garrett_3d said:

So, if @richardandtracy suddenly disappears from the forum, we know the reason why 

Agreed, not feeding cats the second food is demanded is a capital offence in our household. Regards, Richard

The store search has been terrible for... well, I've been shopping here 20 years, but I don't remember much about the original store.  Since the "new" store came in around... 2011?... the search has been terrible and the chance of finding what you want is much, much, better on Google.  

On the positive side, the ability to sort the product library by purchase date now works without the need to switch to List mode first.  Unfortunately, the name sort in ascending mode has some bugs, as the first 14 entires in my library seem to be completely random and not at all in alphebetical order for unknown reasons (First in my list is Beuatiful Skin Iray for Genesis 2 Males), after which there are another 20 or so items that seem to have been sorted early due to things like having the name in quotes (both single and double,) and in one case starting with a period.  After that sort goes numeric, but it's a sort order based on the the first numeral of a number only, so a product that begins with a single 6 only comes after all of those that begin with 50 or 54, etc.... and, of course, it's not until a dozen pages later that the first item beginning with an A actually shows up.    

FInally, there are still a lot of weird issues with the sort by artist, as I have discovered that items that were sold by artists who are still active and selling in the store do not come up under that artist's name search if that item itself is no longer in the store.  That's especially a big problem for vendors like Clacydarch, who split about half of their catalog and moved it over to Renderosity after selling those here for several years, or vendors who regularly retire products like Stonemason.  Most perplexing of all is the case of BIlly-T, who only shows up under artist search for 4 items... yet when I go to front of the store and unclick the "hide items shown", his store displays 17 Billy-T items that I own.       

If you feel a post is out  of place please report it to the forum mods, who are the ones to decide. Please don't indulge in discussions of what can or cannot be posted.

nullvoid808 said:

3DSaga said:

nullvoid808 said:

Where is the AI search these days? I remember there being a button next to the search box once upon a time, but I can't find it now

It's the odd little icon in the bottom RH corner of almost any page on DAZ 4.24.   

Ahh,

in Daz. More fool me for expecting it to be on the website

It is bottom-right of the web pages, in DS 6 it is a pane, it isn't in DS 4.x.x.x 

3DSaga said:

nullvoid808 said:

Where is the AI search these days? I remember there being a button next to the search box once upon a time, but I can't find it now

It's the odd little icon in the bottom RH corner of almost any page on DAZ 4.24.   

nullvoid808 said:

Where is the AI search these days? I remember there being a button next to the search box once upon a time, but I can't find it now

It's the odd little icon in the bottom RH corner of almost any page on DAZ 4.24.   

Where is the AI search these days? I remember there being a button next to the search box once upon a time, but I can't find it now

3DSaga said:

Aside from looking for a specific product, it's always given me poor results. A few days ago, out of frustration I gave the AI assistant a try, and I got much better results. It did ask me some questions to help me make a better search, but very quickly I found examples of what I was looking for. I'm not a huge AI fan, but I have to admit, this is one area in which it proved helpful. 

i agree on the search problems, and also agree that the AI bot is pretty useful. It can also help a lot with DS procedures.  

Aside from looking for a specific product, it's always given me poor results. A few days ago, out of frustration I gave the AI assistant a try, and I got much better results. It did ask me some questions to help me make a better search, but very quickly I found examples of what I was looking for. I'm not a huge AI fan, but I have to admit, this is one area in which it proved helpful. 

Go to the search shop box at the top right of the shop page and search for Dance.

The 1000+ results come back. Now look at the Categories filter. Poses and Animations are not there. Hair is there? What is going on?

Expozures said:

 

On a side note, I was a little disappointed with Vicky the AI chat in Daz.  Was hoping for something...more.  Maybe something that could at least search my library where I could filter my Smart Content, or maybe even load assets based on the prompt.  It won't even do NSFW stuff. Pretty much it boils down to a glorified Daz3D Forum search engine...

It's probably a substantial infrastructure and security hassle to be able to search individidual customers asset libraries remotely and be able to load them locally, even if you're talking about hosting a vector database of some kind that end users or applications could target. Frankly, it would make the job of implementing a prompt based asset search much easier if we would just hit a public endpoint. The approach I've taken in my work is to build the vector database locally against at least the user's installed content. See https://github.com/bluemoonfoundry/daz-content-browser

[Edit: Fixed URL]

So, if @richardandtracy suddenly disappears from the forum, we know the reason why 

Padone said:

Again I'm not sure what you mean by "artifacting", as I don't see any apart the blender image is smaller so fo course gets less details. The skin needs some more sss, or use bsdf instead of principled. You may also want to try the color management, that's similar to tone mapping in iray, apart you don't have to re-render the whole scene to apply different settings. Then if you miss compositing there's plenty of tutorials, as for anything in blender.

https://github.com/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/wiki/Material_Methods

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/5.1/render/color_management/index.html

p.s. Another thing that greatly affect the render quality for complex scenes and shaders is the max bounces, where you can use the "full global illumination" preset for best quality.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/render_settings/light_paths.html

It looks "ok" in the forum modified small version. If you click to see the full image, the artifcating is pretty obvious... isn't it? The barrel of the rifle, the floor in the background, his boots..

I may have dropped the light passes for speed, following some advice somewhere that rang true with something I learned a very long time (and is probably no longer relevant). Its funny that you mention subsurface, because I used Global Skin and I thought it was better than the Daz version (which to me has some overblown effects in certain areas and lacks overall effect in more subtle ways).

You've built a marvelous tool in Diffeomorphic and I wouldn't be where I am here, trying to learn this, without it. Just trying to understand the new workflow (like going from 3Delight to Iray, only by a factor of about 10).

I can't see anything wrong personally 

if both look poor in your opinion, it could be compression of the forum upload

Philip Harmonica Calling...

