Masterstroke said:

Simple rules for any DS user:
No Mac,
no AMD
 

AMD GPUs are not useful for Iray (they can be used for dForce and Filament), AMD CPUs are fine.

Hogyo said:

Fishtales said:

Hogyo said:

Just made this mistake, bought a new PC with the AMD 6700x GPU.

After having tried every possible thing (including octane..)

The result is . Sending it back to were it came from!

It is Iray that wont render with a AMD card not Studio. Iray needs a NVIDIA card as Iray belongs to NVIDIA. 

Of course you're right but in DAZ, IRAY has become the standart, everything is designed for IRAY, ain't it?

No, you can still render in 3DLight, Filament and even Iray with the CPU but if you want fast renders with IRAY, you need a relatively new NVIDIA GPU, which has been no secret.

The Blurst of Times said:

Contest theme is up for super-special people (i.e. the SP elites, LOL).

"She is a freedom-loving young woman
exploring the world and finding herself."

"Entries will be judged by Daz employees and will be based on lighting, texture, creativity, and the young, free-spirited theme."

---

Rules say to EMAIL this time since the "seasonpass" category was a problem last time.

1. Use the Daz character Jacqueline 8.1 to create a new static render not previously posted or shared that relates to the theme of a “freedom-loving young woman exploring the world and her inner spirit” — showcasing inner exploration and self-awareness.
2. E-mail your submission to “[email protected]” in .jpg format.

https://www.daz3d.com/official-contest-rules

EDIT:

Whoops! End date is May 4.

"Contest Period: Entries will be accepted by email starting on April 27, 2021, and ending May 4, 2021 at 11:59:59 MT. All online entries must be received by May 4, 2021 011:59:59 p.m. MT."

My point exactly, not enough time for me to assemble something AND render. I have a MAC that unfortunately is NOT seeing much support from DAZ (can't use Hexagon any more, can't try Filament, and can't update to Big Sur if I want even use DAZ, most plugins are Windows only (not necessarily DAZ's fault, but still). And I'm not canceling a current render just to make a render for a contest that probably won't have a chance at winning (I have my reasons for that comment, and is not directed at any users--contests tend to be unfair at times and true winning entries tend not to win).

DARTANBECK.COM

Part 2

DAZ ZONE

DAZ ZONE - This is an exciting page full of my love for Daz 3D with a stroll back in time to when Genesis came out and then even further down is this wonderful video I posted years ago - Daz 3D as it was when I was an aspiring young PA here! (the face you see there (video's thumbnail) is Kevin, who was my boss! :) )

Daz Content

Daz 3D Content - Mainly just a container/landing page, but will eventually be really cool!

• Daz 3D Human History - A stroll through the Figure Generations

• Daz 3D Bundles - A look at the amazing wealth of content to be found in Bundles at Huge savings

• Genesis 1 ROCKS!!! - I really dig into what I love about this amazing figure generation

• Victoria 4 - A look at what is still (by far) the absolute Most Supported 3D articulate human figure on the planet

• Some Personal Favorites - Kind of the opposite of "Buy something that doesn't work", this is stuff that I love, and it does work! I'll be adding a LOT more to this one as I've only just begun

• Character Packs - a look at some of the cool Character Packs for our figures

• Introducing Genesis 8.1 - Daz 3d takes another leap in 3D human Excellence!!!

• Animal Kingdom

• Animal Kingdom - Domestic Animals

• Content Generations Conversion - Create library versions of items from any generation of Genesis to any other!

• Carrara 8.5 Pro Content - This page shows the massive bundle that comes with Carrara 8.5 Pro. The price of Pro includes all of this plus Carrara Pro? Very Cool!

Daz Studio

Daz Studio - I've started this page to help gather information towards learning this amazing suite called Daz Studio. As I learn I'll be expanding this whole section, but I like this page now already. I update it when I can - several times so far.

Daz Studio Page Quick Map

• What is Daz Studio?

