When a product update appears in the Daz Install Manager, is there someplace where one can review a changelog to see what is being changed in the product?

A number of Out of Touch hair props appeared in my DIM update queue yesterday. These products had been around a while, so I wondered what about them needed to be changed. I knew of no way to find out, but since Out of Touch is a well-established content creator, I went ahead and processed the updates.

Well, as illustrated by this forum post, it seems those updates may have "broken" several of those hair props:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/618601/strange-artifacts-in-out-of-touch-hair

It would be nice is there is some way to review updates to find out what is being changed, and why, before simply allowing them to process. Is there some way to do that of which I, in my ignorance, am unaware?

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

wolf359 said:

Abandoned ??..NOT by animators

From my perspective G9 is a solution in search of a problem.

+1

I cannot think of a problem that I have with 8.1 that was solved by 9. I see zero compelling reasons to switch.

I was praying for USD support, but got V9.

 

Which all adds to my personal conviction that G9 is a stop-gap and one of the reasons I will not buy into it. DAZ 5 will be here sooner or later and I would hope and expect some pretty significant technological innovations. If so, a new generation of figures might be expected which take advantage of those innovations. So whether it is Genesis 10 or, as I expect, a whole new series is an open question. All pure speculation which will probably get this post removed as usual but I would suspect that those investing a lot in G9 might want to think about holding back. On the other hand, it never fails to amaze me just how much money some people are willing to pour into the DAZ coffers.

takezo_3001 said:

I'm usually a champion for new figures, but with G9, it is too bare-boned and quite honestly, a bit lazy, to be honest as Daz employs master digital sculptors, so G9's joints could have

easily surpassed anything from the previous generations, which is why it's disappointing that daz held back with advancing the figure's bends for a new generation for 'ole noodle-knees, as we're now reverting back to the days of V4, we don't even have flexion morphs that are prominently and accurately represented with G9.

I couldn't agree more with this. Probably the most important thing that keeps me from leaving the DAZ ecosystem altogether are the JCMs that are better than anything I am able to do myself, that deform a G8 so beautifully. G9s noodle-knees are as bad as another app's characters that made me close that app and never open it again. That was the deal-breaker for me, and the things at which G9s are actually marginally better wer just that: marginal, and not compelling enough to get me excited enough to re-design my characters and base them on it. If there were something truly innovative about G9, I would have to consider it, but it just doesn't solve any problem. A solution in search of one, like @wolf359 said...

Ascania said:

You moved it. The shortcut link does not know where it is.

no, i uninstalled and reinstalled it. i redid the shortcuts after the reinstall. It was working other than the fact the paths were not what i wanted. I did not touch them but posted here. Now the entire program is gone. Hard drive search yields nothing, other than the parts that are in the user directory, on both C and D drive. DIM does work but there is nothing to be seen in the directory structure of the D drive, where I installed it. Perhaps an HD failure, again. This system has been nothing but problems since I bought it couple of years ago, but everything works except DAZ Studio and associated products. 

FSMCDesigns said:

mwokee said:

Very few PAs blaze new trails, most do what's already been done.

If I was a PA and making 3D barbie dolls paid the bills, then I would have no reason to get off the trail I am on, even if it was to please the vocal minority in the forums.

There would always be complaints. Forum is on the internet.

Gordig said:

 As for UV mapping, that might also have been done for you by whoever created the prop, but if not, it's less daunting than you might think, and I imagine Blender's tools for UV mapping are pretty easy to use (as easy as anything in Blender is to use).

From what I have read in the past, Blender's UV unwrapping was not that well-thought of but I have noticed that more development has been going on lately so it might be worthwhile having a look. Most on this forum seem to recommend purchasing a specialist UV Unwrap application or, maybe, 3DCoat. I'm not going to spend all that money on something I may only use very occasionally.

Q - What did you use for the breast jiggle?

A - VWD Cloth and Hair - I modified the supplied preset values, however, and saved with "dB" as a suffix

Q - How long did that 2 minute video take to render?

