OTOY Forums

Leave it to Otoy, t_3, etc to hide valuable communication about what is going on.
It's really not surprising... Something threatening comes along, and we finally hear from t_3, and a discussion about "something similar" for Daz Studio (THIS FORUM) gets moved to somewhere completely hidden (and nothing to do with Daz at all).

FYI, this is not the only thread that was suddenly hidden without notice.
This is the other: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=45260
I can understand that "Daz with Iray" has little to do with "OcDS 2.1 Pre release 5th", but it has EVERYTHING to do with Daz Studio, which is the entire audience in this forum.

Lack of progress in a plugin I paid for,
A growing list of bugs in a "beta" (betas are normally to reduce bugs),
Months of silence from anyone connected to the development in resolving the above,
General discontent in the quality of this plugin,
and now this... Hiding discussion about a competing product.

It makes me regret ever paying for this. Yes, I have paid, with more than money. I have paid with my time. Anyone that uses the OcDS "beta" plugin has also paid.

Since we're hiding discussions about competing products, maybe you can also hide this one:
Reality for Daz Studio is developed by ONE person, and is priced at a much lower cost, based on freely available software (LuxRender and Daz Studio).
Yet, his plugin has a shorter development cycle, has frequent and regular announcements, and actually responds to people that buy his product.

You can cite "DAZ has shoddy documentation", or "DAZ should implement new features", or even "DAZ is a fast moving target and they work in secret". If any of this is true, how is Paolo able to make any of it work at all with Reality, in a shorter time frame than the Octane Daz Studio plugin?? How are people able to buy Reality 4 that costs such a small fraction of what OcDS people have paid, and produce similar results?? This defies any logic I can conjure. Paolo and the Reality people don't even have a corporate supported discussion forum like this!! Maybe Otoy should take lessons from DAZ, Reality, and others. Maybe then there wouldn't be so many unhappy people using Octane Daz Studio plugin?

It is an unfair and horrible business practice to take advantage of people that have invested their money and time in something, to make them wait for what they were offered... especially when you consider that the current value of Octane (stand alone, or plugin) is decreased whenever something new and similar becomes available FOR FREE. Maybe Iray isn't as great as Octane/OcDS today. What about in a year? Will the OcDS plugin still be a "beta" that can't do animation correctly? (As it stands, Iray can do that already. So can Reality/LuxRender.)

Otoy, t_3, the price of admission goes down over time, and has. You will not have a captive audience forever, unless you give people something that works. I cannot speak for everyone, but I can tell you I am getting tired of waiting, and now I see other things becoming more attractive.

Feel free to hide this message thread, since you may find it threatening.

To be fair, those were off topic to this plugin, and unlike the daz forums those threads were simply moved instead of deleted. Moderation here is very light compared to what happens over on the daz forums. I stopped posting over there for about a year because of how many times I was censored for speaking on topic...(about Carrara usually)

I used reality for 3 months before switching to octane, its not where near the same type of plugin. the Octane plugin for daz does tons more...Reality is merely an exporter.

There are a lot of things wrong with what you said, but I'm not going to call them all out. I do agree it's taken too long to get our working plugin, but I don't think Otoy or t_3 were trying to take advantage of the consumers.

leblancd wrote:FYI, this is not the only thread that was suddenly hidden without notice.
This is the other: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=45260

if i was otoy i had deleted the thread you have linked - just go to any other customer forum of any company on this planet to promote a rival product and wait what happens.

apart from that, what are you talking about? if you need to compare, you have to compare like with the like. and even more: stay by the facts.

ocds is developed by one person as is reality.

only reality is "just" an exporter with a fraction of ocds feature set. the reality for daz studio update from 2.5 to 4 - skipping a v3 for studio - took almost 2 years(!) to complete, with no in-between public update i'm aware of.

btw, reality is out for nearly 2 yrs more, and it took paolo until jan _this_ year to get geo graft support working - and i perfectly know why and i do feel with him.

larsmidnatt wrote:To be fair, those were off topic to this plugin, and unlike the daz forums those threads were simply moved instead of deleted. Moderation here is very light compared to what happens over on the daz forums. I stopped posting over there for about a year because of how many times I was censored for speaking on topic...(about Carrara usually)

Sure. Maybe.
You were censored, as you say.
Not (re)moved from the thread with no warning. Slight difference.
But ok. I'll concede that point.
Moving on...

larsmidnatt wrote:I used reality for 3 months before switching to octane, its not where near the same type of plugin. the Octane plugin for daz does tons more...Reality is merely an exporter.

There are a lot of things wrong with what you said, but I'm not going to call them all out. I do agree it's taken too long to get our working plugin, but I don't think Otoy or t_3 were trying to take advantage of the consumers.

t_3 wrote:apart from that, what are you talking about? if you need to compare, you have to compare like with the like. and even more: stay by the facts.

My aim was not to compare the function of plugins. My point was Daz's inconsistencies, deficiencies, and limitations are often cited as difficulties in creating/maintaining/sustaining a plugin.

If you are going to cite things lacking with Daz Studio as a justification when talking about a plugin, those things hold true for ALL plugins, because they are ALL plugins for the same Daz Studio.
Since they hold true for ALL plugins, why is Octane so special??
Don't say it's because of all the things it does.

In OcDS BETA 1.2, animation worked. When people report problems with animation in OcDS 2.+, they are told to go back to the 1.2 version because that is when it worked. This means, fundamentally, there is less functionality now than before.

