day and does it really animate better than DAZ Studio as some have claimed? I can see it has some physics & other nice instancing stuff. It's non-iray rendering is not really faster or better than iRay rending in DAZ Studio when rendering I tried it. Going to the Smart Content tab crashes it on my computer though. And to navigate in the viewport with the Yuletide Cottage scene was slow. It almost seems it would be easier to port the iRay API & DAZ 3D Model API to Carrara than to do the reverse but I suppose that the coders with the actual code have actually considered both. Someone said 2015 was the last Carrara update done but don't say what was updated. 2015 wasn't that long ago but the compiler was probably Borland or MS VC++ from 2000 or so.
There were no such requirements when I applied (2017).
G3 rig into G2 rig? Are you sure we are talking about the same thing? because it sure sounds like you're talking about a skeleton and not an animation rig. The original rig stays in Daz Studio when the figure is exported. There is no G2 rig or G3 rig in the imported application unless the plugin makes one. Maybe you have a little confusion about what a control rig is? Anyways, not wanting to start a Maya vs Blender war. They both are good choices, but personally I could never do without the dozens of tools and scripts I use to make production easier in Maya.
Middle schools and high schools Junior colleges Colleges, universities, and technical schools Home school programs that belong to a nationally recognized home schooling body
Which rules out a lot of hobbyists who just wish to learn Maya and not interested at all to start commercial activities. A lot of 3D courses won't qualify for the Maya terms.
Guess for those people Blender is still the only option.
NOt at all. There are online schools that qualify (Gnomon for example). Simply apply for a class to get your Maya license and don't reapply after your first term. That's what I did and I got a 3 year educational license. I saw no stipulation that you had to attend class the full duration of the 3 years.
and
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/customer-service/account-management/education-program/who-can-join/eligibility-edu-institutions
It's certainly not innovating. You're right that all the "new" things are like 5+ years behind the curve. They have us pretty well trained to be excited for outdated concepts to be added into the platform. The only advantage DS has over something like Blender is that its easy to navigate.
Really? I use Blender, but having a finite amount of time to spend on 3D, I find that loading content natively (materials, JCMs, geografts, HD morphs, etc.) is by far the biggest advantage DS has.
- Greg
...well, "free" only after you pay for the college credit (and any required prerequisites). To qualify for the basic 3D Modelling and Animation course at our local community college you would need an additional 13 credits of prerequisite courses (total of 16) which comes to 1,850$, about 300$ is more than the standard annual subscription price. I also imagine the educational rate is only effective while you are enrolled.at an accredited college as Autodesk no longer offers perpetual licences..
I'm sorry, but I've read the educational terms. First off, they're rather specific and LENGTHY. They are NOT as "liberal" as you say, and the way I interpret it, I'd rather pay the $1600 subscription than possibly get caught up in an ethics case just because I showed my artwork to somebody who started asking questions.
Stop right there and READ THE TERMS. Don't get sucked in and find your name in the news one day.
You are definitely outside the bounds of the SPIRIT OF THE AGREEMENT. You should not do this. The educational license does not cover the ethical contortions that you're putting yourself into.
This doesn't matter. It would STILL be cheaper than being found guilty of fraud.
I say tread with caution here. Better yet, if you're not actually attending a school and learning Maya as part of your coursework, then you'd be a lot safer by just signing up for the regular subscription.
Yes diffeomorphic can convert a G3 skeleton into a G2 skeleton, that's a fk rig by the way. As for animation rigs you can choose between mhx that's the makehuman standard, and rigify that's the blender standard.
Blender is used more for original animation than for mocap, also 2.8 is relatively new and not all the plugins are ported yet. But from a quick search I found these.
https://blendermarket.com/products/auto-rig-pro?ref=2
https://tentacles.org.uk/quicktalk
I watched the whole thing. I'm not as worried as him. I mean, I'm worried, but for other reasons.
Qt 5.x is backwards compatible with 4.x... he said it isn't as easy as pushing a button, but it kind of is. Qt5 has newer, cooler GUI controls that 4.x doesn't have, but that is not going to make or break Daz in the future.