Best guess by opening DaVinci Saved file and checking the clips I used to make it:

• 17 animation renders which each took an average of 2 hours = 34,
• The Piranha vs Nemesis Car Chase Street scene took about 9 hours, bringing the total to around 43 so far, 
• The Interior Car - Chase scene took about 4 hours, bringing the total to around 50 so far, 
• The BG for that chase about 3 hours, bringing the total to around 53 so far, 
• The other backround scenes took an estimated 9 hours altogether

A - Estimated Total (probably really close to accurate*) = 62 hours of just render time.

Q - What are your PC specs

A - Ryzen 2700 2nd Gen w/ 64GB RAM, AgitatedRiot RTX 2660 6GB GPU, Content Library on SATA, not SSD.

Q - I'd like to see her in a similar video but wearing a skirt/dress just to show off your dForce skills

A - See first Post of this thread. I did that while I was typing in this forum regarding "how useless dForce is". I disagreed, so I made something happen that I've failed at twice before - dForce Whymsy!!!

Turns out to be a lot easier to dForce than I thought. I was over-thinking. For that particular animation to work, however, I had to use my Anim + dials to put some negative bend on the shoulder bones, of it would blow up due to arm pit mesh intersection. This is common for any dforce sim with sleeves in the arm pit region. I make sure not to de-bend them too much to throw off the direction of the dynamics once I delete the correcting shoulder key frames after the simulation is completed.

* (probably really close to accurate*) - these are the animation/simulation (x3) rendering sessions that I do on a daily basis, so I'm fairly good at knowing how long to watch VFX documentaries while I wait.

Richard Haseltine said:

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

wolf359 said:

Abandoned ??..NOT by animators

From my perspective G9 is a solution in search of a problem.

+1

I cannot think of a problem that I have with 8.1 that was solved by 9. I see zero compelling reasons to switch.

I was praying for USD support, but got V9.

Application development (format suport) and content development (new figure) are not inherently related (there were some extra features in DS to support new features of Genesis 9, soem of which may be useful to people who don't want Genesis 9, but essentially they are separate at the level of your implied trade-off).

Good point. I should have just wrote that I was praying for USD support and didn't get it.

Hi all!

In general, I’m sure no one has raised such a topic on this forum yet, although I could be wrong, but I’ll continue anyway. I am a musician, in music for the third decade. He started as a drummer in a youth group at the city's House of Pioneers (now the House of Youth Creativity). For many years he has been professionally engaged in programming in the financial field on the 1C platform. Recently, the craving for music has returned, but in a new incarnation. I started writing my own instrumental music. Fortunately, many different goodies have been created for this, such as all kinds of digital studios, streaming platforms, and so on. But all this "junk" is clearly not enough if the main component of a good band is missing and this is talent. I won't say that I don't have it. Each person is talented, but each in his own way. So, after writing two albums already, and this is about two dozen tracks, I began to notice that there are a lot of creators like me in all our vast mother earth. Each in his own way writes not bad music, but not all of them have a group with which they perform in front of the public. It turns out that while sitting at home a person is engaged in absolute creativity, but in no way can this creativity be revived, that is, go on stage and do the most ordinary concert.

I myself, having spent a lot of time looking for live musicians, set out to perform in front of the public. But either the high demands of the musicians themselves, or their employment in other more successful projects, or my lazy mother did not allow us to combine our efforts. Time passed, and with it the hope that someday I would go on stage and the audience would again applaud the glory of our national Rock flowed away. After a little whimpering, I somehow moved away from this topic, well, that is, the topic of music, and began to engage in game development. I got carried away with 3DMax, Unreal and Unity. I learned to do all sorts of different things by posting them on special sites like free3d and others. A little later, having become acquainted with the daz3d program, I enthusiastically discovered the world of characters (avatars) with quite a decent appearance and endless possibilities for modeling, animation and other design. Suddenly, I was visited by another crazy idea, but what if?

