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Instead of saying "should," I'll say it would be nice and would create good will if there was a way to get the creation tools without being a PA. There are plenty of customers/artists who could benefit from these PA features but who will never be a PA anywhere. If DAZ were too sell them as add-ons, they could recoup their development costs even if PAs sell their creations at other stores. People who aren't PAs could make better art if they want to learn how to make their own dForce hair or HD morphs, and people who don't want to bother with creating anything can buy all the great PA products that will be on the market. This is just my own feelings and wishes on the matter, but I want to share them. Maybe DAZ is listening.
why would any commercial business hand over their in house proprietary IP
without an assurance that they will be entitled to part of the income derived
from the use of that IP.??
This is why the concept of intellectual property exists in the first place.
If you wish to derive or even be in the position potentially derive income from another parties IP
Then you may only do so under the terms they set.
Not according to your plans to use that IP wether it be some bit of software code or
trademaked & copyrighted Characters or themes or other content.
I haven't seen any of this, just lots of people getting angry about it. Anyone got a link to this?
If what you are saying is accurate then this is basically the worst thing Daz could do, it completely violates the impression I have of this company.
Come on guys:) I find it interesting to see people making progress and discussing this new feature...but the "Should DAZ do this and that" part...not so much. Please don't have this thread locked!
The respectful thing to do by Daz should have been, as soon as the beta was released, was to make it clear that we lowly mutts wouldn't be able to make dynamic strand hair, but only the PA's. But instead, they said NOTHING and left it implied that we WOULD be able to make it. It wasn't until people started asking "hey, how do I do the dynamic part of the strand hair" that they come out and say "Oh, right. Well, you won't be able to make that because you don't work for us". And I can tell you why they did it too. Because it would be unpopular. But what chaps my butt more is that they didn't say it from the moment of beta release. If they had only said something, I might have been ok with it. Now, it just seems underhanded and sneaky and it boggles my mind that people are defending it. Sure it's fine with me if they want to hold things back for the PA's only, but by the same token, if they do, why do we even have to know about it? And if for some reason we do, why not just say it was a PA-only feature from the get-go? How hard is that? I buy a lot of stuff here and I feel like I've had my fingers slapped. LOL But it's all good, because I can vote with my wallet, and I shall...
Laurie
+1 These are incredible and powerful tools that Daz is giving to the community, FOR FREE, but people still complain. They could have EASILY made the Strand Based Hair and other tools only available to PAs, but they're giving them away. No other program that I have found can do what this does so quickly and easily, and to have it included in for free in Daz Studio is incredible. Having one of the tools available for PA use only makes sense - Daz is a company that needs to be able to make money to keep being able to update their software and to stay in business. The fact that one of the new tools is PA only does, in no way, detract from the amazingness that the new Strand Based Hair is.
Just an observation - from what I've seen so far in this thread the hair and fur strands look way too thick. I believe you can increase the density and lower the stand thickness but would this also ramp up processing and render times to an unacceptable level? I love the concept but I'm wondering if my current rig would be up to handling a head of dense fine hair.
I've been working on making eyebrows for G8M. This turned out to be MUCH harder than I anticipated. Oh, it was pretty easy to make some eyebrows, but they looked unnatural. After MANY attempts, this is the result that I finally called good enough. I used Brow Eraser to remove the painted brows from G8M. Then I put my Strand-Based brows on. From the side, you can see that they have some depth that painted brows don't have.
looks amazing barbult. you definitely have some natural skill with all things DS. That looks better than a lot of the other fibermesh brows I've seen
I have to agree with Iggy. Thank you to all who understand!
I had yet another major crash trying to simulate that hair I made and am unsurprised as a Zbrush one of similar complexity would do the same, as I would suspect one of that type made by a PA would with the extra plugin features.
The advantages are simply not needing to leave DAZ studio to add a root anchoring surface AFAIK otherwise I think we all actually could create Dforce hairs subject to the same limitations and skill sets after all the same PA’s did with Zbrush too and just about everyone who has Zbrush can use it more adeptly than me
DAZ has given us a tool that does something for free a $800 software does for me so don’t knock that, just use a modeling program on the obj export that lets you select and create sufaces by UV, Carrara can do it too but I would never try a hair that high poly in it!
Thumbs up!
Thanks, Slosh! The Strand-Based Hair editor is fun to play with. I just kept trying with the brows until I was satisfied. I look forward to seeing what products will be released in the store. Will you be doing a Strand-Based hair shader product? It is frustrating to manually try to tweak the surface settings in the current base shader.
Looks magnificent, I'm inspired to do brows and body hair now, though it might take a bit to get this good!
The purpose here is not to recoup development costs through retail sales
of a non tangible digital product that will likely end up on the torrent networks
It is to maintain sovereignty over your intellectual property
by keeping it out of the hands of potential competitors who
compete with you directly in the content market.
So third party shops can't sell hd morphs and dforce hair for daz studio. Because these are locked features only available in the daz shop. I understand. Unfortunately, if this goes on, it also means that DS is going to be more and more a "player" than a content creation platform. So any independent studio needing to create its own private content will have to turn to Blender or Maya (for there are plugins, or anything else if you're fine with fbx and obj).
