I do agree the Daz plugin has a lot of room for improvement. I stopped upgrading at 4, but I've been here since before Octane (standalone) left beta.
How about the thousands of Daz users who try the plugin, see the results and figure Octane is fast but looks nowhere near as good as Iray and abandon it and or takes way to much tweaking to get decent look.
I understand the majority of Daz users will just want to click once or twice and be done, Octane will never be that (I've been saying this for years). So we can't be overly concerned with the people that try Octane and give up because its not a one-click solution.
Auto conversions from iRay/3DL are only going to get us so far. They are just meant to save us some time getting started. Then we do our magic.
That doesn't mean OcDS can't get better. Support more Daz features. Or even improve the conversion tools. Personally I'd love if they somehow got toon lighting to work...somehow. (not betting on it ever). But, I don't think anyone should ever expect out of the box OcDS to look like iRay. People are going to need to put some work in.
UHF wrote:I have something to say here.
*snip*
Most of my time in Daz is and always has been (sadly) spent on textures and shaders.
I wouldn't say that is sad though. ^_^ Visual art is about light and how it interacts with surfaces. Working with lights and manipulating materials is, ya know, what we do.
I hear ya on the whole transition from all the different daz rendering solutions. I remember all the uber this, uber this 3.0, and how things didn't play nicely with each other. You'd swap most of your presets out on a whim and toss out countless products! I'm glad that Octane has stayed forward compatible. Occasionally I have to go back a year or 3 depending on the project and I've been so lucky that things load and render fine even after so many upgrades.
There is a lot to be said about learning a stable set of tools you can leverage for years, versus using what is fashionable for a company for a while until they decide to drop it and go in a new direction. Octane has always been really empowering, which is why I have stayed so long (even with all it's quirks).