What if you take these vavtars and make friends with my musical creativity, and not just make friends, but make a musical group out of them, or in English BAND. To pick up clothes for them, musical instruments and teach them to play my own music. After all, as I already wrote above it, as much as two albums. And months of painstaking work flew by. Choosing avatars and equipping them with all the necessary equipment was not difficult, but teaching them how to play, here I had to reinvent my wheel. How I did it, read below...

In order to teach a 3d character to play a musical instrument, the main thing is to be able to play it yourself. Otherwise, how can he be shown which button to press and which drum to beat. Fortunately, my experience and knowledge in this matter helped me. But in order to create the desired animation, at first I had to put each finger on the right key and record the drum parts by making magical passes over the drums with the hands of the 3d drummer himself. This is a very long and boring business. It was necessary to look for other ways, and I found it. The MIDI (Digital Language of Musical Instruments) technology helped me in this. The fact is that in MIDI each note has its own number, and so, if you read these numbers and associate them with the movements of the limbs of the avatar, you can make him play as they say according to the notes. For a drummer, it's simple. It is necessary to record the necessary hand coordinates for each note of the drum, and when reading the MIDI file, an animation for the drummer will be automatically created.

Fortunately, daz3d has a built-in language and the ability to work with COM technology, which means you can write your own script that will do the whole routine - read files, write the score and give the finished result directly to the 3d editor. No sooner said than done. The first attempts have already allowed me to release my first video where the percussionist grandfather plays the djembe, see the photo below. Writing animation for other musicians was not an easy task. For example, the bass player's game still had to be done manually. Considering that it was necessary to play the SLAP! it was important to show the viewer a certain manner of performance, since slapping is a complex mechanical process. I have not yet brought my keyboard playing to the required level, so even MIDI in this regard does not solve the whole problem yet, and I have to do a lot by hand. But I'm working on it, I hope that a solution will be found. There is really one such miracle method, when using which animation can be written on the fly, using a special suit with built-in gyroscopes on each limb. The cost of such a device is about 3K bucks.

And so, having put everything together, I managed to record my first music video, where all my new avatars (musicians) play my music. Wow! what could be worse. A band that doesn't exist in the real world now plays my music digitally. As you can see from the screenshot, the group has been created and endowed with everything necessary, but another problem has arisen. The fact is that each of the members of my ensemble (band) uses a lot of computing resources. Putting them all in one scene and rendering it is simply impossible. My vidyuha goes into endless idle time and rendering of one frame takes up to an hour. It turns out that to get HD video lasting only one minute with 30 frames, it will take more than a day for continuous rendering. If an average music track lasts about 3-4 minutes, then one clip needs to be rendered for a week. Only a film studio can afford this ;-(

It turns out that creativity, whether you like it or not, stupidly rests on money, that is, on the power of a computer system. You need to have a render farm to write 3D clips. Remote rendering rates are also not encouraging. In general, creating videos for Youtube is too expensive. It turns out that it's cheaper to play with live musicians than to build your own digital cyber band. But what if you can't do it but really want to? And I went back to thinking. After moving away from this idea for a while, I returned to game dev again. After a while, it suddenly dawned on me. Damn, I thought, but if the average computer cannot render my video, then why not do it the way it is done in games, let this clip play in real time, that is, the outline and all the calculations are done on the client side but not on mine . It turns out that the cooler the user's computer, the better the quality of my video.

TIME TO OPEN CHAMPAGNE

In general, friends, I came up with the concept of a music store in a non-standard manner. I now record music videos with 3d musicians not in the form of a video clip, but in the form of a special application for a smartphone where the viewer sees the plot being generated right now. The video clip is born before the very eyes of the viewer, of course, according to a pre-formed scenario, as it happens at a live concert. Now any composer who writes his own music, even without the presence of a live group of musicians, can release his creation into the world, even in the form of animated characters, but his music can no longer only be heard but also seen. Plus, the performance can be filled with light and video effects. For this purpose, I came up with a special mechanism that controls the lighting fixtures placed on the stage. Now you can even create a light show with reference to the timeline.

