Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Yes, thank you so much, Richard, for this good news.
Please note that Richard has said that Qt6 will use Metal, which will probably just speed up the user interface in DAZ Studio and replace OpenGL for Mac previews. It's probably not going to be a new final-quality rendering engine, that would need to be written from the ground up.
I think the best we can realistically hope for is a fast preview render, where the best quality might be on a par with Filament, which we will also be able to use on Macs.
EDIT:
That said, Metal *does* have the ability to do ray tracing; Richard did point out that anyone can add a rendering engine, one wonders how much extra work it would take to add a true Apple Metal rendering engine if DAZ's implemenation keeps their implementation closer to OpenGL's level of rendering.
wolf359 produces a nice animation to explain the financial advantages of Daz over Poser.
Sadly, for Mac Users, Audio files will not import into Daz (acknowledged over 6 months ago and reported to the Daz Devs) which rather precludes a lot of the fun he shows.
Like wsterdan, I too would like to see a dev timeline. If they are using an Agile approach (which one would assume is the case) this should be all mapped out.
Do Mac users get Audio this year, next year or is it just too complex in the Mac environment?
I think we should be told.
deleted
Stepping in so DS thinks the screen is half the size it is, then sending each pixel it writes to a 2 by 2 block is easy. Catering for non-integer scaling, and I would think scaling different elements to different degrees (not everything needs to be scaled up) is going to be much more challenging, and will (at least) require a newer version of the Qt framework - which is what the next major version of DS is getting (though nothing has been said about UI scaling in that context).
deleted
Just watched this video on youTube and thought it would be a good time to see if there are any updates about the progress of DS5?
- Greg
Unreal Engine 5.1 looks amazing, I'm curious to know if Daz Studio 5 will also be an amazing upgrade.
If that clip has been made with DAZ Studio 5 I will be the happiest man in the whole world.
I recognized a couple of techiques I used myself but there are a lot that I don't know or use, this fills me with hope for the future of animators here.
I'm curious to see what render engines will be available and what current shaders, if any, will still be compatible. Will there be any fantastical NPR options, or will it be "You're gonna embrace photorealism, and like it"?
Very cool. I'm going to assume Unreal has a very high learning curve, even for stills? ;)
I can't help but feel DS5 would be much closer to a reality, if Daz3D weren't chasing certain pipe dreams.
We the users really have no clue how far along DS5 is.
We can only guess and make assumptions.
Maybe it's finished and waiting release after Christmas.
Maybe they haven't typed the first line of code yet.
We just don't know.
Keep in mind though allot of the scripts that we all love will more than likely be kaput esp if the the original publisher isn't around any more. Sort of like the whole thing with Poser 11 VS Poser 12 and up with Python 3 replacing Python 2.
Well, yes, we do, in fact, know that they've "typed the first line of code".
If you go back to the first page, first entry of this thread you'll see that in July, 2021 they had a pre-beta they were going to release to allow Macintosh users to run DAZ Studio on machines using Big Sur, and that they'd planned on releasing a more functional version around New Years a few months later. In the thread announcing that Apple had helped them get 4.x running on Macs so the pre-beta was off (https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/514751/daz-studio-5-preview-release-is-delayed-and-that-s-good-news/p1), they also informed us that the pre-beta already had Filament working on Macs.
I – like everyone else – would like an update, but I'm also confident that they have been working on it consistantly and they'll release when they're comfortable that it'll be fairly solid and useable.
The point I was trying to make is, we have no idea where DS5 is in development.
Obviously it's going to be somewhere between not started yet and finished. Hence the generalization.
Yes, I have read both threads concerning DS5.
There was no mention in either about other projects delaying the release of DS5 or the milestones achieved other than what was posted by DAZ_Rawb.
Nor have I seen any other posts about DS5 delays in any other forum.
I could have missed some though. I'm only one person and there are only so many hours in the day to scour the internet looking for info.
If you have more complete and up to date info lots of people would be interested in reading about it.
---
In the future I'll make note of the things I'm generalizing in my posts so it's clearer to the readers what I'm writing.
Scripts may or may not fail - it depends what they do. Plug-ins will fail as theya re now and will, at least, need to be recompiled and may need editing first, again depending on what they do and how they do it.
The application coding team(s) are not the web team(s) or content team(s) - different people have different skills and work on different projects.
We do know, from public comments, that at least some code has been written.
There is no other public space for info.
As you probably know, Opague is more often DAZ's way.
Once "development" is done it is released on DAZ's schedule. May be odd accident reveal but usually just shortly before.
DAZ changelog is sanitized so could be surprises showing up as well (thank you again Richard for this info on these forums).
All the rest is speculation and wishes - which there never is a shortage of.
IMO considering all the moving parts in 3d and the scale of DAZ, think they do pretty darn good on average.
So yeah, +1 to your generalized comment that no one publically knows where DS5 development is at is the general rule. Personally fine with that for many reasons.
That said we do know that the QT framework (scripting esp. plugins) is getting modernized.