• Master Daz Studio

• Daz Bridges - Maya, Blender, C4D, 3ds Max, Unreal and Unity

• Daz Bridges How To - Steph, from Daz 3D, shows you how to use them

• dForce and New Animation Tools Demos

• Content Creation Tools - Oh Yeah! This is what I mostly use DS for now - and even in that I've only been scratching the surface!

• Filament PBR Engine!!! - Near-Real Time PBR viewport and rendering!

• New Animation Features - DS 4.14 was designed with Animation in Mind!

• Free OctaneRender for Daz Studio

PC + Experience

Platinum Club + Experience - It's amazing how much value we can get from this service if we check in often! Even with little internet time I've been able to really fill up my library over the years - and the yearly membership cost is tiny comparatively

• PC+ Cloth Frenzy - I've only just started this page. Since I started using VWD and removing rigging from figures so that I can add/delete polygons, change domains, etc., stuff in the low-price range in the PC+ catalog looks great and is fun to model with! I am working on a tutorial on how I make the clothing into static prop objects and then model them to fit the morphed figure, then run them through VWD as if using them as conforming clothes. It's really neat!

Bridging Technology - A new leap in workflow design and implementation

• Mimic Lip Sync

• Rosie 5.5

Blender Zone

Blender Zone

• Royal Skies LLC

• Diffeomorphic

• Diffeomorphic DAZ Importer

DO IT IN POST

VFX Zone > Fusion - Movie Magic at its Finest! Hollywood-grade compositing software

Editing Zone > DaVinci Resolve - This page contains the Resolve Training materials I'm using to learn this Hollywood-grade Non-Linear Editor - and the free version also includes Fusion, built right in! (along with Fairlight Audio and Resolve's high-end color corrector)

• A Quick Look - This is my short demonstration of some of the techniques I used to create the "Introducing Rosie 5" video

GALLERY

Gallery - This landing page also has a carousel of some of my images you've all seen before. The Still Images and Video pages are very much incomplete still

• Videos

  • Artemis Knight

• Still Images

Inspiration

• STAR WARS

• The Witcher

• Alita Battle Angel - has some missing videos that have been taken down - must fix

  • Homage Corner

  • Industrial Light & Magic (ILM)

  • Inspirations - Weta Digital

​Downloads

• Starry Sky for Carrara

• Carrara EnvironKits

• Woodlands

• Underwater Realms

• Badlands

• dB Animation Kits

Base Scenes

• Base Scene

• dB's Character Template Scene

THE SOFTWARE

The Software - I've included most of what I'm currently using and more. I still have plenty of stuff to add though. HitFilm will be coming to this page, and getting its own but I haven't used in yet in my current workflow - but its coming! Some software is just linked to from this page, others have their own as well:

• Cyberlink Software - Great setups for video production and a lot more. Philip Staiger (PD Howler) uses this to make his awesome videos

• Autodesk - With as little time as I have to use software, this high-end stuff isn't the practical choice. But when you want to go pro....

• PD Howler - Oh yeah!!! My favorite image editor to date!

• Particle Illusion - amazing particle effects simulator/recorder, now from Boris

Whew! So that's the current list of pages. While a few of them are rather bare, currently just containers or landing pages, they have a lot of content in the works for them and the other pages are looking pretty cool, I think.

...and some of my Carrara forum friends have asked my to put up a "Donate" button of some sort, so I reluctantly made a Donate page. I don't really have a method for taking donations, as such, so I offer some examples there ;)

Likley, Daz would need Soft body physics to have a good monetizing factor.  Maybe wrong?

Quite a few of us want and need it like yesterday, but think the main focus today is still sell content with still frames/dforce.  dForce means generally good for that animation and no full spring back, despite any weight map games.  Bridges and Filament were first additions to support the more basic animations.  Not to say some users didn't take time to push the DAZ envelope.  Bridges mean so much again for moving content with issues galore.  Or that's my take.

