DAZ Studio Pro BETA - version 4.8.0.4! IRAY

[ch0pper]

To be honest with you, I think everybody main concern of that just didn't hear from you quite a while.
No one you really what the status was of the plug-in, and then IRAY Daz happened,

Obviously lots of speculation.

Even if you are busy. I would just say post something to say that your working on the update.
And I'm going to be really cheeky here LOL any rough ETA on the new updated for daz.

PS you can tell me the sod off

[bmosalt]

but, btw. why did nobody of _in particular_ the people that were pushing here in the forum, also in direction of otoy, ever reach out for me by i.e. writing me a pm? my inbox was empty from january until last weekend. so, why? is it more fun trying to stress me in public? does it look like this helps me coding faster? i'm just curious...

I've checked in every few days or so to see if an update had been posted. I did this patiently for a couple of months after your last release, but as time went by (and speculation grew amongst your customers) I must admit that over the past week or so I was starting to wonder whether or not you were still working on the plugin at all. It's not that I grew impatient, demanding another build. For the most part I can work within the current build. It's that you just seemed to up and vanish. You weren't even from posting in the OcDS forum. You were just gone. Prior to March 11, your last post in a publicly viewed forum was at the end of December. That's simply far too long. You wonder why some people get impatient and frustrated? That's the reason. People will generally be incredibly patient so long as they are assured that progress is being made.

I'm not going to criticise your work. The plug-in is good, and pretty much as soon as you iron out the issues, it'll be great. But I have to say that you're not very good at customer relations. You have developed a pattern of neglect towards your customers. You post an update, you're active on the forum for a few days, then you disappear. On this occasion you were absent for over two months! And when you do show up again it just happens to be the same day that an alternative to your product is released. Then when you're asked about the progress on the plug-in, you're defensive and reactive. I mean, you threatened to hold back release of your next planned update because you didn't like what your customers were saying to you!

I (along with others) requested a quick update every now and then. This would solve a lot of your problems (in regards to the forum). Your customers would be reassured that work is indeed progressing.

In your 5 paragraph response to my request, you listed reasons why you don't think an update is necessary. Except that in that response I learnt some of the things you'd worked on, and some of the issues you faced recently on that plug-in development. I've edited your response to show you that you could simply post that information for us, and we'd go away content with the knowledge that development was progressing.

Post by t_3 » Wed Mar 11, 2015 1:48 pm
there were >8.5k builds since the last update. i had not expected that i would need to create an own patch to the freeimage c++ library (to include the latest open-exr libs) to fix a particular crash. that's not the most easy thing to do, and boom there are another 3 days X xx hrs gone for sthg.

some of the users here were testing v2.2 for a while now

A paragraph or two like that every couple of weeks indicates progress, and will shut people like me up. Surely you don't want every one of your customers contacting your directly (via PM) every single time they get to wondering how the plug-in is going.

[asennov]

To stop the flames I confess that I indeed know nothing about Octane API (I asked Otoy about SDK but they refused to give access) and all my experience with Qt, OptiX and DS SDK pales before that fact.

but, btw. why did nobody of _in particular_ the people that were pushing here in the forum, also in direction of otoy, ever reach out for me by i.e. writing me a pm? my inbox was empty from january until last weekend. so, why? is it more fun trying to stress me in public? does it look like this helps me coding faster? i'm just curious...

When it comes to legal side of thing - I'm in contract with Otoy, not you personally and from my standpoint as customer Otoy is responsible for not fulfilling the contract and not one of developers (especially third party). That's why I wrote them.

As for bugs and software in general - there always was someone who made bugreport faster than me on forum, so why should I repeat it (in pm, or forum)? And after being 'licensed customer' for a while I've seen that this will not help at large

I never used 2.x and 1.5 series for anything but "oh, that bug still exists" testing and developed a set of "NO-NO" rules for 1.2 that helped me to complete small projects despite of it's shortcomings. After that I didn't use it also, investigating the possibility to use Blender's Cycles (standalone or finally to write plugin for it ) with DS, visiting forum only to see "PRE RELEASE 5" thread is still relevant. And here comes DAZ with Iray...

reading this sentence i feel like giving it another intense round of closed testing...

Huh, wasn't each of PRE RELEASEs "better tested and more stable" than previous one ?

Know what? I have an even better idea: switch to 3.x development and charge for upgrade.

[t_3]

As for bugs and software in general - there always was someone who made bugreport faster than me on forum, so why should I repeat it (in pm, or forum)? And after being 'licensed customer' for a while I've seen that this will not help at large

honestly, they help. if you know the daz sdk, you must know how it works. everything is event-driven and most things happen out of order. octane is quite the contrary. to force a "random" stream of events into an ordered stream of - in addition abstracted - events incorporates buffers, caches, aggregators, simply said the timing starts to count (at least if you prefer fast of boring). and what might work on my machine and lots others may fail somewhere else or under particular circumstances. not to mention to put multithreaded task on top of a non-threadsafe api.

without descriptive bug reports there is no way to get a trace of/work around such problems. the online report form that came with the last release was the most helpful thing ever. interestingly the reports i received were much more descriptive and detailed than i had expected (thanks everybody). and way better to handle than "bug discussions" in forum threads where things start to wash out on page 2 already.

Huh, wasn't each of PRE RELEASEs "better tested and more stable" than previous one ?

indeed they were. (ps: you are entitled to now place the punch line)

[t_3]

Surely you don't want every one of your customers contacting your directly (via PM) every single time they get to wondering how the plug-in is going.

there is a little gap between zero and everyone. but you are probably right that it might be no the most ideal form to deliver news...

