Daz Studio on a Mac using Parallels

crashworship

Sorry for a new Mac related thread but the Mac FAQ is getting too long and out of hand.

At any rate, until a compatible Big Sur version of Studio is available (if ever), I've been running it on a Bootcamp version of Windows but I'm finding that switching between the systems is cumbersome and time consuming. It would really be nice to jump into Photoshop (which I do quite a lot when I'm using Studio) when I need to without having to reboot to my Mac OS. I played around with Parallels years ago, found it wanting and painfully slow in terms of systems resources and decided not to use it. That was probably a decade ago.

I'm wondering if anyone has used or is currently using Parallels to run Studio and if so, how well it's working.

Richard Haseltine

I believe Parallels will not let you use Iray - I'm not sure it doesn't block all 64 bit applications. Is your Photoshop license Mac-only? I know the real ones were, but I thought the rental ones were OS neutral.

bytescapes

I just fired up an instance of Windows 10 running under the latest version of Parallels on a MacBook Pro (Intel i9, running Catalina). Iray does actually work -- I was able to load the Genesis 8 Basic Female and do an Iray render without problems, under both Studio 4.12 and 4.15. It's not fast -- I haven't done benchmarks, but I think it's probably slower than running on the Mac natively -- but it definitely works.

I haven't made extensive use of it, so it may be that there are pain points that you'll hit as soon as you try to do more serious work. However, the basic functionality is definitely there.

Remember to allocate your VM as much memory as you can spare.

crashworship

Richard Haseltine said:

I believe Parallels will not let you use Iray - I'm not sure it doesn't block all 64 bit applications. Is your Photoshop license Mac-only? I know the real ones were, but I thought the rental ones were OS neutral.

No, not Mac only but both of my licenses are in use, at home and at work.

crashworship

bytescapes said:

I just fired up an instance of Windows 10 running under the latest version of Parallels on a MacBook Pro (Intel i9, running Catalina). Iray does actually work -- I was able to load the Genesis 8 Basic Female and do an Iray render without problems, under both Studio 4.12 and 4.15. It's not fast -- I haven't done benchmarks, but I think it's probably slower than running on the Mac natively -- but it definitely works.

I haven't made extensive use of it, so it may be that there are pain points that you'll hit as soon as you try to do more serious work. However, the basic functionality is definitely there.

Remember to allocate your VM as much memory as you can spare.

This has become an issue for me because of the Big Sur issue. This is a pretty high end iMac with an i9 processer, a huge amount of ram and an AMD Radeon Pro with 16 gigs of memory. The first time I tried Parallels a decade ago, it was also on a pretty beefy iMac and it had trouble running both OSs simultaneously. I was a Poser user then long before physics based rendering and yet it was still really clunky to use.

bytescapes

Parallels has come a long way in the last decade. It's certainly much faster than it was then.

But there are limits. I did a quick test render using a nude Genesis 8 Female with Toulouse Hair to do a 960x720 Iray render on my i9 MacBook Pro. Under OS X Catalina, the render was done in 43 seconds. Under Windows 10 running under the latest Parallels, it took 243 seconds. So that's almost 6 times slower in emulation than natively, and on a very simple scene. With a more complex scene you may see worse slowdowns.

To be honest, I'm impressed that it's even that fast, but you'll need a fair tolerance for long render times if you're going to go this route.

crashworship

bytescapes said:

Parallels has come a long way in the last decade. It's certainly much faster than it was then.

But there are limits. I did a quick test render using a nude Genesis 8 Female with Toulouse Hair to do a 960x720 Iray render on my i9 MacBook Pro. Under OS X Catalina, the render was done in 43 seconds. Under Windows 10 running under the latest Parallels, it took 243 seconds. So that's almost 6 times slower in emulation than natively, and on a very simple scene. With a more complex scene you may see worse slowdowns.

To be honest, I'm impressed that it's even that fast, but you'll need a fair tolerance for long render times if you're going to go this route.

You could do the scene set up in Parallels and then switch to Bootcamp to do the render. I essentially go do something else while me scenes render so switching to Bootcamp isn't a problem. It's the need to jump back and forth between Studio and Photoshop which is my biggest bottleneck.

crashworship

Just to follow up after a couple of weeks of usage...

Parallels does work with Studio pretty well. I'm able to do a lot of my scene creation using Parallels and then switch to the bootcamp version for Iray renders. It's not entirely ideal (a bit of lag) but a big improvement over back and forth rebooting in iOS and bootcamp. I've been able to successfully share an external SSD drive that all of my library content is stored on, with some tweaks. My two screen set up works as well although there's quite a bit of lag when moving undocked panes back and forth between monitors.

payaso

Trying out running DS in Parallels, and it runs ok, but I can't quite seem to connect to the content library. It is mapped correctly in preferences...is there some trick to it?