I'll probably surprise you, but it seemed to me too little. Watching a clip even in real time with a good render is good, but somewhat banal. This is the same as clips on Youtub, only a different streaming technology and nothing more. I put my musical group in virtual reality and now, wearing 3d glasses or a VR helmet, you find yourself right among 3d musicians and listen to music in complete immersion. You can also move among the musicians, which allows you not only to watch their play, but even learn something from them. I am even thinking about creating a virtual school for playing musical instruments, where the avatars themselves and not people will teach. Ask why? Yes, because the 21st century is in the yard. The future is here friends!

Now I am closely engaged in this project and if you are interested in this topic, I will be glad to cooperate. It doesn't matter if you are a musician or a game master. The main thing is to join forces and create together. At the next stage of my plan, the creation of a virtual catalog of performers similar to the stars of the world stage. I want to see Queen or Metallica in tridesh performance. I think you can even make very good money on this by offering musicians the development of virtual space. But that is another story.

my Patreon: patreon.com/CYBERBAND

All the best!

I don't know if this is the correct forum category. If not, please move the thread to the correct one. I'm a bit confused by all the MetaMixer products and don't actually know what I need and what I don't need. Ok, first I need the MetaMixer Toolkit. But in order to know if this product is actually what I'm searching for and to make it easier to decide what I could need in addition, here are some question that need to be answered. 
1. Do I really need those preselected characters (and add-ons) in order to use the toolkit? Or can I also use the default G8 head or any other random G8 character as the base? 
2. If yes, can I use MetaMixer to add HD face details to any non-HD character?
3. The 3,400 morphs that are included in "MetaMixer 25 Male Faces" are those HD morphs or non-HD? The same question applies to the 885 morphs included in "MetaMixer PLUS".
4. Why is "MetaMixer 25 Male Faces" called "male faces" when you can also use them for female characters? What is the "25 male faces" related to? Face presets? And if yes, why there are no female face presets as well?
Thank you in advance for answering my questions.

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

wolf359 said:

Abandoned ??..NOT by animators

From my perspective G9 is a solution in search of a problem.

+1

I cannot think of a problem that I have with 8.1 that was solved by 9. I see zero compelling reasons to switch.

I was praying for USD support, but got V9.

Application development (format suport) and content development (new figure) are not inherently related (there were some extra features in DS to support new features of Genesis 9, soem of which may be useful to people who don't want Genesis 9, but essentially they are separate at the level of your implied trade-off).

wolf359 said:

Abandoned ??..NOT by animators

From my perspective G9 is a solution in search of a problem.

+1

I cannot think of a problem that I have with 8.1 that was solved by 9. I see zero compelling reasons to switch.

I was praying for USD support, but got V9.

Abandoned ??..NOT by animators

WendyLuvsCatz said:

Dartanbeck said:

However, I know what it's like to have someone hounding me about trying things I don't feel like trying, so all I can say is: You do You! 

I just try to share what has really been working well for me - and I've been entirely satisfied with dForce, Iray, the whole nine yards! ;)

BTW, I love our chats. I learn a lot from all of this. Crosswind comes in with these brilliant additions, and Richard... is Richard a dev? 

All these forum-frequent folks... I love 'em all!!!

I hope you don't mean me about Unreal Engine

I have given up to be honest your loss  

I wish I were clever enough to get into Unreal (or Unity - I don't know the difference). However, when I have looked at tutorials they invariably start going into coding which is a show-stopper for me. So I don't know whether it is possible to animate as you might in, say Blender or whether Game Enginines have a set of pre-configured animations (walk, jump, crouch, etc.) that just get strung together to make a movie. 

One of the reasons I don't export my scenes to Blender to animate is becuase of dForce. I don't think that Blender can animate the character and clothing together like @Dartanbeck describes above. At least DAZ Studio can do that even without NLA. I'm not sure that Diffeomorphic can convert dForce to Blender Cloth Sim.

