Daz3D plug-in capabilities

[kraken]

Hello,

I bought the stand-alone and the 2.0 upgrade. I've only rendered a few things, but I have to say I LOVE OCTANE! I was thinking of buying the plug-in for Daz, but have been disappointed with other plugins (namely Reality) in terms of performance, workflow, and animation capabilities.

I noticed there is no DEMO version for Daz3D.
My question is to those who have installed and tried to animate a sequence: Does it integrate well with Daz3d? Does the workflow seem intuitive and natural? Does it run inside Daz3d, or does it pop-out a new panel and run independently? Does it crash a lot, if so, does it recover well or maintain the source files.

I'm also learning C4D lite (as a part of After effects) and was wondering if CD4 plug-in works with the lite version and if the renderings migrate natively back into after effects as part of the standard workflow offered by AE/C4D lite?

Keep in mind, its not necessarily a matter of money. I think Octane is the best deal out there. You really get a lot of bang for the buck. Without a DEMO, I have no way to make a decision without community feedback.

Thanks for your insight.

James

[Spectralis]

I've had the plugin for over a year now and while it can produce stunning results the current DAZ Studio (DS) version is really problematic for me on two different systems (Win7 & Win8 x64.) The plugin has its own viewport in which the image is rendered. I haven't had many crashes but I've had continuous problems with the Octane Render (OR) viewport not updating clothing, hair and other adornments when a figure is moved. In my experience the same problem also affects clothing and hair during animation which are not updated in certain frames. This makes animation of anything more than a couple of hundred frames incredibly difficult and stressful because each frame needs to be checked after the render completes to ensure it has rendered correctly. This is a long and tedious task which of course requires the re-rendering of each mistake.

For still images a work around is to set content up in the DS viewport before opening the OR plugin but as you can imagine this is not ideal and impossible to sustain because lighting and materials all need to be adjusted in the OR plugin anyway and invariably it's necessary to adjust object placement as well. I spend about an hour a day waiting for the viewport to update or restarting DS when the viewport fails to update. This slows down my workflow significantly which is infuriating.

My advice is to seriously consider waiting until the beta v2 is released in Oct (that's what we've been promised anyway!) Hopefully many of the problems I and others are having with v1.2 will be resolved by then. Based on the extremely long intervals between updates, very poor support currently and the bugs I've highlighted, I can't, in good conscience, recommend the plugin at this time. I persevere with it because when I bought it a year ago I had no way of knowing all the problems that would unfold since then but now I'm stuck with it. I've just bought the Carrara plugin in anticipation of possibly moving over to that platform in the future.

[sikotik13]

IT seems mileage varies with the current iteration. Many users report problems like Spectralis, others have constant crashes, I personally haven't had any of these issues yet (started using the plugin pretty much exclusively in Feb), but I appear very much in the minority (at least out of those who are posting), and only did one short animation months ago. I would second the motion to hold off until we get the next release to see if any of these more common issues are resolved, and if the development continues to progress before deciding.

Oh, and for the C4D questions, you should probably direct them to that particular subforum. The plugin developer there is usually pretty responsive, and may not notice your question here. He'd be the guy with the definitive answer, I would assume.

[kraken]

Thank you Spectralis and sikotik13 for your insight. Last thing I need right now is to open another can of worms.

I guess my biggest issue at this point is a matter of workflow. I really like the output of Octane, but have never animated with it. I saw a Daz3D plugin for alembic output and thought that might be a solution for animation. I had a feeling the Octane plug-in would be problematic. Every other rendering plug I try to use "blows up" as soon as you send it something more complex than some primitive shapes.

Thanks for the C4D suggestion as well.

[Spectralis]

The DAZ Octane Plugin has the potential to be perfect for animation if only each frame rendered correctly. Some people seem to have more luck than others and even I find the problem varies from scene to scene but it's just not reliable atm. That's what's so frustrating with the current situation - close but not there yet.

[wendyluvscatz]

well I have been animating in it from the day I bought it.
the only things that give me issues are texture sizes and instances.
the first I can resize them all but not found a way to do multiple ones so tedious and does not always save with the scene
instances render if just the figure in the scene but add other stuff and it stops updating


in the above video I have 100 animated instanced Chzor with a flame prop as an emitter and it worked fine
additional scenes done in iClone, the pink hell chzor being octane renders



the above scene however would not update, that is an opengl render that actually took longer per frame to render my animation than Octane would have.

[kraken]

OMG! I thought I was having a bad acid trip. I'm going to hide under my bed...that is some scary-freaky stuff you've got going on there. I can't turn away from it. Good job.

[Veneris]

It works well for still images, but to create animations most of the time OCDS always renders the frame 1 and not advance.