Will there be a daz studio 5.0 ?
boisselazon
Posts: 458
in The Commons
Considering that:
- Daz 4.x (and especially 4.5+) has been out for ages
- Daz 4.8 iray big move, new render engine (nice!) but so few software additions
- ….but no major module added (dynamic cloth, physics, etc…)
- Daz business model very (not to say exclusively and massively) content oriented
- Daz (somewhere in forum) talked about a 4.9 release (essentialy bug corrections?)
- From 4.5 to 4.8 took ages!
- Most of teams are on content dev on new figures (G3)
- Despite they are good, Most of products are more or less abandoned (hexagon, Bryce, carera?,…)
- Daz new development https://www.morph3d.com/
Do you think that we will see in the near future a 5.0 release with big improvements and additional modules?
(I'm expecting soooooo many things )
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Comments
an emphatic "possibly.", everything else is hearsay.
i don't think there is a problem with the time from 4.5 to 4.8. We did have at least a 4.6 in there. Some companies add a new number to thier software every year because they need to resell it to you. I think the progress from 4.0 through now has been good. The numbers used don't mean much.
It is not about numbers. It is about new major release wich explicitely adds (many) new improvments/modules.
Yes, you're right about the timeline from 4 to 4.8 but it's been a long time since we hope to see certain things added to our beloved software. for exemple: physics, dynamic cloths, improved animation tools (well, not for me but I've seen on other thread that it is a big expectation from users), modeling tool (since hexagon is gone, we expect a super exagon like maybe inside daz?), etc...
According to the wiki page for Hexagon there's a private beta of Hex going on (no idea when that entry was added though), so it might not be that dead...
If DS5 does come out and it's a pay for app it will cause a riot in render-town. The 4.0 advanced purchase then later free debacle when it happened is still a wound that left scars for some users.
I wanted to learn hex but it was so buggy on everything I tried it on it was unusable for me.
If they do fix it I'd be interested in trying to incorporate it into my pipeline again.
I guess I don't ultimately care too much what the Studio version is called. As long as it works..... And isn't IRay only. The moment 3delight is dropped is the moment I stop upgrading.
In general though, I think DAZ focuses on vending content. Thats where the money is.
Recently I was wondering about all this myself... So I decided to do some research into the matter.
Since as noted above, there is a "possibility" and everything else is just speculation, but I wanted a more concrete answer.
After asking several employees who work in the building materials department at the local Home Depot, I didn't get any helpful answers... but I did find a nice acrylic additive for mortar and hydraulic cement. Undeterred, I took my investigation a step further...
I gathered up a group of chimpanzees (it always eventually involves apes and monkeys) that used to work for me (they used to write my readmes, but I use Rhesus Macaques now... they work for less money and their name reminds me of Reese's peanut butter cups)... They were happy for the work, even though they had been doing a lot of speech writing and fact checking for various candidates for the upcoming elections, they are very underpaid and a lot of the candidates are also starting to use Rhesus monkeys too now, so work had slowed down for them... Anyway to make a long story more confusing, they came over and I set them up with some very sophisticated brain wave amplification devices made out of spaghetti colanders, automotive spark plugs and old radio tubes... And one of those big shiny metal ball devices that makes the static electricity bolts and goes ZzzzzapZzzzzzzZzzzap... It was all very cool looking, but the the idea was to harness the collective precognitive powers of the chimps to see what the future of DAZ Studio was... Well, first I had to explain to them what it was because most of the chimps were only familiar with Blender... But after setting them in the right direction, they focused their thoughts and the static electricity started zapping back and forth and in no time they found the answer... Well, I think they did... They all pretty much just started shrieking and throwing poop, and one even shouted "Oh my god, the horror, the horror!”... Which was really weird because they normally just use sign language and he said it in a perfect British accent... Moments later they ran off and carjacked a passing Mercedes and I haven't seen them since.
