OcDS v1.2 - GENERAL DISCUSSION

[leblancd]

Apparently, Reality 4.1 will be released soon with x7 faster CPU performance and full OpenCL GPU performance. A possible alternative? At least until we receive an OcDS update. It's currently 50% off.

I think it's interesting how the world is passing by while this OcDS plugin stalls and lingers.

Otoy, along with t_3 et al, really fumbled this entire thing.
While they could have been years ahead of everything and everyone with respect to GPU rendering, they sat on their laurels and made things "good enough" for the Daz community.
Now, Reality (and iRay) is knocking on the door of opportunity.

I seriously regret spending so much money and time on this thing.

[Spectralis]

Apparently, Reality 4.1 will be released soon with x7 faster CPU performance and full OpenCL GPU performance. A possible alternative? At least until we receive an OcDS update. It's currently 50% off.

I think it's interesting how the world is passing by while this OcDS plugin stalls and lingers.

Otoy, along with t_3 et al, really fumbled this entire thing.
While they could have been years ahead of everything and everyone with respect to GPU rendering, they sat on their laurels and made things "good enough" for the Daz community.
Now, Reality (and iRay) is knocking on the door of opportunity.

I seriously regret spending so much money and time on this thing.

It's shocking that I paid about £350 for one operational OcDS plugin license and the full version of Reality 4.1 is $25 atm. I already own an earlier version of Reality so I can upgrade for $20. iRAY for DAZ is free! I suppose we had some time to produce renders using 1.2 before these other renderers added GPU rendering to DS, but I agree that it's very difficult to justify that expense now. It works out to over £150 per year I've waited.

It's one thing to offer a cheaper alternative to renderers at the high end of the market but, as you say, OTOY, have messed up royally at the lower end by pricing themselves completely out of the market of the hugely popular DAZ Studio. This makes no sense for a renderer that was supposed to bring GPU rendering to the masses. Unless OTOY revise their pricing then OcDS will not survive the competition.

[leblancd]

Apparently, Reality 4.1 will be released soon with x7 faster CPU performance and full OpenCL GPU performance. A possible alternative? At least until we receive an OcDS update. It's currently 50% off.

I think it's interesting how the world is passing by while this OcDS plugin stalls and lingers.

Otoy, along with t_3 et al, really fumbled this entire thing.
Now, Reality (and iRay) is knocking on the door of opportunity.

I seriously regret spending so much money and time on this thing.

It's one thing to offer a cheaper alternative to renderers at the high end of the market but, as you say, OTOY, have messed up royally at the lower end by pricing themselves completely out of the market of the hugely popular DAZ Studio. This makes no sense for a renderer that was supposed to bring GPU rendering to the masses. Unless OTOY revise their pricing then OcDS will not survive the competition.

I agree with all that.
But it goes beyond just price...
1. People are already familiar with Reality. It has been around longer, and I would venture to say that most (if not all) people involved with OcDS have already had experience with Reality/LuxRender. It goes without saying that iRay should already seem familiar to Daz users everywhere, because of the way they are integrating it into Daz.
2. There is more support than there is for OcDS. I am still getting updates about Reality emailed to me, even though I haven't commented in the Reality forum, or purchased anything from Paolo in years. Of course, Daz has a well known and established forum for support as well, and their releases are highly detailed in what changes from version to version, so everyone knows what they are getting into. Can we really honestly say that about OcDS?
3. The above two things create a sense of community and sharing. Even so far that there is the shared library of shaders for Reality, and tutorials/howto's for Daz, often with YouTube videos to help people. For OcDS, there is only THIS forum, in which case there is an overwhelming feeling of "well, we're all in this sinking ship together", which is a community, sure, but not a very happy productive one.

All these things are worth more than the price of admission, which, as you point out, is ridiculously cheaper than Octane and subsequent plugins, especially since OcDS is broken in fundamental ways. Add them all up for each product, and you end up paying for a ridiculously great deal when compared to the pile of steaming regret that is Octane for Daz Studio.

