Seriously disappointed in progress of the Daz plugin Tweet

[alaman64]

I remember when Paul took over development of the plugin from T3, that was great a great day, all the little problems were finally getting fixed, I think that was about 5 years ago.
If there was a bug, Paul would be quick to look at it and try to fix it, that is if you could reproduce It.

The default skin setting for example are plain awful, a little tweaking or spending some more money on RedSpec improves things, but it’s still a pain because every time, you change something the figure turns black and you have to reload diffuse materials. This should have been fixed by now, we should have had better default material conversions, I should not have to purchase RedSpec. I think I brought this up a few years ago, Paul's answer I think was tell me what to do and I will fix it, problem is I have no clue, as do 95% of most Daz users. I have no idea how sub-surface scattering works, skin layers, and all the other parameters that need tweaking on skin to make it look realistic. This is a hobby for me, I don’t have a PHD in this stuff nor an interest to learn it.

And then we have stuff that should be working but doesn’t and never will because it’s just too complicated to fix. About two years ago, I started working with VR and wanted to start creating 3D art that could be viewed on VR devices, problem is there is no spherical camera in the Daz Octane Plugin, Octane supports it, but the plug-in does not. Paul’s answer was "Implementing the new camera type is on the long-term "todo" list.” That was August 8th 2018. That was 16 months ago, you could have re-written the entire plugin in that time.


I signed up for the Studio subscription last week, well I will be cancelling it after the month is over, there is no point Octane is an incredible piece of software, to bad this plugin takes all the fun out of it. If you don’t want to develop this plugin I recommend you find someone who does, maybe Daz would be willing to buy it from you. If you had a plugin that worked with the ease of Iray, I’m sure you could make good money from this plugin

[Tugpsx]

Sorry to hear about the issues you are having with the application. We have all had things not work exactly as we intended over time. Regarding the Octane material room, there is definitely room for improvement and it is a process that Paul will be investigating. The current conversion is based on the older technology with a few tweaks. When working on the conversion pattern years ago some of the features was not available in Daz Studio that are available today.

As for the skin vs other materials, there was an issue of determining if the material to be converted is skin or not. There were a few cases where skin was used on a cube or sphere to determine if the algorithm could determine correctly. Some materials translate quite well where as others do not and require adjustment. The basic bump level has changed as well as gamma for 1.8 to 2.2.
Remember there is a added feature to correct a skin/texture that has gone to black when the material is added, simply pressing CTL+ALT+R to replace the maps of the material or R-Click on the material then "Texture for" then choose "Replace All Active Maps". Now you will say why don't they just do that automatically, well as stated some material convert acceptably so not all maps need to be brought back from Studio, Making that a checkbox option would be a good idea too.

Daz plugin maps replacement

[alaman64]

Thanks for the info, by the way I've tired many times and the ctrl alt R has never worked for me and still does not. But forget about me for a second, I've been playing with Octane for over 5 years. 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. This community is dead, but with a little investment in the plugin I could see I can see many users dropping iray and switching.

[Hun73rdk_1]

I can only say i have been using octane for about a year and i still cant figure out how to make HDRI scale and look god like in iray so chars does not either to small or to big, and if you export a render profile and re-import it data gets lost.

The handbook is way to outdated to even make sense, the only reason i still use octane is that its not bound by the ram on your cards like iray i say we overpay for it with how little is happening to the plugin and how much trouble i have with it.

The mats translate to octane wary badly even PBR textures it cant even figure out how to get right had to get a substance painter empty material off the live server.

And my live material database keep forgetting names all the time so i have to delete the livedb2 file and some times the number of materials in the database just goes down and down until i delete the database file.

Just my 2 cents to add about the plugin,

[Tugpsx]

Check this quick video to explain how to use the replace material
https://youtu.be/c0dsmz92cF0?t=1024

[UHF]

I have something to say here. Complaining that its not all easy to use is fine and dandy, but I see this entirely differently. When I started using Daz, 3DLight wasn't supported, and my introduction into rendering was spent with days of editing textures. Not only that, but after 3DLight was supported for most of what I bought... Lux/Reality was available, and I loved that, but Dang is was slow. (The renders were worth it. Sleeping on the couch all night while the render updated.. not so much.)

Then Iray came out. (What we refer to now as Iray Legacy.) Anyone who put time into that, got stuff that doesn't work now. And if you think Iray 3.0 isn't coming, or that all your content will just magically work fine when it does, you're not thinking clearly. You're in for a nasty surprise.

Most of my time in Daz is and always has been (sadly) spent on textures and shaders. At least Octane cranks out test renders fast, so you can tweak things quickly. (Dang... 30 minute test renders with Reality to verify a chrome shader... Ah! Those were the days!)

[seanlo]

To OP: You've summed it up well - I've cancelled my subscription a month ago for similar reasons.

As a casual hobbyist, I love octane - it produces the prettiest renders when used with Redspec.
Currently, there's two issues that cripples the software to the point that i've given up and went with Iray (Ugh!!).

- Transparency issues (put a shell that is 100% transparent that clashes with another surface. The entire surface becomes see through)
This may sound trivial, but i assure you it is not. Several body parts currently uses some form of a shell, and it causes see through issues on multiple body parts in daz3d. Iray does NOT have this issue.

- Strand based hair not supported
This feature only works with octane in very strange circumstances. I have gotten it to work if i load the character, render it once. It won't work the next time - i will need to delete the character and reload it(?). Works with Iray flawlessly.

[birdovous]

Yeah... The lack of progress of the DAZ plugin (pretty much no progress at all when it comes to implementing new Octane features and achieving parity with what DAZ allows us to do and what the Octane Plugin can actually render) is the main reason for me why I didn't upgrade to the new subscription based licensing model at all. I'm still using DAZ with Octane plugin, but my workflow is frozen on the last "buy-to-own" version 4 as I don't really see a point in paying for something that seems to be dead in the water (as I pretty much use only DAZ, so I would not even benefit from the ability to use up-to-date version of standalone or other plugins).

[3dxcentric]

I'm so in-tune with Octane and Redspec now I can't imagine changing even though both are getting more and more dated.

Is anyone aware of another solution?

[Goldorak]

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.