Cos i use Visual Menus for calling up pretty much everything, and it's creator Bitwelder only JVs with Zevo rn, am likley more nervous than most what DS5 would cos for impact to my workflow.
Cos it is a script and not a plug-in there is some hope. But even one code diff can cos everything to halt. Shudder.
Like Imago, and other animators, hope animation gets at least some love in DS5. Just a bit easier would be nice.
Depends in part how DAZ assesses its bridge attempts to other apps. Would guess they have a years worth of data and will re-assess at some point soon'ish how much it improves sales & user adoption.
When i looked at DAZ main promo landing video and saw the animation, i saw the dress showing mesh view but the rest of figure rendered.
That doesn't look anything in current DS. Show Mesh all or pick another render type.
So is that DS5? Or using other apps to show DAZ animation possibilties? Know my guess.
Edit. See Richard added some good info as i was writing this. Thnks.
Yes, that is true. Some progress has been made.
Sorry for the long post but I feel like I'm not making myself clear.
Daz isn't writing one version of DS5 they are writing two.
One for windows and one for mac.
Maintaining feature parity between them is going to cost time and cause delays itself.
Milestones in development may have been met, but negated because something wouldn't work in one of the versions.
That can cause days, weeks or even months worth of work to be lost if parity is a requirement.
It may even necessitate a complete rewrite of certain features. So the "first line of code" can be rendered useless if you get to start over.
I'm not a programmer, but I'm sure there is some boilerplate code that gets added to the first stanza and other places so generic things can be done quickly.
I envision the first line to be something similar to
//this is the mac version.Attempt number 17 this week.God I hope it works this time//
So it could be reused as needed making it an example of the "boilerplate code" I referred to.
What follows after that line may or may not be usable, and that's what I'm getting at.
How many Mac users are we telling about ?
I thought it was a small minority compared to the Windows users.
Filament, a feature introduced in the Windows version two years ago, is still not available for Mac users. If they were going to hold release to maintain a parity between Window and Mac users, they're two years too late.
The excessive time it's takiing to produce DAZ Studio 5 is mainly due to updating all of the code (Windows and/or Mac) is due to moving to the latest version of the Qt libraries.
From the few times I've glanced at the change logs, it seems like most changes and fixes tend to deal with keeping iRay running properly, as is witnessed as well by the vast numbers of threads asking for help with or detaling problems with iRay. I guess if they didn't spend that much time keeping iRay working, they might have release D|S 5 long ago, but you're correct, we don't really know where they are development-wise. We do know that scripts and plug-ins need a lot of attention as they're not gonig to work without updating, and so on.
Based on my two-year-and-counting wait for Filament, I don't believe that complete and total feature parity is the thing holding them back.
There are definatley far fewer Mac users than Windows users, but that's only one statistic that we don't know. A more important metric would be how much money is spent at DAZ by Windows users versus Mac users. We know neither statistic. If I were a Windows user and had to spend hundreds of dollars on a new nVidia card just to keep iRay running, that's hundreds of dollars that I wouldn't have available to spend on DAZ assets that a Mac user would have, so who knows?
I suspect that any portion of their profit from Mac users, even if only 20 or 30%, makes it still worthwhile to develop for Mac users, even if all of the features aren't available in the Mac version. If there wasn't enough profit from Mac users to be worthwhile financially, I expect they will drop Mac support like a hot potato as it would be the most prudent decison to make. I believe developing the Mac software has been profitiable enough so far to explain why they're still supporting Mac.Should the day come when Mac support isin't worth it, my feelings wouldn't be hurt if they dropped our support. It's just business.
When DAZ Studio was first released, it's release date was set back a few months simply because the Mac version wasn't ready yet, so Windows users had to wait a few weeks. That was then, this is now, and as we've seen, they didn't wait on releasing Filament support until the Mac version was ready. I suspect that if the Windows version is ready long before Mac version is ready, they might just release the Windows version and possibly a Beta version for Mac to play with while they finish it off.
All speculation, of course; it would be nice to get an actual update.
...well as Qt6 wll no longer support W7 and 8.1, looks like whatever the last version of 4.x (or sooner based on the highlighted blurb) is, it will be the end of the line. Figured it was only a matter of time.
...and I just renewed my Daz+ annual membership. Hopefully new content won't be so restricted.,
...being dyslexic, my sentiments as well. I feel Portland's power grid system map is easier to follow (and it's pretty wacky).
I love Carrara's shader room as I find it much more intuitive.
From what I've read, it's not possible to add Filament to the Mac version before upgrading the Qt version.
They are not writing two versions of DS 5. QT is a framework that runs on both windows and macs and the whole purpose of using a framework is that the vast majority of the code you write will work the same on both systems. Naturally there will be some work on a per OS in getting certain things working, eg: installation, and testing. There will also be extra work getting third party libraries working, eg filament.
My company develops apps that run on Android phones/tablets and Apple IOS phones/tablets, and there is no way we could do this without using a platform independent framework that means the bulk of our work on our apps only needs to be written once.
So something like Unity then, where its super easy to port to multiple platforms.