[Hydra]

1) Reality is about to get 8 times faster using AVX instructions on a PC. That will only make it much much slower than Octane, but its in the ballpark. It will however still be buggy as hell since bug fixes aren't a big part of Paolo's next release. (I'm still not a fan of the random database corruption bugs which force you to delete all your files and start again.)
2) There is zero info from Daz about what will be released and when. Richard Haseltine has said this is their policy, it eases off their release schedule issues, and allows them to surprise their customers with cool new features. Changes are also not documented, case in point plugin docs are now 2-3 years out of date, and getting older. All along developers are asking the same questions over and over...
https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-4-5-sdk
3) I haven't had an overwhelming need for support with Octane. Its pretty much worked better out of the box for me than anything else I've used. By contrast I've had numerous issues with Reality and discovered multiple critical bugs. (All of which Paolo refused to believe existed, or even look at until multiple people came forward with the same issues.)

Price could be a concern, particularly with the gap between application performances narrowing. However, Octane has been sold into markets were they were already giving away IRay, so I'm not sure its some sort of death nell.

Strictly speaking, I've spent more on Daz software than Octane.

For me, the biggest sell for Octane has been the immediate visibility of changes to render parameters, like so;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZG1_UnxAdI

This kind of capability is a year or two away from Lux/Reality. (In fact, that is why Lux is being rewritten. They are changing the GPL licensing to allow DLL integration for immediate test renders.)

I don't know if that is the kind of immediacy that IRay has, but its not something I'm hearing about.

The immediacy of results is critical to me. Waiting for Reality to export a render (5 -10 minutes), and waiting 1 hour for results (soon to be 7 minutes), is just not very fast.

Believe it or not, final render time is less important to me than test renders. Its the difference between tweaking a render for 1 week, (soon to be 2 days) or 1 evening (Octane).

[leblancd]

3) I haven't had an overwhelming need for support with Octane. Its pretty much worked better out of the box for me than anything else I've used. By contrast I've had numerous issues with Reality and discovered multiple critical bugs. (All of which Paolo refused to believe existed, or even look at until multiple people came forward with the same issues.)

All good and valid points, but it's the above I will respond to for reasons that will hopefully become obvious.

You may have been quite fortunate in that you haven't experienced the crashes, seizures, or general wonkiness in the plugin. I know if I haven't experienced any bugs in the software, I would say the same things and agree with you.

Sadly, I have experienced quite a few bugs in Octane for Daz Studio. Many more than I've seen in any other plugin. Even so far as things that were working 2 releases ago have ceased working. It goes beyond minor annoyances, and results in corrupted saved files, forcing a complete restart of hours/days of work, only to be faced with the same issue after redoing everything in a scene. Meanwhile, this is with little to no acknowledgement that they will be fixed any time soon. ("Soon" has been used to describe a fix, yes, but "soon" has come and went by a measure of several months.)

Now, to address your point above...
It is the support that I cite as critical to have things work. I can understand, from a support perspective, that one person complaining about an anomaly may be alienating from a user's perspective, especially when a developer tries to recreate the anomaly to confirm a problem, or when no one else has come forward to confirm the anomaly.
But the fact that someone did confirm it, in the support community, and it was recognized as a valid concern by the developer means something. It means the community played a vital role in making the software better, and the developer recognized that, and addressed it. Whether you realize that you leveraged support or not does not mean it is of any less value. In fact, I would say that because it may happen so transparently makes it even more valuable.

Can you honestly say the same about Octane for Daz Studio plugin?
I would venture to say there are more unsatisfied people here, than satisfied ones. (Yes, that is speculation, but educated speculation.) The community is unable to budge the developer to make the software better, because ... I feel... we are largely ignored. At the very least, responses from the developers of the plugin are sparse, cryptic, unhelpful, and often only lead to more questions.

