Seriously disappointed in progress of the Daz plugin Tweet

[Sorel]

We are bringing on a new dedicated developer for Daz3D (so Paul can move on to his own plug-ins, he graciously took over from the original dev after that dev suddenly left the project). Bikram will be managing user feedback on the forums as he does for Maya and Hydra as of next week. We will make a formal post this week. It will take a bit of time for the new dev to fully get up to speed on major refactoring work, but we expect after this happen at a quicker pace once we get a first 2021 update out.

This is wonderful news, thank you for the communication. I have been grateful for Paul and all he's tried to do for us but a dedicated developer is exactly what we need.

[Fiezekoenig]

Indeed excellent news! Thank you Paul for your work on the plug-in and the support on the forum. Having someone dedicated to this plug-in is the right move and can hopefully elevate it to new heights.

[larsmidnatt]

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.

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).

[UHF]

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).

Of the renders I posted above... the Robotics Lab used 11.5 GB on my 6GB video cards, and it still took only 10-15 minutes. Daz was chugging in the 20GB range, and my PC was struggling just to edit that.

I spent a good 6 hours converting the textures for the room with Arya; https://www.daz3d.com/rog-medieval-fantasy-bedroom But the render was done in 12 minutes. It was super fast. What I find important is the amount of time I can spend on test renders. Quick test renders really help you figure out what to tweak.

I have been soul searching about whether to continue with Octane. I started using it before Iray was available, and to be fair, the monkey show of Iray at Daz has largely cleared up. However, I believe the switch to Iray will require a very expensive upgrade to my GPUs simply because of Iray's memory limitations.

All that aside, I decided to try and hit the "Make Art" button and quickly turn a render with the same room. (I have to bear in mind that I don't know all there is to know with Iray...) After following a few guides on improving render quality... It was awful. That room with 1 character will take over an hour in Daz, and I'm not certain the sparkles would clean up in that time. I would need a LOT more hands on experience to work with it, but the performance is still limiting.

I also have a lot of poser world, and older Daz sets, and I find editing in Daz\Iray painful and slow. All the Octane nuisances come out in the wash when you realize that you can combine all the work for related textures. The NGE is dang intuitive, and it really helps.