Sincerely hope DAZ will find a way to monetize animations going forward.  They can have my credit if it means a 2 year buy-in minimum.   But guess that's a less popular method.  Also, guess MAC support among more main current focus, depending on number of actual MAC users.  Personally think MAC is more suited to a more canned environment, so smaller studios like DAZ will need more time and thought.

Can't believe Carrara had bullet physics. Wow.  Don't know how advanced, but still.

Anyway, add my $ vote for soft body physics.

That must be how Poser was able to add the Cycles rendering engine, but not Eevee... Superfly is just an implementation of Blender's Cycles.
Filament seems like it has a long way to go — I too don't like the look of its renders. Its documentation on physically based rendering is an academic deep dive on the subject...
https://google.github.io/filament/Filament.md.html
Eeevee is cool, but it also has a lot of limitations...
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/eevee/limitations.html

ArkadySkies said:

Rev2019 said:

they should skip that loosy Iray and put Blender Cycles into Daz 3D instead

much more realistic lighting and shaders.

I think it might be faster too, at least there seem to be more options to optimize the scene without making everything look terrible.

Plus, then they could replace Filament with Eevee. I was not impressed with Filament.

Not legally. Cycles specifically has a different liscence than the rest of blender that allows it to be used in closed source programs - Eevee however has the same liscence as the rest of blender as it is to integrated to seperate in the way Cycles was.

Also to the original point, as someone who uses both the idea that Cycles has more intrinsically realistic shaders or lighting is... misguided (lights in particular. In blender its hard to even attempt using any real world units at all, which personally I would consider an element of "realistic") Cycles does have a dedicated SSS shader rather than relying on volumes, but even this isn't more "realistic" just way less of a pita to set up. Most of Cycles real advantages are being in blender - hey intancing and particles work better in cycles, (because blender handles those better,) using nodes for you shaders is so much easier for cycles (because blender will update them in real time) etc. If you take cycles out of that environment a lot of those benefits go away.

In my experience Cycles in more memory friendly but again its hard to say how much of that is Cycles and how much of that is blender. Blender has things like adaptive sampling that can make renders faster - although the user has to know what they're doing - theres no one size fits all settings to speed up renders. Iray might actually be a bit faster at interiors lit from the outside, though both are not great and luxrender knocks both out of the water on this one.

Cycles is great but its not something that Daz could just plop in and woo everyones renders get better because its better.

I have seen proposed solutions for this in the forum, but they were for previous versions of Daz Studio... and they don't work.

I have made many good renders with Iray so far and I had never encountered this problem before.

In the attached image you can see obvious jagged edges on rounded objects but not on the rest of the scene.

The outline of the four closest balls are not round as they should, and more obviously in the gradient shades of the yellow ball and cue ball.

Also on the left arm's sleeve.

But I noticed afterwards that it is not only in the Iray render, even in the viewport, with Filament displayed, the problem is visible (though less obviously).

Is there some tweeking I can do to resolve this problem?

Rev2019 said:

they should skip that loosy Iray and put Blender Cycles into Daz 3D instead

much more realistic lighting and shaders.

I think it might be faster too, at least there seem to be more options to optimize the scene without making everything look terrible.

Plus, then they could replace Filament with Eevee. I was not impressed with Filament.

I can't disable casting shadow in filament so i hope there is gonna be an option for this.
and Bloom/Glare/Emissive Lights effects should be added too.

Is that a render or preview? If preview, is it the Filament Drawstyle? That often makes hair look thin.

This goes in "Product Suggestions." A mod will move it there eventually.

Where is this picture from?

Based on the wonky straps and barebones texturing of the bikini top, it looks like something the artist made themselves in Marvelous Designer or something.

The face doesn't ring any bells, but it looks like a Filament render and those always come out looking weird.

Can barely see the hair, so I can't help you there.

margrave said:

lilweep said:

i wish the Purple clay pre-render of the Filament viewport mode was an option.

I keep forgetting Filament even exists, honestly. 

Filament was such a disappointment that I have ignored it since I first tried it out. But yes, I totally agree with your OP - some way of seeing the actual contact instead of total shadow would be a big help. 

lilweep said:

i wish the Purple clay pre-render of the Filament viewport mode was an option.