Lola: Richard, come back. You've got another call.
Richard: Hello?
Phil: Hello, am I speaking to Richard Haseltine?
Richard: Yes.
Phil: I'm Phil Harmonica, president of the Catalympics Committee. One of our benefactors, King Charles of the United Kingdom, has suggested that you would be a good addition to the committee. We've recently been in touch with Cat Supply Company, and they told us quite a colorful story about you. We think that you would be excellent at scouting locations for Catalympics competitions. It would involve world-wide travel and exciting opportunities. What do you think? Can we count on you?
Richard: Wow, I am honored to be asked! King Charles and I struck up a friendship when he invited me for tea, to learn about forum posting, when I became famous for 100,000 posts. I am unable to travel on my own, though. Lola won't let me drive the car anymore, and she won't let me use her credit card anymore. Airlines won't let me fly alone. Last time I had to pretend to be my friend Jack's emotional support animal. 
Phil: Oh, don't worry. The King was quite generous with his donation. We can afford to send you and an entourage of 3 to help with location evaluation. Do you think you can convince your friend Jack to go along again? 
Richard: I'll be seeing Jack this week for tea. We'll discuss it then. I'm sure I can find a couple other friends to go along, too.
Phil: I encourage you to select male friends for this trip. Some destinations may be a little dicey. 
Richard: Understood. I have lots of male friends. 
Phil: OK, we'll talk again next week. Ta ta for now.
Richard: Bye!
Lola: Did I overhear that  right? Is the Catalympics a real thing? 
Richard: Did you think I was delusional? I am not AI. I don't hallucinate, you know. (I guess it IS real!) Wow!

csaa said:

barbult said:

Wendy, comments about the renders and story are welcome in the story thread. I just didn't want pages of unrelated discussions that deviate more and more from the story. It breaks up the flow.

barbult,

I follow your posts and wanted to say that I appreciate how you share it with everyone. The twists and turns can be quite unexpected!

+1 on staying the need to stay on topic. A good signal to noise ratio is hard to come by in an open forum. It takes a fair amount of effort to stay in the creative zone.

Cheers!

Yes, thanks, "signal to noise ratio" really sums up the issue nicely. 

barbult said:

Wendy, comments about the renders and story are welcome in the story thread. I just didn't want pages of unrelated discussions that deviate more and more from the story. It breaks up the flow.

barbult,

I follow your posts and wanted to say that I appreciate how you share it with everyone. The twists and turns can be quite unexpected!

+1 on staying the need to stay on topic. A good signal to noise ratio is hard to come by in an open forum. It takes a fair amount of effort to stay in the creative zone.

Cheers!

Dareshiranu said:

hardware, despite the higher prices. 3) Consumers using older generation hardware longer, or reissued hardware to throw said consumers a bone while the corporate customers get whatever improved hardware actually hits the market... Look at the increases in the cost of not just RAM, or GPUs, but storage. All driven by AI datacenters that have largely yet to materialize. Still, it's these datacenters that by design will sell, or rather rent or lease, what we once did ourselves on our own metal

Torquinox said:

@Dareshiranu you have described perfectly how we are all already paying an ai tax, and as consumer level 3d artists, we and gamers are among the hardest hit. But all consumers will feel the pinch as even Apple has pending price increases for their phones due to the ram shortage, among other things.

Dareshiranu, Torquinox:

I hear you on the matter of AI build out driving up prices of consumer electronics, particularly NVIDIA GPUs ... hence this discussion about iRay and a Daz-Cycles alternative. However I do hope you haven't lost sight of larger forces at play that affect the semicondutor supply chain. With all due respect to the Daz Forum TOS, I'm deliberately being terse about this -- I'm talking about the geopolitical trouble brewing around the Taiwan Straight. 

A protracted war there affects not just the two belligerent countries across the Straight, both major players in the global supply chain of consumer electronics. That waterway also sits on the energy corridor that supplies the pair of North Asian nations crucial to the very same industry. How are we to cope when there's an all-around shortage of GPUs ... or memory ... or CPUs? 

Some are hoping the conflict remains a matter of "if" rather than a "when". Personally, I think thought and action put into avoiding that conflict, or mitigating the fallout, is a better investment of one's energy, rather than repeating dystopian narratives about data centers and the corporations behind them. To that end, if an NVIDIA GPU shortage puts a crimp on iRay usage, then taking up alternatives, such as Blender Cycles, sounds like a wise choice to make.

Cheers!

I include img2img in my workflow from time to time.  I'm running local models using ComfyUI.  And yeah, you're right that AI doesn't have creativity.  I'd add the caviat of *much* creativity, or it also depends on the model you are using.  Local Qwen or Gemma LLM models can get pretty creative since they're trained on fictional works and are good for roleplaying, though you can also use them to help generate scene ideas.  You -do- need to be clear about the intention, though because it may runaway and start a whole roleplay session since those are mainly used for.

Another thing I find handy in my workflow is img2txt, so I can take an image, and ask the AI to describe the scene, then take the output, and go txt2img and regernate the scene.

What I do is I have a vague idea in my mind, then I go into a txt2img model, and generate a dozen or so images.  Find some that catch my eye, then go into Daz, and setup the posing, lighting, etc adding my own style, etc into it.  Then, render it out in Daz, and take the Daz rendered image and run it through img2img AI, setting the image creativity to low, so the AI will just essentially retexture everything to the style of the SDXL model.. 

On a side note, I was a little disappointed with Vicky the AI chat in Daz.  Was hoping for something...more.  Maybe something that could at least search my library where I could filter my Smart Content, or maybe even load assets based on the prompt.  It won't even do NSFW stuff. Pretty much it boils down to a glorified Daz3D Forum search engine...