So there's so much I need to learn but I don't have the capacity for taking in new stuff like I did when I was younger.

Just to comment about starting at Frame 30 (for example). Yes, I do that when I'm starting an animated scene from scratch. I generally get the dForce clothing to a starting point at which the real animation begins - clothing included. But If I have a scene which I have rendered already and I have run a dForce sim - I can't go back to that later and use it as a base for an animation because I probably would want to change the poses, etc., and have a different starting position for the animation. If there's a dForce timeline already present, DAZ don't give us the option to delete it.I am stuck with it.

Having said that, someone (ahem!) advised me to use Puppeteer to save out single frames from an animated scene so that is possibly a workaround.

Dartanbeck said:

However, I know what it's like to have someone hounding me about trying things I don't feel like trying, so all I can say is: You do You! 

I just try to share what has really been working well for me - and I've been entirely satisfied with dForce, Iray, the whole nine yards! ;)

BTW, I love our chats. I learn a lot from all of this. Crosswind comes in with these brilliant additions, and Richard... is Richard a dev? 

All these forum-frequent folks... I love 'em all!!!

I hope you don't mean me about Unreal Engine

I have given up to be honest your loss  

However, I know what it's like to have someone hounding me about trying things I don't feel like trying, so all I can say is: You do You! 

I just try to share what has really been working well for me - and I've been entirely satisfied with dForce, Iray, the whole nine yards! ;)

BTW, I love our chats. I learn a lot from all of this. Crosswind comes in with these brilliant additions, and Richard... is Richard a dev? 

All these forum-frequent folks... I love 'em all!!!

Dartanbeck said:

marble said:

I avoid the timeline because I sometimes want to use that scene as the initial frame for an animation and having a dForce animation in the scene already ruins any chance of using it later for character animation. If DAZ Studio had some kind of multiple timelines or NLA it might be more practical but I don't really understand all these technicalities as I am not an animator - I just like to animate certain scenes as best I can manage.

If I know for sure that the scene will never be used for character animation then I do sometimes use the timeline for dForce but only when Start-from-Memorized doesn't cut it.

For collisions with props (such as the couch) I don't use the actual prop as a collision target - I create primitives and hide them from the render. Props generally don't have enough polygons.

Here's where the magic comes in, my friend:

When we simulate something using dForce, unlike VWD, if we save that, either as a scene or subset, the simulation stays with the save. 

My character animations all begin with a Blank aniBlock covering the first 30 frames. I use these first 30 frames for any tweaks that I might want to make before the render starts. However, when we bake the animation to the timeline, these first 30 frames hold the pose all the way through - so in the timeline I delete frames 1-29 for anything and everything in the scene at this early stage.

I've discovered early on that this appears to make no difference at all. Those first thirty frames still hold that same position. Oh... I see... it's because the first keys have ALL been set to "Constant".

 I have Animate 2 but don't use it. I have aniblocks but don't use them. Almost everything I animate is quick and dirty manual keyframing from frame 0 to frame 60 (or whatever). Very short loops, generally. I don't have the patience to wait all day for 1200 frames of an aniblock to render. Nor do I like the look of Filament so I render with IRay (I do wish that Filament was more like Eevee in Blender though).

To explain a little further - I like to make stories like the old photo-comic stories that you could see in magazines. Occasionally I will add a quick animation in with the stills which is something those old magazines couldn't do but I bet they wish they could have. The story will typically be 100 - 120 scenes and will take me a couple of weeks to complete. When it is done, I usually go over it for a few days, decide I could have done better with much of it so I then delete it and start a new story (not the same story). That's my hobby - it keeps me occupied and challenges my creativity. Sometimes my stories are actually memories from my youth or childhood that I populate with digital avatars of friends and family. Other time the stories are just pure imagination let loose.