I keep forgetting Filament even exists, honestly. 

i wish the Purple clay pre-render of the Filament viewport mode was an option.

actually its being problem when you use clothes that have transparency like stockings.
in filament there is no shadow bias option of the lights, stocking itself casting shadow to the body. There has to be a way to disable casting shadow.

contedesfees said:

This book was published in 2013 and 350 pages long and claims to be comprehensive, although it's obviously dated. Never the less, it's the most recent volume I can find. Is any one familiar with it? Can someone please give me a frank review, favourable or otherwise? I really would like to develop competence with DAZ Studio and I'm working in the dark. Thanks to all.

It it was released in 2013 then it was written for DS 4.5 or 4.6, which means before DS included features like Iray render engine (added in 4.8), dForce clothes (4.10), strand-based hair and dForce hair (4.11), Filament (4.14) and probably many more things.

ebergerly said:

It renders fine (section caps disabled) on my GTX-1080ti plus RTX-2070 Super. No weird memory spikes. BTW, did you check your log file to see what it says? Also, keep in mind it may be scene-dependent, so just because it works in my scene doesn't mean you don't have some other issues going on that might cause even an upgrade to 4.15 to go bad...

Also, I'm trying to figure how you can use the section cap feature and still get the HDR lighting inside the capped object(s)? When it does the orange cap does it still admit light as if the cap didn't exist? These cap thingy's really have me scratching my head. 

Many thanks for the info, I'll update to 4.15 and see what I get :)

As for HDRI's - simply place the section planes just outside of your camera shot (so they're not visible) - on the sides and on the top (so three in total, you could also do the bottom one) - this way you'll get a 3-way HDRI light coverage. The planes are going to cut elements of your scene that are not visible in the camera shot, thus unblocking the way for HDRI light. This can be done by hand, but there also is a product for this:

https://www.daz3d.com/interior-light-pro-for-filament-and-iray

"The Iray culling camera has a slider attached to the camera that allows you to choose how much of your scene is culled. Once your scene around the camera is invisible, ambient light from the chosen HDRI can cast inwards and illuminate your scene."

marble said:

Just a sideline comment about comparing render quality. 

A few years ago my render options were restricted because I had an iMac and was not willing to wait for IRay to chug along on my poor old Mac CPU. So I got quite good at using the alternatives - either 3Delight or Reality/Luxrender. With the latter, I had to spend a lot of time tweaking the materials because, despite the claims of the Reality developer, the results of the automatic conversion were less than satisfactory. So I made the adjustments myself and I can honestly say that the renders were pretty close to what can be achieved in IRay. The problem was that Luxrender was also slow but it did have advantages: (1) I could let it render while I was working on the next scene, (2) I could adjust any of the Luxrender settings while it was rendering and (3) I could network render so I set up a Linux system that I had at the time to share the render load. I couldn't get GPU speeds but it was much faster than IRay on my old CPU.

The point is that I am not averse to learning how to tweak materials but the results I am seeing in that Blender Render thread here suggest that (a) Cycles can't match IRay for quality with Imported DAZ content and (b) Cycles is not that much quicker than IRay. My experiments with Eevee have not been encouraging either but it is way ahead of the DAZ implementation of Filament.

Reality was the first plug in for Studio that I bought at once, even at $80. I really liked the physical light engine and being able to make lighting changes on the fly. Eventually the material conversions people made got quite good. I too put up some older hardware running Linux to have network renders going. I still miss many of features of LuxRender and still have an iMac as my machine Studio machine, so no Iray GPU for me either. This is what has lead me down this Blender path as my other workstation is a Linux box.

NotAnArtist said:

I will NEVER condemn the Daz 3d folks for not telling me what's coming in the future! I need help with the present!
Let me repeat, I do condemn them for not providing that Filament help...

The past has taught us that Daz is not going to document their new features. They might sell you a tutorial that explains it for you though.