Daz Studio 5 development update

Tirick

margrave said:

Yes. The Uber shader combines dozens of Nvidia's MDL functions into one "uber" shader. People then use its SSS functionality to cobble together a workable volumetric lighting feature. This shader setup cuts out all the stuff you don't need and just implements what you do.

There's more info in my Shader Mixer tutorial/deep dive thread:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/505581/the-shader-mixer-deciphered-blender-to-daz-conversion

Thank you!

hjake

marble said:

I think that some people are getting ahead of the curve here. I doubt that we will see things like soft-body physics or a decent IK system, etc. It seems to me that DAZ Studio will have an updated platform and any nice-to-have's might come along later, if at all. The community has been asking for a Linux port as well as soft body physics and a good animation toolkit for as long as I have been using DAZ Studio (almost two decades). We eventually got IRay and dForce although I suspect many of us would have liked other options. Who knows - the new framework might open the doors to long wished-for features but I'm not holding my breath.

I also suspect that there will be considerable costs when it comes to replacing plugins but I would like to see some kind of listing of what will break and what will migrate easly.

 

I agree with you about future features. DAZ Studio is free to help sell more DAZ 3D content. DAZ Studio is not about being a comprehensive 3D software.  The DAZ 3D sales model is razor and blades. The content sold in the store are the blades but to get the best performance you should use their razor (DAZ Studio) which they offer for free. Therefore it is reasonable that DAZ 3D's primary concern is DAZ Studio features which sell more DAZ 3D content. In addition, all those features you want they will offer as plug-in and script content sold at the store. Since they have been doing this for many years it seems like a successful sales model for them.

Also they seem to recognize that the content market is maturing and if they don't bring inter-operability to their content (DAZ Bridges) they may start to lose marketshare.

 

Ivy

Richard Haseltine said:

Ivy said:

I have some questions. that seemed to be passed over .

1)  Will Daz5 still read. DUF, ? or support pz3 like daz4?

Given the comments on compatibility I would say that was a clear yes for .duf at least

2)  Will there be a offer for downloads of older version of daz 4 such as 4.11 or  4.12 ?

I wouldn't expect that to change, it will be the latest DS 4 on the DS product page and in DIM/Central

3) Will the Daz bridges to blender still work?

That we won't know, but I'm sure they will be updated if necessary

4) Will GoZ still work or a new zbrush bridge for us zbrush users?

GoZ is a plug-in so it will need a new file, to go to the new location, but I have no doubt it will be updated (though I've no idea if that will be immediate, or if the two will be different enough to have both GoZ afor DS 4 and GoZ for DS 5 installed at the same time).

5) Will the animate2 timeline and the .GFA scripts for aniblock still work in the new daz 5?

Nothing has been said to indicate otherwise, though it is possible from what was said that not all features may be in the initial release.

Thank you

AlmightyQUEST

hjake said:

marble said:

I think that some people are getting ahead of the curve here. I doubt that we will see things like soft-body physics or a decent IK system, etc. It seems to me that DAZ Studio will have an updated platform and any nice-to-have's might come along later, if at all. The community has been asking for a Linux port as well as soft body physics and a good animation toolkit for as long as I have been using DAZ Studio (almost two decades). We eventually got IRay and dForce although I suspect many of us would have liked other options. Who knows - the new framework might open the doors to long wished-for features but I'm not holding my breath.

I also suspect that there will be considerable costs when it comes to replacing plugins but I would like to see some kind of listing of what will break and what will migrate easly.

 

I agree with you about future features. DAZ Studio is free to help sell more DAZ 3D content. DAZ Studio is not about being a comprehensive 3D software.  The DAZ 3D sales model is razor and blades. The content sold in the store are the blades but to get the best performance you should use their razor (DAZ Studio) which they offer for free. Therefore it is reasonable that DAZ 3D's primary concern is DAZ Studio features which sell more DAZ 3D content. In addition, all those features you want they will offer as plug-in and script content sold at the store. Since they have been doing this for many years it seems like a successful sales model for them.

Also they seem to recognize that the content market is maturing and if they don't bring inter-operability to their content (DAZ Bridges) they may start to lose marketshare.

 

Couldn't you have made the same argument that they wouldn't have had any reason to release a dforce cloth engine (since there was never much optitex clothing) or the dforce hair option?

Mistara

updates.  lets celebrate the 9 year anniversary of the last carrara update  August 2013

what was the year general rigging came out and left carrara out of new content?

shadowhawk1

3dOutlaw said:

It would be comforting to see Daz officially just say, "Daz Studio 5 will continue to be a free software, just like DS4" or something of the sort.  Most of the rest I can live with, and in fact look forward to!  :)  They've been doing a good job with new features and technologies so far.    Unfortunately, the lack of that particular statement is what is worrying, along with the intentional mention of keeping your old version.

