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I don't know if it's choice on your part, but your username is your email adress (there was / is a bug that makes browser to autofil mail in the username field apparently).
Currently, DazStudio has three keyframe interpolation methods: TCB, Linear, and Constant.
It's hard to control the animation.
I would like to see a more versatile method of interpolating motion paths.
For example, After Effects offers five different interpolation methods: Linear, Auto Bezier, Continuous Bezier, Bezier, and Hold.
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/keyframe-interpolation.html
Bezier direction handles in the graph editor would make motion paths easier to create.
Please update the graph editor to add Bezier direction handles to the graph keys.
I would like to see Viewport implement frame memory to smooth out animation preview playback.
In the current version of DazStudio, previewing an animation on the timeline causes frame skipping due to the weight of the scene.
This is because the Viewport is re-rendered each time the animation is previewed, so it is not displayed in time.
In the case of AfterEffect, a rendered preview frame is stored in frame memory.
When the animation is previewed again, the previously saved frame is displayed along with the newly rendered frame.
Repeated previews will increase the number of rendered frames, culminating in a smooth, full-frame motion playback.
Not only that, but by changing the playback speed, it is easy to check the details of the motion.
This feature is very useful for animation production work.
I would like to see this feature implemented in DazStudio.
I definitely second this.
We TRULY need better animation tools and urgent fixes on the already existing ones.
There already are the TBC controls in the timeline, so I guess there should be big issues making bezier controls or even "presets" for selected keys.
Also we need negative frames (like in ALL animation softwares) and multiple audio tracks. And, pretty please, make those pesky buttons on the graph pane NOT cover the last keys.
This is a bit more complex, especially for IRay previews.
But, as I ca see, it's enough to update the viewport to a more recent version of GL graphics to fix that.
Anyway, he's right, we absolutely need faster and smoother animation previews.
Yes, I also have a problem with the buttons in the graph pane hiding the keys.
I'm trying to avoid this by making the timeline extra long, but I don't like it because I might inadvertently make a mistake in calculating the rhythm of the frames.
It would just be helpful to be able to save all the images displayed in the viewport at the time, whether texture shades or wireframes, directly into frame memory and instantly have a smooth animation preview as many times as possible.
The aim is to check the movement and fine-tune it, alternately, over and over again to make a better animation.
If I had to render and check every time, my work would not progress.
It would be helpful if iRay could also set the quality of any high speed low quality image for animation preview and play back the animation from frame memory.
This is because I can't check the motion of dForce hair, for example, if I can't preview the motion in iRay.
This is an example of an AfterEffect timeline.
At the top, the broken green dashed line is the state of the frame memory.
Frames that have been previewed at least once and the image has been saved are coloured green.
Frames in the green area are immediately displayed without rendering when the cursor comes to them.
If the preview is repeated, eventually all the frames will be displayed already, all saved and in a straight line in green.
The preview will then play back smoothly in full frame.
If you adjust the parameters, the memory is immediately cleared and a new preview is rendered.
The current DazStudio timeline can only extend in the future direction when extending the total time.
In fact, when I am making an animation,I often want to extend the timeline in the past direction.
As I create the animation, I sometimes need to add more pre-movements for dForce.
I would like to have the ability to extend the timeline in the past direction.
I've been asking for this for years. It'd be amazing if they made the interpolations match all the other programs out there, but don't hold your breath.
I have submitted several feature requests to Daz in the past as support tickets.
Daz then encouraged me to post on the forum to get the PA's attention.
Catch-22
Is there a roadmap?
I have submitted my problems with the graph editor and IK before.
Posting ideas in the frum allows them to be discussed, which may improve them - or explain how it is already possible to achieve the goal - before submitting them to Daz. But yes, eventually they do need to go into a Technical Support ticket.
Thank you for your response.
In my experience, tickets are often left unanswered for months.
The same goes for trouble reports and feature suggestions.
Sometimes I don't receive a reply for almost a year.
Then, just when I have given up and lost interest, I get the following canned reply.
"Thank you for your patience in working with us. we are reaching out to confirm if the issue stated in the initial opening of this ticket still persists. Within the current build of Daz Studio. should the issue still persist, please share with us a video of the problem as you go about reproducing it."
I send them a video and they leave it for months again.
Then Daz encourages me to discuss it on the forum.
For these reasons, I haven't used the technical support ticket recently.
It is very time-consuming and disappointing to try to accurately communicate a technical problem in a foreign language communimation, even though it is an automatic translation.
