OcDS 2.1 PRE RELEASE 5th

[vortex3d]

Don't you all enjoy how no official Otoy person has touched on this issue AT ALL. "Avoid it and it'll go away" sort of mentality. I believe is very irresponsible and insulting to us.

iRay seems okay in its infancy but if it's going to be more consistent and FREE..well, I guess I'll support that.

[Xertyos]

DAZ Studio has several dozens of thousands users and only few dozens use OcDS now

I didn't think the figures were SO small.
Dude, that explains a lot of things.

[vortex3d]

DAZ Studio has several dozens of thousands users and only few dozens use OcDS now

I didn't think the figures were SO small.
Dude, that explains a lot of things.

Well, FREE always wins. How can anyone say no to that?
The problem with Otoy is that paying money for their OcDS plugin doesn't seem to motivate anyone there to communicate with us to explain what's going on.
We've all been filling the void with assumptions, which sadly isn't accurate.

1. Are we getting an update, ever?
2. Will we get refunded for undelivered software (Insert laughter here).
3. What's OcDS' future, defunct-ware murdered by iRay?

As of today, OcDS smells like road kill.

Thanks DAZ and nVIDIA

[Hydra]

So, only one clear advantage of OcDS - VRAM map. Is it worth to pay 379 euros (it will be 479 when out of beta)? Or better to save money and buy more hardware to (over)compensate little speed gap between two renderers? Control over the texture sizes is good but I'have converted more than 50 shots of my current project to iray and only in one scene have hit the VRAM limit (I even shall not retexture it - I'll render it on another computer in CPU mode in parallel, no need to buy additional license).

As for disadvantages even if we put aside the bugs and crashes: high price, weak material system, workflow is different from general one in DS (renderer settings not in render tab, presets different from DS etc.)

DAZ Studio has several dozens of thousands users and only few dozens use OcDS now (I suspect that even Carrara plugin has larger userbase). And now all of them will have GPU-accelerated renderer for free. I doubt we'll ever see OcDS V3.

Octane can render with external texture RAM. I've run 8.5 GB renders with my GTX 980s. The only way to to do that with iRay is 'slowly' (CPU only) near as I can tell, or with a $1300 video card.

I paid 676 euro's (2 x OcDS including 2 x v2 upgrades) since nearly 2 years ago (some have been waiting longer!) for the ability to render in parallel or at least render on two machines at once. This possibility, among others, has not materialised so far. That's 338 euro's a year for a product that barely works. I might as well have bought some DAZ shares, invested in Kickstarter or a new GPU. I also seriously doubt we will see a v3 plugin at those prices. But as a gesture of goodwill for financially supporting this development, if a OcDS v3 is ever developed then ALL of us should receive this completely gratis - and that includes the standalone upgrade to v3 as well! As far as I'm concerned that's the only way OTOY will go even half way in making up for this debacle.

I don't know about all of us, but you should.

Just an observation, but if you have very specific requirements and cost concerns, you really shouldn't buy something that doesn't do it. No matter what they promise. Companies are known to change priorities... halt support, etc. One company I was at intentionally misled one customer in order to make a sale. (There was a mainframe sale hanging on a few white lies.)

My attitude towards a lot of things changed when my new car blew its engine at 1 year. If it hadn't been under warranty it would have cost me $12000 to fix, and it was a known factory defect. I'm no longer willing to buy anything that I can't afford to just walk away from. If something doesn't meet my needs, I keep looking. I have to be able to walk away from it without any regrets.

[leblancd]

My attitude towards a lot of things changed when my new car blew its engine at 1 year. If it hadn't been under warranty it would have cost me $12000 to fix, and it was a known factory defect. I'm no longer willing to buy anything that I can't afford to just walk away from. If something doesn't meet my needs, I keep looking. I have to be able to walk away from it without any regrets.

That is your prerogative, of course, but invalidates any sort of customer satisfaction.
If everyone viewed buying things in the same way, companies would be able to do or say anything at all, to make money.
We have evolved since the days of snake oil salesmen.

Unlike you, I feel quite trapped. Otoy took my money, and gave me quite a nice piece of stand alone software in exchange. All things being said, Octane does everything it promised to do, and a bit more.
The big problem I have is that they misled everyone when it came to the Daz plugin, which Otoy happily accepted money for.
At this point, I feel forced to have to wait for a plugin that I know will already be riddled with bugs and glitches. I'm half-tempted to toss it back in their faces just out of spite for making me wait so long without any communication or update.