Thank you @3dOutlaw that is exactly what I am looking for as well. 

shadowhawk1

AlmightyQUEST said:

shadowhawk1 said:

marble said:

shadowhawk1 said:

Here are a few things that I saw in the announcement that concern me and haven’t been properly addressed yet:

No backwards compatibility… Is this just for the add ons or will this also mean that all products going forward will be 5.0 only?

Cost/Subscription… In this world of cloud based software subscriptions is 5.0 going to remain free, or will daz be following the market trend and going cloud based subscription as well?

If it is going to be a cloud based subscription, will there be a free version that has reduced abilities and a Pro or subscription version that gives you full access to the program?

Core support… Currently Studio only uses the first core and the more advanced the cores like the i9 are actually slower than the i7, will this be addressed in 5.0?

 

Subscription would be the end of the line for me. I have enough content to play with 4.x for a good while and, meanwhile, I'll finally make the effort and learn Blender. 

It would be for me as well. At one point in time studio had a free version and a 'PRO' version that had to be purchased in order to unlock its full program. With all the major programs going cloud based subscription it seems like a reasonable question to ask at this point.

The "Pro" version was a collection of plugins that added on to the free base, of which I believe most of not all of them eventually became part of the free base in DS4? So the only difference from plugins they sell now is that they bundled them together and have them the "pro" name, and it's something they tried in the past and moved away from.

I wasn't aware of that, I was a Poser user at that time and knew that there was a free version that didn't have all of the features that the 'PRO' version had.

AlmightyQUEST

It's still the case that the free base doesn't have, for instance, LAMH or Instancify.

benniewoodell

margrave said:

Tirick said:

margrave said:

Do you mean a volume scatterer or an instance scatterer? Iray has a built-in volume scatterer, but it's hidden in the shader mixer. 

You have just blown my mind... Is this a material on a cube (like in the SSS method)?

Yes. The Uber shader combines dozens of Nvidia's MDL functions into one "uber" shader. People then use its SSS functionality to cobble together a workable volumetric lighting feature. This shader setup cuts out all the stuff you don't need and just implements what you do.

There's more info in my Shader Mixer tutorial/deep dive thread:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/505581/the-shader-mixer-deciphered-blender-to-daz-conversion

Wow. This is amazing. Thank you! 

hjake

kyoto kid said:

...all I get is the "Game Ready" one when I put in the GPU information.

 

I think Studio drivers only became available to the "10s" series of cards. my GTX 970 can not work with the latest Studio drivers but my 1070 and 2070 Super work just fine.

hjake

AlmightyQUEST said:

hjake said:

marble said:

I think that some people are getting ahead of the curve here. I doubt that we will see things like soft-body physics or a decent IK system, etc. It seems to me that DAZ Studio will have an updated platform and any nice-to-have's might come along later, if at all. The community has been asking for a Linux port as well as soft body physics and a good animation toolkit for as long as I have been using DAZ Studio (almost two decades). We eventually got IRay and dForce although I suspect many of us would have liked other options. Who knows - the new framework might open the doors to long wished-for features but I'm not holding my breath.

I also suspect that there will be considerable costs when it comes to replacing plugins but I would like to see some kind of listing of what will break and what will migrate easly.

 

I agree with you about future features. DAZ Studio is free to help sell more DAZ 3D content. DAZ Studio is not about being a comprehensive 3D software.  The DAZ 3D sales model is razor and blades. The content sold in the store are the blades but to get the best performance you should use their razor (DAZ Studio) which they offer for free. Therefore it is reasonable that DAZ 3D's primary concern is DAZ Studio features which sell more DAZ 3D content. In addition, all those features you want they will offer as plug-in and script content sold at the store. Since they have been doing this for many years it seems like a successful sales model for them.

Also they seem to recognize that the content market is maturing and if they don't bring inter-operability to their content (DAZ Bridges) they may start to lose marketshare.

 

Couldn't you have made the same argument that they wouldn't have had any reason to release a dforce cloth engine (since there was never much optitex clothing) or the dforce hair option?

They may have seen bigger financial benefit for selling new content if they contolled the physics simulation with dForce. I know that I have purchased alot of content that has the word dForce in the title. Although for me, the dForce was never a specific selling feature and it seems that ultimately I wll be investing my time in Blender instead of DAZ Studio since DS4 probably has an 18 month shelf-life from today and re-purchasing 167 plug-ins and scripts does NOT really appeal to me.

 

akmerlow

Anyone who has Daz Studio 4 in their account will be able to keep it. You'll be able to continue to download and use it for the foreseeable future.