Also, it is not quite true that Qt Script is gone; it got integrated into another component called the JS Engine, whose interface looks awfully like the DzScript class of the C++ SDK. In any case, Qt Script and Daz Script are BOTH based on something else called ECMA Script, which is alive and well. Nothing to see here, folks, the sky isn't falling.
But the point that he most agregiously overlooks is that fact that the majority of Daz Studio, its guts, from the looks of the SDK is written to the 2003 C++ standard, and this is among the most portable languages in the computing world. He correctly pointed it out that many differences revolve around how GUIs behave, but this is really simple programming that junior programmers could do because it envolves some of the first programming idioms that junior programmers learn. One of the things one learns while studying Software Engineering is the Separation of Concerns, which means that the buttons that you click to perform a particular function are well separated from the mechanism by with that function is performed. How to display a button and respond to it being clicked might change, but it is simple to do so, and doing the drawing or whatever the button was supposed to do in the first place is more complicated, but that changes much less rapidly precisely because it is more complicated.
Another point that he doesn't bring up is that Qt has open source roots, forced into it a long time ago by the KDE foundation. It would not be a good use of time, but the beauty of open source is that anyone can get the source to Qt4 and fix whatever bugs they wanted/needed to. You don't need to wait for the Qt Foundation. There's a saying that Free Software is "Free as in Speech", much less importantly "Free as in Beer". Off topic: That is why Linux just works, while people complain endlessly about driver silliness in Windows, and Blender is gathering features at an already alarming rate and accelerating.
I'd really like to think that Daz simply must upgrade to Qt5 or die, but that's simply not the case. I don't think Daz is willfully resisting upgrading, against their own best interest; there's just no compelling reason to do so. They'll do it when they absolutely have to.
I agree that the quality of Daz's framework speaks for itself when it enables the PAs to do such awesome work. What Daz enables people to do, and the ease at which they can do it is unparalleled, full stop.
But, sir, have you actually tried to USE the SDK for something non-trivial yet, and tried to figure something out with the included "documentation"? Seriously, why even bother saying that you have documentation when virtually all of it is like:
Function: getX()
Description: Gets the X
I am not kidding. I think someone wrote a parser that auto-generated the documentation.
Or have you heard the deafening chirp of the crickets after posting in the SDK forum an extremely basic question that you couldn't divine from useless non-explanations like the representative one above? As an exercise in reality, go to the SDK forum and count the number of questions, from what number of users, that is someone saying "I couldn't figure out how to do..." and has ZERO replies.
Or have you had direct messages to a Daz dev, literally begging for any kind of help, ANYTHING, and been 100% completely ignored? Not even a reply saying, "I don't know", "Sorry, that's Daz IP", or even "I'm really busy and can't respond right now"?
I think you are reacting to the POTENTIAL of what Daz Studio should be and can be, but not what it IS.
There are ifdefs all over the place for Qt3 in the SDK, The guy in the blog is well intentioned, but overreacting.
But I was in the room at SIGGRAPH when Ton Roosendall said that that is exactly what UbiSoft is going to do. And Epic Games as well. I found it interesting that Epic is paying $1.2 million not directly for new features, but rather to get Blender into a position so that Epic can throw their own developers behind Blender and have them be productive. That will amount to a lot more than $1.2 million, all told. And Ton spent a lot of time talking to Amazon representatives, I have no idea why, but yes, Amazon... I keep saying that Blender is today where Linux was in the late 1990s, and we all know how that one progressed... Microsoft is about to become the biggest distributor of Linux in the world. Microsoft. If even they can, twenty years later, see what was so obvious if you looked, Daz can too.
Me neither... Daz's quality and price are both far beyond, say, iClone, which usually doesn't happen. And G8s, with their JCMs animate BEAUTIFULLY, it's just an unnecessary PITA to get them out of Daz.
Why they make such incredible products with so much potential and then inexplicably limit them is beyond me. I would by so much more content with my creativity ignited if the whole process weren't so cumbersome.
I don't see how the people that should know how to do it making an export tool to get great Daz content into Blender would cost Daz any customers.