It's the same for me too, Jingoroh. I reported a lot of bugs many times, never got a real answer.
I was not the only one who did not receive a response.
I am working on multiple PCs.
While I am working on a “scene” on one PC, I proceed with rendering on another PC.
I can then control the other PCs via Windows “Remote Desktop”.
It is very convenient to manage everything in one place by using Windows “Remote Desktop”.
I don't have to move to another desk, so I can work very fast.
If I wanted, I could have just one set of monitor, keyboard, mouse, and desk.
However, when I operate DazStudio on another PC via “remote desktop”, the sliders and camera cubes move abnormally fast and cannot be operated properly.
Is this phenomenon only on my PC?
Or does this always happen when I use DazStudio on another PC via “Remote Desktop”?
If it is a common phenomenon of DazStudio, I hope it will be solved someday.
When I use Teamviewer to control my PC, the same thing happens to me. So pretty much I either have to have everything set up before I leave the house and just swap out renders, or I have to do something on my laptop, send the file to myself, open it on my PC at home and render it. It's a hassle but at least I can still use my home PC. The same thing happens with Blender fo rme, so I don't think this is a Daz issue.
My two main wishlist items. These may be in the works as it is, which would resolve it for me.
1. As it stands now, Daz feels like it's a script-driven app running in a platform-compiled executable. That is, every element of the user interface is being generated by a script engine. The only thing the executable does is launch an interpreter that loads those scripts so we have a program to work with. Adobe went this way for years. The advantage is you don't have to keep track of two versions for your cross-platform compiles; the executable is platform specific, but the scripts will run on anything that the executable can run on. The disadvantage is it's always an interpreted scripting language, which means it runs slower and less efficiently than a native-compiled app. If Daz is in fact a scripted app, I'd love to see native compile. It's harder to do, and costs more for development and debugging, but the speed and efficieny improvements are dramatic.
1a. Much better efficiency of hardware usage, if my surmise on (1) is incorrect; or if it's correct but there are still no plans to go native compile. Daz is slow.
2. A complete overhaul of the database, so it's not monolithic, doesn't all-but-require loading from the boot volume, and in general is a lot more accomodating of users who want or need to customize, sort, create their own categories without having to resort fo using a "favorites" section on the backend, etc. Imagine, for instance, being able to easily (by drag and drop) group all your figures by Genesis type. So the original Genesis is in one section, G2 is in another, G3 a third, etc. You're not just looking at a generic "figures" category in the smart asset manager, and you're not hunting around in the older interface either. Being able to quickly and painlessly define our own categories for assets, then adding items to them, as one might on the computer desktop with folders, files, and executables — I mean with that level of speed and convenience — would save me at least 20 hours a month that I burn off by having to navigate an awkward and arbitrary tree structure, or wait for the smart asset manager to finish filtering by context.
This, also, is not trivial. But the database we're harnessed to now is ancient, clunky, inefficient, and user-hostile.
Third item, lower priority, but "it would be nice if…"
I like the look of Iray. It yields much more reaslistic results much more easily than 3DL. But there are other render engines out there that work a lot faster, don't require a front-end expenditure on medium- to high-end graphics cards to do it, and it'd sure be great to be able to pipe my renders off into them. And what would be even cooler would be if I could tell Daz to start a render, then close out the file I just sent to render and open another to work on. You know, multitasking.
What I'm hoping is that the reason D5 is still a WIP is because Nos. 1 and 2 are actually part of the development arc, and are being very, very carefully designed so as not to break anyone's existing collections of assets. That would be a monumental undertaking, and would require a helluva long time to get right.
Daz Studio is a native application coded in C++ and Qt.
It is a core application with much of its featuer set supplied by plug-ins, though - but theya re compiled, platform-specific, C++ code not scruipts (some features have been implemented as scripts in the past, e.g. Drop to Floor and Symmetry, but as far as I know most or all of those are now fully compiled).
Slow how? It is doing a lot of things that are not readily threadable, since there are mutual depenedncies, which emans single core perfomance often matters more than core count in inertactive use - simulation and rendering, for example, are multi-threaded.
Aside from the app data folder entries nothing in DS is tied to the boot drive, though some of the default content paths may be (Public documents for DIM installs, and the My Library folder if the user's Docuemnts folder has been left on C:, but those can easilt be changed). The database certainly doesn't care which drive the content is on.
If you are using Smart Content then Filter by Selection should already do what you need by showing only compatible figures, but you can drag-and-drop from the Content Library to a particular category in Smart Content if you want, or use the Filter by Context feature in Smart Content, select all, right-click>Categorise.