In comparison, the Octane support and communication is quite great.
The OcDS support is abysmal, which I find very ironic and confusing. How can a plugin for software from the same company as the stand alone suck so badly, or have the support for the plugin be almost non-existent?
And, when I look at other plugin forums, it isn't nearly as bad as it is in OcDS. Octane for Poser gets frequent updates, and releases.
Why is OcDS so sadly horrible?? I just don't get it. The only thing I can think of to make sense of it comes down to 2 people:
t_3, and his predecessor.

[Hydra]

This just goes in circles.

I've had exactly this treatment from pretty much every 3rd party Daz vendor out there. It was like 6 months to a year to get Optitex dynamic clothing working. 3 years for geografting with Reality, and I had to buy another rev to get it. One script for Daz wouldn't work for a year no matter how much I complained. I'm now pushing 5 months waiting Redspec SSS Hair to begin functioning after I already paid for it. Heck I stopped buying models from Daz in the first week of release because they were so consistently buggy.

In any case its just not wise to buy something if you have exact and specific requirements that it doesn't meet. It doesn't matter what anyone tells you. The fact is that even if it was delivered, it may be delivered in a fashion that you just can't use. In my day to day job, we've release products that worked, but weren't exactly what the customers were hoping for. We had to cut and run because the cost of redoing everything was simply too high.

[vortex3d]

This just goes in circles.

I've had exactly this treatment from pretty much every 3rd party Daz vendor out there. It was like 6 months to a year to get Optitex dynamic clothing working. 3 years for geografting with Reality, and I had to buy another rev to get it. One script for Daz wouldn't work for a year no matter how much I complained. I'm now pushing 5 months waiting Redspec SSS Hair to begin functioning after I already paid for it. Heck I stopped buying models from Daz in the first week of release because they were so consistently buggy.

In any case its just not wise to buy something if you have exact and specific requirements that it doesn't meet. It doesn't matter what anyone tells you. The fact is that even if it was delivered, it may be delivered in a fashion that you just can't use. In my day to day job, we've release products that worked, but weren't exactly what the customers were hoping for. We had to cut and run because the cost of redoing everything was simply too high.

It really doesn't matter what's bought or how much it cost.
What matters most in any business is customer service, good communication with customers.
You can have a bad product and still retain customer loyalty though excellent service and vice versa.
That being said, OcDS is far from bad but poorly supported by the people who hope to get more development money for it.

It really doesn't matter that iRay entered the scene as the legitimate sibling, pushing the adopted one down the ladder.
We bought into it because we like the results, and would like to see it mature.
Benz didn't stop making cars because of Honda.

[vortex3d]

This just goes in circles.

I've had exactly this treatment from pretty much every 3rd party Daz vendor out there. It was like 6 months to a year to get Optitex dynamic clothing working. 3 years for geografting with Reality, and I had to buy another rev to get it. One script for Daz wouldn't work for a year no matter how much I complained. I'm now pushing 5 months waiting Redspec SSS Hair to begin functioning after I already paid for it. Heck I stopped buying models from Daz in the first week of release because they were so consistently buggy.

In any case its just not wise to buy something if you have exact and specific requirements that it doesn't meet. It doesn't matter what anyone tells you. The fact is that even if it was delivered, it may be delivered in a fashion that you just can't use. In my day to day job, we've release products that worked, but weren't exactly what the customers were hoping for. We had to cut and run because the cost of redoing everything was simply too high.

What's bought or how much it cost is irrelevant. What matters most in any business is customer service and good communication with customers.
You can have a bad product and still retain customer loyalty though excellent service and vice versa.
That being said, OcDS is far from bad, but poorly supported by the people who hope to get more development money for it.

It really doesn't matter that iRay entered the scene as the legitimate sibling, pushing the adopted one down the ladder.
We bought into it because we like the results, and would like to see it mature.
Benz didn't stop making cars because of Honda.

[Hydra]

You are quite correct about good communication.

[Liagriest]

We just requested a refund for ALL our octane purchases. I think that is the only real thing left to do. Otoy doesnt care enough to comment on what is going on.. and all we have been getting for half a year is broken promises. I am done complaining about the lack of support from these guys.. so time to just move on.