OcDS 2.1 PRE RELEASE 5th

[asennov]

Hello.
I know nobody asked for help, but you clearly need some, so let me lend a hand.

I have asked Otoy if SDK is available (under NDA or whatever). They refused.

We need our own community supported GPU render plugin. Maybe all us devs can pitch in.
I signed the NDA, but never heard from t_3 ever again

There are a few renderers worth integrating

1. Appleseed (appleseedhq.net) - very clean implementation, production quality output, permissive license. But not GPU accelerated (yet )
2. Cycles (blender.org) - average in everything , more features for CPU (OSL support), but it's working. I have toyed with idea of Cycles plugin but renderer itself doesn't have everything I want so I've postponed it and now iray entered (it also doesn't have all I want, no motion blur yet etc., but the difference is I haven't to code it and I'm lazy and DAZ promised to add some of that features later )
3. LuxCore - didn't play with it. But there is WIP plugin for Carrara.

[asennov]

But taking your point further, targeting Octane at hobbyists initially was perhaps a way to fund development for projects targeted at the industry?

Mostly it doesn't work this way. When you make something for mass market you usually have to invest many resources upfront: in development itself, in marketing etc. so income will cover the costs.

On the other hand if you have some bright idea and potential big fish customer you can make prototype in garage (80% of work in 20% of time) and try to lure that fish with it and get money for polishing (actually, to start from scratch and do it "right" ). Then, if you see that product fits somehow in mass market niche you may take steps in that direction.

See how Brigade 3 was initially in the header but now they swapped it with OctaneVR. Brigade was initially a demo of small game, they take it with dev and tried to find someone from gamedev insdustry but it seems nobody took the bate, so VR is new big thing now

[Hydra]

There's no mass market here. All of this stuff is low volume, industrial scale.

[leblancd]

There's no mass market here. All of this stuff is low volume, industrial scale.

That's part of the point I keep making.

When you look at something like Reality, it bridges two programs in very complicated ways. This makes it very specific in its use, and difficult to maintain because the two programs are moving targets. The number of users begins very small, but once people begin to see the potential, it gains momentum in the market. Couple this with the improvements made in both moving targets the plugin bridge connect to, and things get even better over time.

To have something like Octane be so efficient and reliable leverages the recognition and adoption. Compare Octane to LuxRender, in this case. LuxRender is open and cheap, but moves very slowly because of its openness. The downside is that its function is slow, but stable.

When you compare OcDS to something like Reality, it's really comparing plugin to plugin, and renderer to renderer, since they both use Daz Studio, which in itself is a limited market.

I believe the market gets even smaller, because *everyone* can use Reality/LuxRender, since it requires no special hardware.
Octane requires an nVidia graphics card -- the better the graphics card, the more you have of them, the faster it will work. So, it makes sense that Octane, and its plugins, have a smaller audience.

The highly illogical thing, though, is how something with a much smaller audience can be so unstable and buggy. One would think that something so specialized and specific, for such a small group of people, would be much more stable, because the "beta testers" are the audience. (I'm overlooking the braindead decision to cut out some of the very limited audience to make them a subset of "beta testers".)

[Hydra]

I'm not really sure what the purpose of that comparison was. Reality is buggy big time. And it took way way longer to support many features. Neither product have large markets. Tech support... about the same.

I'm here because reality has been such a let down for me.

[asennov]

There's no mass market here. All of this stuff is low volume, industrial scale.

'Mass market' is not about the concrete number of customers but the organization of development process.

We deliver our hardware to customers accompanying it with sealed laptop where user cannot install or uninstall anything and still people keep finding new creative ways of dealing with software. Compare to 'pay by PayPal, download and use on your home computer with whatever else you have installed there' policy.

And it's easy to compute how much copies have to be sold monthly to pay to part-time dev like t_3 multiply on number of months the product is in 'beta' and that will give a minimal number of customers OcDS would normally have.
~500 - quite enough to entertain the support team (provided there IS support team)

[asennov]

I'm here because reality has been such a let down for me.

I was able to make stills with either Reality or Luxus, but I'm here for SPEED When doing animation there are thousands of frames to be rendered so things like interactive viewport, autofocus etc. are not relevant, I would be happy if there will be only 'Render in Octane' button, that will render shot without misplaced parts and lost materials

Well, not only - want normal and robust 'DAZ Studio' way of working with presets: materials, render settings etc...

[Tugpsx]

Sorry for the long delay, more updates hopefully all can join in soon. The past few Daz 4.8 updates have resolved some internal issues so this is good for all.
Quick images showing GeoGraph and Final button (uses the resolution setting from the preference tab) along with Animation showing animated DOF.
Skin also uses RedSpec TGX from material drag and drop to viewport.
Image Browser and animation preview player (This particular animation included an environment that allows Octane to render snow, rain, dust or even animated star field. It also used BVH from Casual's Daz Kinect plugin and stare at camera script.)

Camera control for animation

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/128703044[/vimeo]

Geograph preview screen

Final button and expanded menu

OcDs image browser and animation preview

OcDs Camera Animation setting

[bmosalt]

Sorry for the long delay, more updates hopefully all can join in soon.

When is soon? You guys really need to start giving us more information about when we can expect the next release. All we've heard for months is "soon". It's time to set a date and then deliver on that date.

[thongology]

Sorry for the long delay, more updates hopefully all can join in soon.

I don't know if I'm excited or insulted.

Either way, I'm laughing.