The point I am trying to make is that I am not concerned with making exhibition art - nobody will ever see my stories but myself. But I am concerned with wasting valuable time waiting for dForce over 120 scenes. So that's why I am so keen on DAZ coming up with something that can simulate in seconds rather than minutes. I follow this forum and type these posts while I am waiting for dForce (or renders) so if DAZ gets tired of my constant whining, they can shut me up by giving me a quick cloth simulator.

RexRed said:

crosswind said:

RexRed said:

crosswind said: Oh my~~ that's you ？？！！

Yea, that's me, lol 

I watched 1/3 of your long video in the morning, fast-forwarded sometimes   .  Just a reminder: if you insist on using Task Manager to observe the GPU load, you better choose CUDA from the dropdown list on the right panel then the data should be more stable. I still suggest you use GPU-Z. GPU load, VRAM used, etc. are all there and more accurate than Windows'~

I'll continue to watch it tonight~

I don't have a cuda option, a while back someone here on the forums suggested better performance by changing some sort of parameter in Windows. I forget the thread I read it in, and I have forgotten the parameter I changed. But you will notice I have a 3d option and when I click the drop down, cuda is gone. It got replaced by a 3D graph. I was told in this Daz forum thread that letting Windows handle the cuda cores gave some kind of huge performance boost. Maybe some will remember more than I do and link that discussion to this thread. I would test out that as well in a future video. Thank you very much Crosswind for watching some of my video!

I apologize for shamelessly plugging my YouTube channel here in this forum, but I do not make a dime from my channel yet. It is not monetized, and I have been making free Daz videos for over 5 years on YouTube with zero income derived from this effort. So, if people do subscribe, click the bell for notifications and plz watch my videos. I may one day meet the criterion to actually get paid something for my efforts there.

I have the kind of job that I would do anyway even if I am not paid for it.

I must get 1000 subscribers (almost there) and 4000 hours of viewing time in a year (and I am only at 1000 so far).

Best to you!

RR

Sounds great and keep going with it! I also make free tutorials for hobbyists, just for fun ~ 

crosswind said:

RexRed said:

crosswind said: Oh my~~ that's you ？？！！

Yea, that's me, lol 

I watched 1/3 of your long video in the morning, fast-forwarded sometimes   .  Just a reminder: if you insist on using Task Manager to observe the GPU load, you better choose CUDA from the dropdown list on the right panel then the data should be more stable. I still suggest you use GPU-Z. GPU load, VRAM used, etc. are all there and more accurate than Windows'~

I'll continue to watch it tonight~

I don't have a cuda option, a while back someone here on the forums suggested better performance by changing some sort of parameter in Windows. I forget the thread I read it in, and I have forgotten the parameter I changed. But you will notice I have a 3d option and when I click the drop down, cuda is gone. It got replaced by a 3D graph. I was told in this Daz forum thread that letting Windows handle the cuda cores gave some kind of huge performance boost. Maybe some will remember more than I do and link that discussion to this thread. I would test out that as well in a future video. Thank you very much Crosswind for watching some of my video!

I apologize for shamelessly plugging my YouTube channel here in this forum, but I do not make a dime from my channel yet. It is not monetized, and I have been making free Daz videos for over 5 years on YouTube with zero income derived from this effort. So, if people do subscribe, click the bell for notifications and plz watch my videos. I may one day meet the criterion to actually get paid something for my efforts there.

I have the kind of job that I would do anyway even if I am not paid for it.

I must get 1000 subscribers (almost there) and 4000 hours of viewing time in a year (and I am only at 1000 so far).

Daz Studio advanced users (and beginners), come be part of the live video chat and you can share your knowledge as well. I love learning too!

Best to you!

Just yesterday I was laughing at another post on this here forum saying that the continued release of G8 products was evidence that G9 had failed and not enough people were purchasing products for it, and I was thinking about the people saying that only G9 products were being released and G8 had been dropped completely. It's all perspective. Anyway, over at other stores like 'rosity where the vendors may not have gotten a bit more lead time on the new generation, there are more G8 products still getting released. Something to consider if you've gotten everything for G8 in the store here and are looking for something new!