Thank you much. I'm mostly using DS together with Bryce and not on very modern PC, so it's important to have legacy version available to me. 

Mustakettu85

AlmightyQUEST said:

The "Pro" version was a collection of plugins that added on to the free base, of which I believe most of not all of them eventually became part of the free base in DS4?

Save for the Decimator.

Originally there was also DS3 Advanced that came with all those omnifreaker shaders like UberEnvironment2 etc. I remember it being quite expensive for the then-young me, but luckily later I managed to get my unlock code for DS3A from a 3D magazine (remember when those had awesome giveaways?).

AlmightyQUEST said:

It's still the case that the free base doesn't have, for instance, LAMH or Instancify.

On the other hand, Garibaldi was originally a paid-for plugin and years later it was reborn as the built-in "strand-based hair" tool.

margrave

hjake said:

They may have seen bigger financial benefit for selling new content if they contolled the physics simulation with dForce. I know that I have purchased alot of content that has the word dForce in the title. Although for me, the dForce was never a specific selling feature and it seems that ultimately I wll be investing my time in Blender instead of DAZ Studio since DS4 probably has an 18 month shelf-life from today and re-purchasing 167 plug-ins and scripts does NOT really appeal to me.

Sickleyield wrote in her DeviantArt blog it takes so long to make corrective morphs everybody just makes skimpwear instead. I've assumed all along the purpose of dForce was to let content creators put outfits out more frequently.

shadowhawk1

Richard Haseltine said:

shadowhawk1 said:

Daz Jack Tomalin said:

With all the major programs going cloud based subscription it seems like a reasonable question to ask at this point.

How many have gone from free to subscription models though?

I'm not sure what makes people think Daz are going down that path.

I am not going to speculate or guess about other software as they are not being discussed on this thread, and I am an end user and don't have the numbers or information to speculate on your question. All I am asking is will 5.0 remain a free to download unthrottled program or are there plans to go back to the free/pro format that studio once was? 

This is why we are down on speculation - a question like yours turns into a worry turns into a conviction that the end is nigh.

Jack has alrady address the main point of your original query, but for the record Daz Studio had only a very brief spell of having a limited free version with a paid-for full version when DS 4 launched; before that DS 3 had an Advanced version and a Pro version, but they were essentially bundles of the application and the content tools and a few others (which could also be purchased separately).

I am not speculating as my comment clearly says. I am asking a question that several others are also curious about. Also Jack did not address my original query he mearly posed another question in response. 

DAZ_Rawb

I'm out of town on a vacation to celebrate my wife's birthday (which is why I'm not responding more) but just wanted to step in and say that keeping Daz Studio free is definitely the plan.

shadowhawk1

DAZ_Rawb said:

I'm out of town on a vacation to celebrate my wife's birthday (which is why I'm not responding more) but just wanted to step in and say that keeping Daz Studio free is definitely the plan.

 

Thank you! I appreciate you taking the time away from your vacation to respond. 

daveso

its all pretty much specualtion right now. My only thing is that 4.15 is not very stable, has memory issues, ans those should be fixed. I would love to go back to 4.12. Hopefully 5 isn;t changed so much as to not work with all this content I've purchased over the years. I'm happy right now other than the existing issues everyone always talking about. I would rather see 4.15 fixed and called 4.5 or something like that. And yes, release 5 for the Mac crowd. 

AlmightyQUEST

Mustakettu85 said:

AlmightyQUEST said:

The "Pro" version was a collection of plugins that added on to the free base, of which I believe most of not all of them eventually became part of the free base in DS4?

Save for the Decimator.

Originally there was also DS3 Advanced that came with all those omnifreaker shaders like UberEnvironment2 etc. I remember it being quite expensive for the then-young me, but luckily later I managed to get my unlock code for DS3A from a 3D magazine (remember when those had awesome giveaways?).

AlmightyQUEST said:

It's still the case that the free base doesn't have, for instance, LAMH or Instancify.

On the other hand, Garibaldi was originally a paid-for plugin and years later it was reborn as the built-in "strand-based hair" tool.

That last part is more along what I expect, like with the old "Pro" set, some paid plugins eventually become built in to the free base. I'm not sure if any examples where something that was in the free base later got removed to become a paid for feature, which seemed to be the concern before.

AlmightyQUEST

Uh, not sure what's going on with the quote block there, when I go to edit the post it looks correct on my phone...

hjake

MelanieL said:

Richard Haseltine said:

certaintree38 said:

@ j cade and others: I asked Daz for a copy of 4.14 and they said no. As far as I know, they no longer offer any older versions for download. I would not assume the offer to keep 4.15 available to last forever. Besides, backing up is easy, so I don't see a reason not to.