[t_3]

To stop the flames I confess that I indeed know nothing about Octane API (I asked Otoy about SDK but they refused to give access) and all my experience with Qt, OptiX and DS SDK pales before that fact.

just for fun: you can grab source 2 (soon) or unreal 4 (now) engines for free and challenge me. there you can easily get a grip on realtime rendering with ds - since these engines are all about that.

[Spectralis]

Some of the excuses being raised here sound a bit like the dog ate my homework. Heaven knows what potential customers reading these forums must think!

since only registered users come here, probably nothing. what doesn't mean it is good by any means.

but, btw. why did nobody of _in particular_ the people that were pushing here in the forum, also in direction of otoy, ever reach out for me by i.e. writing me a pm? my inbox was empty from january until last weekend. so, why? is it more fun trying to stress me in public? does it look like this helps me coding faster? i'm just curious...

Probably two reasons, you're not usually involved in the forums so it feels as if you have a "do not disturb" sign on your PM door and you requested specifically that we contact you about bug reports. Because we're not sure what bugs you're working on, whether someone else has sent in a report or whether it's been solved it's difficult to know what to send. We have posted in the forum requesting news about the development so if you check the forums then that's evident. Apparently the forum is visible only to customers so it's not public and we're all aware of the situation. As others have suggested, surely it's a lot quicker and a lot less time consuming for you to post a brief update once a month rather than answer PM's?

[oofnish]

In case anyone's still interested in the differences between OR and IRay, I spent a while the last couple days comparing the two. It's tough to get a truly fair comparison, since iRay is much newer to me than Octane is... and I'm sure my results with iRay would be improved with more practice.

Attached are renders of the scene I used. I kept it pretty basic to avoid having to delve too deeply into customizing materials and settings for either renderer, hoping to get a feel for how they look 'out of the box'. One glaring difference is that I used Redspec SSS shaders for the skin in octane, and the "optimized" skin shaders for g2f in Iray. I used a spaceship model/scene from the Daz store with lots of simple meshes and textures, and put a figure with simple clothing on the bridge in front of a window that lets environment lighting in. The camera is positioned outside the window, looking in. I added three reality mesh lights and set them up with emissive materials - two small ones on the ceiling to the figure's right and left, and one large one partially embedded in a mesh behind her.

shipgirlIray.jpg

shipgirlOctane.jpg

Both renders took about the same amount of time to reach their current state on my dual GPU system. (about 1hr, 15 mins at 2650x1440 resolution). 24000 s/px for octane, and 99% convergence for Iray. The resulting noise levels are about the same too, Though the Iray one features noticeable fireflies and errors (belt buckle reflection on the belly, a reddish glow at the end of one of the hair strands, etc). I didn't utilize hotpixel removal for either renderer. One thing I missed alot with Iray was the ability to pause the render, and to continue the render after it finished to continue cleaning up noise if necessary.
I tried to get the lighting to be consistent between the two. The intensities of the lights were visually set to be about the same, and the environment was set to the default daylight for both renderers. The IRay one had the time set to noon to prevent 'evening' sunlight from streaming through the window. I found that I had to crank the luminance values of the lights very high on Iray to get them to produce enough light. (intensity 40000, with a 100 cd/W efficiency, versus an emissive value of around 5000 for Octane). I tried to get the temperatures the same too, a greenish fluorescent 5000 k.
It seemed to me that Octane did a much better job distributing the light around the scene. Both had similar settings on the textures (glossiness on the metal bits, etc) but the iray version looks completely flat. Worse, Iray didn't seem to bounce light around, which makes everything look darker and lacking GI. The lack of GI is even more apparent in the second two images (taken at slightly different angles by accident), where the ceiling seems to be nothing but blackness for the Iray render.

shipgirlIrayB.jpg

shipgirlOctaneB.jpg

Other things, quality wise, is that the specular for the eyes and lips is far more apparent with Iray's g2f shader... I have in the past struggled with octane's specular/reflectivity for eye reflections, so this is actually a benefit of Iray to me. Even though, in this case, it turns out that I don't like the effect
I go back and forth with regards to the quality of the skin shader... Iray's seems less consistently good to me, with stronger transmission when light is behind the ears, but less scattering in other areas. It also has very low specular values that are difficult to increase, which can make skin look very flat in a lot of lighting conditions.

In summary, the speed and quality of the two renderers are pretty close. When compared to 3delight or Reality, Iray is FAR faster and better in results, but in my view, Octane is still a good deal better than Iray in terms of quality. A lot of improvement is probably available for iray with respect to adjusting shaders and settings, but most of those adjustments weren't apparent or easy to work through. Of course, my results with octane could be vastly improved with some more time spent tweaking shaders as well, and I find the octane node structure much more usable than iray's. Furthermore, the interactivity of Octane's plugin remained much more responsive than when using iray, so adjusting settings is a much more pleasant experience with octane for me.
Since I already have Octane, I don't see myself switching over to use Iray. A bigger question is for potential new users of Octane who see Iray, are able to achieve comparable (maybe slightly poorer) results, and without the additional cost.

[linvanchene]

obsolete post edited and removed by user

[oofnish]

What counts for me is not only the quality of the result but also HOW I get to the result.

I totally agree. The workflow and ancillary features of the plugin versus integrated method are extremely important to me as well. The Octane plugin for Daz3d has a lot of these quality of life features that are indispensable to me. I didn't go into detail this time because in this particular case I ended up having to fight the plugin a bit to get the results I wanted. (beta software, I totally get it)
All of the things you mentioned are great improvements over the normal daz3d workflow. The ease of use and power of the node shader editor is worth the cost of the plugin by itself to me. And the good thing for us Octane fans is that a near parity on the renderer itself means that more focus will likely be given to the "window dressing" that makes it better to use... and the current plugin clearly has a lead in this area.