I have no idea what you mean by "the database we're harnessed to now is ancient, clunky, inefficient, and user-hostile." Though database are not designed for casual tinkering, beyond what is available 9carefully considered) through the UI.
As for alternative render engines, the SDK isa vailable - anyone is free to write their own connectors, though they will also presumably need to write content converters (to the extent that that is possible).
Thanks for the reply.
I see, so this is one of the bugs during Windows remote.
I will try to contact Microsoft.
In the past at least part of the issue has been [lack of] OpenGL support, as I recall.
I often find the interface response to be slow when operating DazStudio.
When the number of objects in a scene is small, I have no complaints about the response time.
However, when the number of objects in a scene increases to a certain degree, it slows down dramatically, making it difficult to work with.
Since only a portion of the 64GB memory is used, I do not think there is a memory shortage, but as the number of objects increases, operations become extremely slow.
Animation keys also slow down when the number of keys increases.
When creating a 600-frame walking animation and trying to make 10 different people walk, the screen freezes for a while when the 600-frame key is selected on the timeline and the timing is moved.
The figures are also slow to load.
At one point it improved and became faster, but it is still quite slow when I have bought and installed many figures.
Furthermore, if there is a pose control animation, the load save slows down drastically.
I have learned my lesson and have refrained from buying many figures since Genesis9.
With Genesis9, men and women have the same single fugure, so if I buy the same number of figures as I did in Genesis8, the number of morphs each figure holds is double the number of figures in Genesis8.
Therefore, we are extra careful in Genesis9 to limit the number of figures we buy.
I don't know the structure of the database, but finding content is always a challenge.
I always have a hard time finding the content I want in Smart Content.
I remember that I bought a product, but I don't remember the name of the product.
I have bought more than 10,000 products, so it is not practical to remember all the product names.
Many products I don't even remember buying.
Products with cool names are often hard to find because the name doesn't match the product.
When using a high-resolution monitor, the icons in a row are too small to be intuitive.
Search filters and tags don't seem to be perfect, and many products are bought but not found when needed, so they are kept in dead storage.
Right now, the fastest way to find a product is to first look for it in the catalog on the Daz site, then use the product name or its filename as a clue and look for it in Smart Contents or Contents Library.
The fact that the thumbnails in the store catalog are much larger when lined up than in Smart Content also makes it easier to find the product.
When I search for a product in DazStudio alone, without using the site's Shop Catalog, I often can't find it.
It would help me if I could select larger thumbnail sizes for Smart Content and Content Library.
If I were a young person, I would probably not have a problem if I looked closer to the screen.
The current version of DazStudio makes it difficult to move the camera when working with long distance, large sized scenes.
I have to move the mouse over and over again or turn the mouse wheel a lot.
I would like an acceleration key for camera movement.
For example, if I hold down some key and turn the mouse wheel or move the mouse, the camera moves about five times faster, etc.
It's exciting to see all the renders using FilaToon.
On the first page, DAZ_Rawb stated that they had Filament running on an early build of DAZ Studio for Mac (with native Apple Silicon support coming later).
That was in July 2021.
I suppose all the great sales and excitement re: FIlaToon will be long gone by the time Mac users have the opportunity to use the elusive DS 5 (with Filament and other improvements.)
It's mid-October 2024 now.
That's a long, long, long wait for us to get a native modern Mac version of DS. I am glad that the devs (with Apple's help?) got a crippled version running on modern versions of macOS/Apple Silicon. It seemed like that was a quick interim fix until the real deal was released and kept our hopes up.
Time has faded those hopes. I quit purchasing products off and on over the past few years while waiting for DS 5. When SimonWM came out with a new product recently, I did buy a few products including his. Thank you, SimonWM for giving me a reason to invest in DS again.
I'd like to know if we're truly going to see the Mac version of DS updated properly in a time frame that is reasonable for customers. This delay has gone on too long (for me).
Yep, I'm being all pouty about the situation, but Apple has released 3 generations of Apple Silicon processors with the 4th gen coming quite soon. None of them can run DS natively or without issues. The 3 year stop gap version has had its run. Let's get that proper version. Or some confidence inspiring news about it.
Had to get that off my chest and sorry for the tone of the rant. But not the content of it. :)
Lee
Filament for Mac will not be added before DS 5 as it will entail breaking plug-in compatibility.
Been painfully aware of that for a while now. As we all have.