I'm not arguing that the software is worth less.
I'm arguing that the price of the software is too high, compared to what you get, which does include support, whether you choose to use it or not. Reality support is worth well more than the ~$50 admission. Octane-DazStudio support is almost non-existent, if it weren't for fellow users -- but those are users who are experiencing the same problems and are largely powerless to change the software.
Octane itself is a marvel of innovation. Octane for Daz Studio tries to innovate as well.
What good is innovation if it is unreliable, and not supported by its creators?
For me, it makes me wonder.... If they aren't supporting what they've made, what are they supporting?

[Squirtle]

For me, the biggest sell for Octane has been the immediate visibility of changes to render parameters, like so;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZG1_UnxAdI

This kind of capability is a year or two away from Lux/Reality. (In fact, that is why Lux is being rewritten. They are changing the GPL licensing to allow DLL integration for immediate test renders.)

I don't know if that is the kind of immediacy that IRay has, but its not something I'm hearing about.

The immediacy of results is critical to me. Waiting for Reality to export a render (5 -10 minutes), and waiting 1 hour for results (soon to be 7 minutes), is just not very fast.

Believe it or not, final render time is less important to me than test renders. Its the difference between tweaking a render for 1 week, (soon to be 2 days) or 1 evening (Octane).

Iray for DAZ does has the same immediacy (seeing test renders update live and instantly), which is one of its main strengths for me. It's actually better in DS Iray than DS Octane in my opinion, since the live Iray render isn't occurring in a separate window, but in the main DAZ viewport. You have to switch the preview style in the viewport to Iray mode to get it to work (the same control you use in DAZ to switch to wireframe view). When you move on to your final render, it is done in a separate window at your chosen resolution.

Here's what the live preview in Iray looks like: http://i.imgur.com/I6fBVJf.jpg

[birdovous]

Iray for DAZ does has the same immediacy (seeing test renders update live and instantly), which is one of its main strengths for me. It's actually better in DS Iray than DS Octane in my opinion, since the live Iray render isn't occurring in a separate window, but in the main DAZ viewport. You have to switch the preview style in the viewport to Iray mode to get it to work (the same control you use in DAZ to switch to wireframe view). When you move on to your final render, it is done in a separate window at your chosen resolution.

Here's what the live preview in Iray looks like: http://i.imgur.com/I6fBVJf.jpg

I would say that this is about personal preference. In my case, I like the separate OcDS render viewport more.

[Squirtle]

I would say that this is about personal preference. In my case, I like the separate OcDS render viewport more.

A separate preview viewport window is possible in Iray too: Under the toolbar Window - Viewports, you can choose various multi-viewport setups, setting one to "Texture Shaded" and one to "Iray" to get something like this:

You can even set more than one preview viewport to render live in Iray if you want, though it's adding more strain for the graphics card so probably not worth it. Still cool to have the option, like this:

Even the orthographic cameras work.

[Spectralis]

I much prefer having a preview window that can be docked because most of the time when I'm working on a project whether it's in DS or in Vegas Pro I've no need for a full preview and a docked window is much easier to work with than a floating window that needs to be moved around the screen as I edit. When I need a full preview I can simply undock the window and preview away. I like how Vegas Pro handles docking by using the cntrl key to dock and undock. I really dislike software that automatically docks windows in any way. The ultimate solution I suppose is to have a separate preview monitor but I don't have the space.

Concerning iRAY, I haven't used the beta but it's great to know that it has instant preview like OcDS. There is little doubt that I'll be switching to it as soon as it's ready. I've been away for a few days and really hoped to find an update to OcDS but unfortunately not. Reading the forums over the years of waiting, the vast majority of posts are from customers who are having serious ongoing problems with the plugin that have not been addressed. I can't believe that, without making serious compromises, the plugin, as it stands in either its v1.2 or v2 version, is fit for purpose. If that level of development is supposed to be satisfactory then that sets expectations at such a low level, far below even the "free" iRAY option offered by DAZ, that OTOY should be paying us to beta it.

[linvanchene]

edited and removed by user