In previous versions, something as simple as zooming in the render window worked. You cannot zoom in the render window now -- it only scrolls. That also means, fundamentally, there is less functionality than before.
These are two examples from the very complex, to the very simple. Since there is fundamentally less working functionality than before, "OcDS does more stuff than other plugins" cannot be a valid justification, because the list of working functions is diminishing.

t_3 wrote:only reality is "just" an exporter with a fraction of ocds feature set. the reality for daz studio update from 2.5 to 4 - skipping a v3 for studio - took almost 2 years(!) to complete, with no in-between public update i'm aware of.

Yes. It took him 2+ years, by my count. That's quite a while.
For maintaining two plugins at the same time.
Meanwhile, this is the first post in this forum...
Daz2Octane Beta released
Postby Tugpsx » Mon Jan 02, 2012 6:01 am
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=11712

That is more than three years.
Also, there is no projected timeframe of completion.
There is no roadmap.
There is only t_3 posting updates.... every 5 or 6 months... maybe.
For one plugin that is still in beta, after 3 full years.

And, yes, there have been many updates about Reality.
Look at his blog. http://preta3d.com/category/blog
Look at the "official Reality for Daz forum". http://forum.runtimedna.com/forumdispla ... udio-Forum
At least every few months, sometimes multiple times a month, he gives a very detailed status of what he is doing, why, and how he is accomplishing it, with his customers in mind. This is called supporting your product. This not only helps people understand why he takes 2+ years, but it gives them a compelling reason to wait for him. They end up understanding what to expect when he releases the plugin to the public.
ONE guy. TWO plugins.

leblancd wrote:ONE guy. TWO plugins.

skipping the rest... it is one plugin, just compiled for mac and windows. he even stated a year back that he had automated that.

so you are saying that waiting 2 years for an update is super duper if you only get a blog entry every other week. interesting. since 1.2 is just a year back, this is going to get me another year strolling around for 3.0 (while skipping 2.2). i'll consider that. and i swear i'm going to write a blog post every week in return.

note: there is a slight difference if i need to create a 10k lines of code work (reality) or 100k lines of code (ocds), or to say it in your personal math (and in caps): i'm doing not only ONE plugin but TEN plugins in the same time others are doing one or two wow. pats himself on the back. easily explains why there is no time to blog about it. oh, and btw. i'm doing this with my users in mind. or what do you think this is all about... masochism?

yes anims were broken. sorry bout that. is already fixed and tested.

zooming went broken out of nothing. didn't notice since it was still working on my machine. took a week to find a fix btw. if you like to find out what all may happen to code for no good reason you can visit stack exchange

but pls leave me alone with sentences like "reduced functionality". it is a beta and this means things may be broken form one release to another. its even almost literally what "beta" means. in other words this is nothing new in software land. curious who else is able to do that? chrome (3rd most important product of google inc., non beta) did receive an update a couple months back, boom gmail (also google inc., 4th most important product, non beta) was broken in many non english spoken countries. including payed google apps accounts. google (52.000 employees) needed over a week to fix it. apple released a new ios version (non beta), and countless things were broken. i had a rewrite of half of the code to inherit the also rewritten octane api, and it broke things. so what's your point exactly? and pls leave me alone with "3 years beta". gmail was 5 years in beta, so what.

Seriously now. When will you release the final version of the 2.x plugin, or at least give us another pre-release.

Could we maybe not have these types of arguments? Everybody's comparing apples to oranges here, and none of it is very constructive.

I for one would rather hear your thoughts about what's going on, than your defence against a lot of accusations.

Nobody's expecting you to write long developer's logs. Maybe just a monthly "currently working on XXX" or something? I know it's hard to balance, because wel'll start asking questions to whatever you post.

You may not be aware, but we can't see when you last logged on the forums, so people have no idea if you have just vanished:


Honestly I think that fact alone leads to a LOT of speculation.

DrHemulen wrote:Everybody's comparing apples to oranges here

in my case it's sarcasm.

DrHemulen wrote:Honestly I think that fact alone leads to a LOT of speculation.

linvanchene already pointed me on that. i of course wasn't aware of it, and i still see it if i look there as well as in others profiles. have no idea where to turn that on or off, since there apparently is no setting for that.

seriously: it is _really_ a lot of work. let aside if it could be done with less effort while skipping some stuff here and there, it is just plain exhausting; day by day, 7 days a week. and even that english isn't my main language counts in when i'm already totally spent and would need to write sthg. and at some point almost every minute not spent for coding feels like a lost minute - the more, the more time is passing since the last update.

of course... a monthly or even weekly "working on xxx" should be doubtless possible, not matter what else is going on. to me it still feels pointless (a bot could do that), except it was for presenting and discussing news and stuff - and there it gets timely. do i really need to write down that "i'm still working on it" to make everybody believe that this is what happens?

3dmania wrote:Seriously now. When will you release the final version of the 2.x plugin, or at least give us another pre-release.

i can't give any date. i can say that the last update build was done on mar 1, and since then i'm testing; the last updates were released at that point already (means barely tested), this one is going to be tested. a release is close, but i can't give an exact date - sorry.

Wow! Did he say the animations are fixed on March 1st build? That steers my wheel in hard turn.

After trying Iray, it really makes me double checking materials in the OcDS's node material editor. I.e. Hair. I'm already spoiled on how accuracy Iray is with the materials.............. Despite Iray is terribly slow when making new change in scene. Not to mention a simple frame render T 1080P takes a whooping 13 minutes to complete while Octane can produce similar result only in one minute...