I'm going to take that as a positive sign, since they haven't called back to say otherwise... I hope that wasn't an overly long answer, as I probably could have just said, "The chimpanzees have implied the answer is yes, and lots of good stuff will come with it"... But then you might have been wondering which chimpanzees and how did I come up with that answer.
Well, still have some paperwork to fill out on this incident and my insurance company is very picky about details, so have a great day and I hope we all are looking forward to the next version of DS!
And they make improvements to the software to make using their content easier. But the people who are hung up about converting Daz Studio (a character creation tool) into a modeller or something else ignore the improvements that did go into DS over time.
I couldn't tell you the last time Photoshop added a new tool I could use...but I still love it and use it regularly. I could start listing the stuff that Daz added since 3, 4 or even 4.5 but people would dismiss those improvements because they don't include bullet physics. A feature that might be cool sure, but not sure most really would use it.
Some peoples expectations aren't really well grounded. There is no reason to expect something that was not formally announced.
Version numbering is largely irrelevent in the circumstances with which Daz opperates; it's main purpose, like any other, is to show progression. They could have called it version 5.0 when they added IRAY, a not inconsiderable additon. That they didn't might mean they have something specific in mind, something more worthy of the jump in version number.
The thing is, that would be pure speculation - guesswork - on my part, to call it anything else. That the version will increase, is likely as Daz add new features, and as Larsmidnatt said, they make improvements to their software; they need a way of keeping track, and chossing one users feel is familiar with is a legimate reason; there is no way to read anything into, nor any way to expect anything other than what has been announced.
... Nothing has been announced; yet.
Yeah, how about real light bounce in 3Delight. Now that would be something.
Different teams. There is a DAZ studio Dev team who I would guess would also work on the other programs as there was time. But the thing to remember about them is that Studio was developed in house so they know that program far better than the others. That makes it faster/easier/home ground for them to work on. Figure work/development is done by other people then the Studio team adds the support stuff for the newer figure. Morph3d is part of DAZ but a separate part. Products and so forth with bleed over but the staff is separate.
They are going to put off going to 5.0 as long as they can and won't do it until it does become necessary for a new SDK. As we know an SDK change causes havoc and it is not something they are going to jump to lightly. So, changes big and small are going to keep going into 4 until they can't any more.
IMO, the answer to whether 3DL will continue to be supported is in your statement. When they stop supporting 3DL, they'll have to stop selling content that is only for use in 3DL. There's a TON of it. This doesn't mean they'll keep adding new features to 3DL, though.
Curtailed support for 3DL could be an opening for Smith Micro to get more market share. There are always artists who prefer biased renderers, especially for cartooning, draw styles, shadow manipulation, and other effects. Even though Poser is getting an unbiased renderer, I'm sure Firefly is there to stay. There's no benefit to SM dropping it, and as Poser is paid software, they can afford keeping development of its mature features.
I just have begun to work with DS4.8 and now you ask on DS5????????????
3Delight has to be supported also in the future.
Something's wrong in what you say.
Version numbering for a big program is important. Minor release are there for the development flow, for bug correction, to catch, grab or maintain a growing base of users etc...
But, IN THE MEANTIME, a company decide if they will go for a major release..or not. I'm a developer myself, by no way, you start to develop "release 5.0" AFTER "release 4.99". You do it way before that.
So, my post -and its short tittle - was to know if we can expect something really new or not considering the relevant points that I noticed in my post.
As a user, I know the boundaries and the limits of daz studio. it does well what it is intended to do. but it could do better. Far better considering its foundations ;-)
As a user again, learning a program is an investment. I nned to know a bit the development/strategy orientation of my tools. I don't have the time to learn many programs. I prefer to know well few of them. That is the "why" of my question.
The features for 3DL will progress...to a degree, as long as Daz incorporates the new versions of it. And the way it has worked in the past, that was pretty much an automatic thing. Now gaining access to those features, especially through the existing shaders, is a different question.
nDelphi...it's a matter of shaders. 3DL is capable of full GI with bounce, the included shaders in Studio are not.