The DS 4 page in your Product Library should remain, though it will have only the latest version. Those of us who purchased one of the bundled versions of DS 3 likewise have that in our Product Libraries still. I'm not sure where DS 2 was found on the Daz site.

I still have DS2.3.xxx in my account, which seems to be downloadable still. 

Latest release of the previous versions are available in your product library.

Mustakettu85

AlmightyQUEST said:

That last part is more along what I expect, like with the old "Pro" set, some paid plugins eventually become built in to the free base. I'm not sure if any examples where something that was in the free base later got removed to become a paid for feature, which seemed to be the concern before.

I've been here since 2008, and the only thing somehow resembling taking away a feature was that in the DS default shader "before my time" (DS 1.x?) the "skin" fake scatter mode had tunable colours, and then in DS2 those colours got locked. And in DS4, IIRC, that functionality got re-enabled again.

I'm worried about accidentally introduced bugs. Because of added features :))

Mustakettu85

AlmightyQUEST said:

Uh, not sure what's going on with the quote block there, when I go to edit the post it looks correct on my phone...

The forums inherited a tendency to get bugged from the flagship software, it seems.

frank0314

Mustakettu85 said:

AlmightyQUEST said:

That last part is more along what I expect, like with the old "Pro" set, some paid plugins eventually become built in to the free base. I'm not sure if any examples where something that was in the free base later got removed to become a paid for feature, which seemed to be the concern before.

I've been here since 2008, and the only thing somehow resembling taking away a feature was that in the DS default shader "before my time" (DS 1.x?) the "skin" fake scatter mode had tunable colours, and then in DS2 those colours got locked. And in DS4, IIRC, that functionality got re-enabled again.

I'm worried about accidentally introduced bugs. Because of added features :))

There are always going to be bugs no matter how hard you test something upon release. They can't ultimately produce every single problem that may occur during the coarse of using the app. It has always taken a release to find all of the bugs and getting them fixed.

Mustakettu85

frank0314 said:

...It has always taken a release to find all of the bugs and getting them fixed.

I'll voice my issue again and then I promise not to repeat it anymore:
Not all the bugs have been fixed. That's the problem. If it's only a bug for a negligible subset of users, it remains.

3dOutlaw

DAZ_Rawb said:

I'm out of town on a vacation to celebrate my wife's birthday (which is why I'm not responding more) but just wanted to step in and say that keeping Daz Studio free is definitely the plan.

Thanks and have a great vacation!

hjake

Silent Winter said:

+42 for a Linux version (Daz Studio is the only reason I still have windows - and that's Windows 7 on my offline work/render machine). While I'm sure Daz could do a Linux version, it would mean they'd have to support it. I think we heard before, unofficially perhaps, that there just isn't a big enough user-base to make it worthwhile. Then again, chicken-egg, Studio could be a leader there.

 

Happy to see DS5 coming along, pre-beta won't expect too many interesting features but once the core is stable, I'm sure there are plans to add good stuff to it.

Input error. I'm sorry any number greater than +1 generates a negative vote for Linux, therefore we will have to cast your ballot as 42 votes not for Linux. Thank you for participating in democracy. 

margrave

davesoX@10 said:

its all pretty much specualtion right now. My only thing is that 4.15 is not very stable, has memory issues, ans those should be fixed. I would love to go back to 4.12. Hopefully 5 isn;t changed so much as to not work with all this content I've purchased over the years. I'm happy right now other than the existing issues everyone always talking about. I would rather see 4.15 fixed and called 4.5 or something like that. And yes, release 5 for the Mac crowd. 

There's a reason they need to massively overhaul the framework. Qt4 was created in 2005 and ended service in 2015. It may not be possible to "fix" a system created in the Windows XP days, and deprecated half a decade ago, so that it runs flawlessly on modern hardware.

hjake

margrave said:

hjake said:

They may have seen bigger financial benefit for selling new content if they contolled the physics simulation with dForce. I know that I have purchased alot of content that has the word dForce in the title. Although for me, the dForce was never a specific selling feature and it seems that ultimately I wll be investing my time in Blender instead of DAZ Studio since DS4 probably has an 18 month shelf-life from today and re-purchasing 167 plug-ins and scripts does NOT really appeal to me.

Sickleyield wrote in her DeviantArt blog it takes so long to make corrective morphs everybody just makes skimpwear instead. I've assumed all along the purpose of dForce was to let content creators put outfits out more frequently.

Sickleyield has always been on the ball (good balance ... ).

I think your estimation of the situation is spot-on.

 

hjake

DAZ_Rawb said:

I'm out of town on a vacation to celebrate my wife's birthday (which is why I'm not responding more) but just wanted to step in and say that keeping Daz Studio free is definitely the plan.

Thanks you for checking in and may this be a great day for her. Happy Birthday.