linvanchene wrote:
You can try any value in the Iray Envrionment tab.
SS Day / Time, Ground Color, Horizon Height / Color / Orientation etc.
Oh, forgot about it - I'll try. Renderer settings are not animatable and they should not be (imagine animated frame width
), but if some properties are propagated into environment tab - then they certainly have to be animatable and if not - that's DAZ fault
linvanchene wrote:
None of those values stick to the DS timeline. Now go ask the DAZ developers why that is the case.
If they just exposed some renderer settings without making proper scene object then I know why
linvanchene wrote:
What has not worked with 3Delight will also not work with Iray and that is part of the whole issue.
Should we not expect DAZ to finally provide a solution that fixes all those things that have not worked since DS4 launch in 2011 and even before?
It was pointed out to DAZ years ago that DAZ Studio needs a fully functional time line to animate all kinds of properties.
Well, some of these issues came with invention of DSON, older .DAZ format allowed animation of materials (with some scripting trickery) but DSON simply doesn't have facilities for that by design (it also lacking means for saving LODs, for example, and there are other features of Studio that are not supported by DSON). On the other hand, DSON brought many improvements into save/load process in general, for plugin writers - it's much easier to embed plugin-specific info into almost any object and that info will be persisted by host app.
I've posted these issues in DAZ issue tracker (old one) and DAZ is aware of them, but when they will be fixed (or will they be fixed at all) is unknown.
linvanchene wrote:
Having another 3rd party like gofigure creating animation plugins that then should be used by other plugins was bound to lead to issues sooner or later.
When was the last time gofigure released ANY kind of update for their animation plugins? Well right. NEVER.
They way I understand it t_3 had to work around this animation / timeline issue from the start.
There are very different gofigure plugins
keymate and graphmate do not add anything to Studio animation - they just provide means to visualize and edit keyframes, actual update of properties and interpolation is done by Studio itself in common Studio ways so you will not have any troubles with these plugins. animate is very different as it has it's own animation engine with different interpolation method and it updates the properties of controlled objects in most evilish way - directly in responce of 'timeChanged' signal and this potentially may cause inconsistencies with other animation methods (IK, for example). Studio has the 'right' way of doing such things - via 'controllers' bound to properties but this is used mostly for ERC and not by animation engines (my own plugins do use controllers and are happy
)
I don't know if OcDS does something special to handle aniMate but what I know is that it tries to wait for a moment when all changes in scene are done and to grab the geometry form scene after that, but that moment might not even happen because Studio may use multiple threads to update scene and different objects might be updated in different moments in time so one have to wait extra time just to be 'sure' and still may miss it.
linvanchene wrote:
But maybe you are right and DAZ will not bother to fix those "issues" for their Iray integration.
They surely will not fix interference between third party plugins (aniMate vs OcDS).
linvanchene wrote:
The first step to fixing an issue would be to acknowledge that there is one.
And so far I got the impression that whatever is only important to a minority is not important enough for DAZ to invest any time to adress.
And that is the main reason why I am not that optimistic about their Iray integration.
It will be a nice tool for those people who are looking for one click render solutions but whenever you want to set up any advanced custom settings you will probably stumble upon some excuse why that option was not integrated fully.
I never felt "short of options" with 3delight, moreover sometimes it's like too much of them (Shader mixer vs Shader builder), even missing feature like pointcaches may be implemented by Studio plugins. Hope iray integration will be of the same quality.
linvanchene wrote:
The OctaneRender plugin for DAZ Studio should NOT be considered as a competing product by DAZ 3D!!!
It may be a competing product for Nvidia.
But for DAZ what should have mattered is that OcDS users are also customers who pay for licensed content in the DAZ store.
DAZ have chosen iray because they believe iray will help to sell more content. Selling content is their primary goal - Studio is just a helper for that and third party plugins for Studio - secondary helpers, that's how their priorities are set (and that's why my own plugins will probably never be in DAZ store - I simply cannot provide required support without DAZ help, and there will be not enough of it).