They just reupped it and I think I read that is generally a 3 year thing so 3DL will be in studio that long at least. Last I heard they were still very much involve with its implementation and feature set in studio so there is no "curtailed support" for quite some time. I suppose in a few years they might see enough of a drop in use that the money to reup again would be better spent elsewhere but that is a long time from now and user interest/numbers is pretty hard to speculate about.
"So, my post -and its short tittle - was to know if we can expect something really new or not considering the relevant points that I noticed in my post."
Will they have a 5? No doubt at some point there will be. They may continue impliment new things before they move to that new SDK however.
Well DS 4.8 has already so much tools and things I do not need and use so I do not need a 5 with much more stuff :)
That's true if it's a commecial application, since the new features and new version number are what justify a new upgrade for sale. But DS isn't sold, it's given away free, so there isn't the same need to have a new full version number. 4.6, 4.7 and 4.8 have added significant new features which in a commecial application would have warranted new full versions. We are seeing a similar thing in subscription-based software, though not so clearly.
Different tools for different tasks. You have to learn different tools regardless. Whether those tools are in DS or in another program doesn't change much. Physics, modelling would all be new to DS if added so you would still have to learn them. But if those are genuine needs for you now, you have options for them elsewhere(some in the Daz store even). And there is no real need to limit what tools you have in your toolkit. Many users leverage multiple programs to craft their pieces. This allows them to pick tools they like the best.
Rob or Spooky actually explained the version numbering a long time ago...and that explanation basically was> "We call it what we want..."
The important thing is that it makes sense to the devs...
Seriously...does Windows 10 make any sense (it is NOT the 10th version). Or Firefox jumping from version 3.something to the high teens/20-something?
I can work with that.
can't agree with that.
Daz is not free.
Daz is sold at 0 according to a business model. With daz, you can do almost nothing without spending good money in content.
So the next upgrade, even sold at 0 will be there to make again money with the new feature (example: dynamic cloth and new outfit to get the most out of it, other example with animations etc...)
That is not the price of the product that make the whole thing. This is the business model. at the end of the day, we all are CUSTOMERS.
"Version numbering is largely irrelevent in the circumstances with which Daz opperates; it's main purpose, like any other, is to show progression."
A kind of major caveat, here, though. Products that no longer function in later versions; as slight a change as, say 4.6 to 4.8.
This, to content customers, is a bit relevent. Spending the hard earned dollars on products that may become inexplicably non-functional in a next version is consequential to the customer base.
My spending, this PA Sale, is definitley way down. It's just too much trouble to have to contact a vender to see if a product is compatible with the quite recent version I'm currently using.
That hassle has given me enough pause to question whether I really need a new whatever-it-is. Mostly, I'm finding I don't, since the PA Sale purchases can't be refunded if they won't work.
As a fairly long-term, good customer, I'd say that's relevent.
Well... someone should get cracking on that and make it happen.
amen to that
Yeah, there's a number of products I've been interested in that I've decided not to get because it looks like they've stopped working.
Among other things, I feel a little burned by getting an AoA atmospheric camera that apparently stopped working properly .2 versions ago.
I think the point that Richard was trying to make is that, in PAID software, going from one full version to the next warrants charging for the next version. D|S is "commercial" software in the scheme of things, but it's the psychology of full version numbers that cues pruchasing into the necessity of shelling out for an upgrade. The next big version could well be 4.9, or they coupld pull a Microsoft and skip entire numbers. or name the software by year. Does it really matter?
On 3DLight, while I do believe D|S will continue to have it for a while, I do wonder about the level of love for it from within Daz. In other threads, PAs have said that 3DL promos that "don't look good" compared to Iray promos are rejected. Well, these are the same PAs, the same quality level of promos, that before were routinely accepted. What's changed? In going through older content that's still 3DL-based, it looks pretty good.
Divorced of monetary and marketing drives, esthetically '5' should be some dramatic shift or evolution of the product, I imagine.
Heck, Iray could have been that point, but guess not.
I don't know if they have a planned 5.0, or just are waiting to be inspired.