It always was just a player(render studio) for DAZ content
if you want more you use something else
for example
My choice
Carrara, dynamic hair, robust content creation suite including 3 modellers, terrain, tree, volumetric clouds, bullet physics, particles often on sale for a steal
Blender particle hair and most of the above plus more via python scripts mostly free
you got money?
As you said, Maya, Shave and a haircut and countless other plugins probably the next most supported professionally priced software after
3Dstudio Max which has everything as a plugin under the sun
Cinema4D which has THE awesome hair as well as much other stuff
Houndini the other best hair out there prob C4D’s equal
can go on, the prices climbing as I type though
My sentiments exactly
Really it wouldn't have mattered, either way there were going to be complaints. It would have just started at page one and no one would bother playing with it or, the complaints would have started 8 pages in after some would have gave it a go. I can think of one reason why it's set up like that, but I'll leave it to others to figure out. It's a pretty big reason IMO, and may it will make sense once others find it. But bottom line everyone has hair to play with; I may not play with the dforce part, but I can play around with making hair styles for my guys that haven't been available before. I'll look at it that way.
You do have control over hair thickness, and yes, you could increase the density, but for fur, since it is required to cover the entire body, it will take ALOT of hair and that density will really eat up your computer processing power. As with all things CG, less is faster. So that is where we have to find the balance between coverage/speed/thickness.
My first character has really course dense hair (my first couple will have this) but now i am trying to push the limit of thinner more dense hair and see how far I could reasonably go with it (my computer is over 5yrs old...so if it works on mine, I feel the average user should be able to handle it LOL)
Funny that .. I was under the impression that DAZ Studio would be a free content creation platform for DAZ customers. Given that it includes a number of tools for content creation. Plus they recently added Hexagon for modeling. While I understand that they'd like to cut off other shops, unfortunately this also means cutting off DAZ Studio itself.
Competing with other shops is best done by providing better/more content. Locking features to PAs only is just harmful to creative users and probably unuseful too for the purpose of a competition advantage.
Then personally I am a Blender user and honestly I wouldn't give a peek to the DAZ shop if it wasn't for the ability to export assets to Blender. As I guess many other Blender and Maya artists around here.
Nope...it was designed as a player for content they are a content based company.....the tools included were just a bonus given out by DAZ.
For a while they did buy other software and toy with the software development side of things, but that was under the old management. The new management brought back the original focus, and that is content........and i should note that sales have really grown with this refocus on what DAZ is good at. (unlike that other program who focused on the software side, and has been pretty well dead in the water for a decade now)
I'm pretty sure the intent was to say that we were getting the tools to create strand hair, and to use hair that had been converted to dForce, but there was not meant to be any suggestion that the tools for convrsion were or would be included. I imagine they were surrpised when this, which was clear to them, was not picked up in the discussion - hence Steve's later post.
I understand that DAZ wants to earn money, thats fine.
But I really think that DAZ should gives us somehow the possibiliy to use the PA exclusive tools for personal usage.
E.G. I like to to split with X-Morphs (or now Shape Splitter) some HD morphs for a transformation comic, but I can't do that because doing stuff with HD Morphs is limited for PAs.
The new hair editor looks would be very usefull for me, especially if it's possible to do an animation with growing hair. For long hair, dForce Hair would be very usefull, but I can't use it, because it's limited to PAs. Yes I know I can use cloth dForce for the hair, but why should I do that? I'm using currently some of the "old" dForce Hair products, they are great, but simulating them takes forever. Why should I do that any longer, if there is dForce optimized for hair?
As I said before, I understand that DAZ wants to earn money and that they need some exclusive features?
But why not make the HD and dForce tool with some for all DRM availibe, so that everyone can use it?
E.G. add an API function for creating HD morphs, which can be only used by user who has created them.
I did think this all along (and think I said as much earlier) as I'll never assume I've been given anything until I've got it in my hand, although I imagined Daz would have to come out and clarify that for people sooner or later. However, I'm a bit mystified by the difference (from the perspective of an ordinary user) between this hair that's converted to dForce and products like Linday's 'Long Curly Hair' and other dForce-ready products. In other words, we've been able to buy dForce-ready hair for a while now, but with the coming of Daz 4.11, we'll be able to erm, buy dForce-ready hair. It's understandable in a way that people might have thought the dForce hair announcement amounted to a bit more.
Perhaps the dForce hair and strand-based hair features should have been announced in separate threads. It's been a lot more interesting to read all the posts about what we can do with the strand-based hair rather than all those about what we can't do with the dForce one :)
dForce hair is set up as hair, the Linday and other products use dForce cloth on strips to make dynamic hair but it does lack a lot of the options and optimisations that the actual dForce hair offers. Trying to cloth dForce a fine hair mesh would bring most systems down.
The UV issue is because the Octane plug-in needs to be updated to suport multiple UVs, a relatively neew feature in DS - see http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/change_log#4_11_0_319
Thanks, Richard. I like messing about with the strand-based hair so much that I don't think I've even looked at the dForce version, but I'm beginning to see the wood among the trees now :)
Wow, those eyebrows look terrific, as does the short hair you showed earlier. I'm looking forward to when this comes out of beta and is released. Thanks for posting such inspiring examples!
I am going to reitterate Will (Oso3D): Why?
"Because I want it", or something along those lines, does not present Daz with a sound business reason.
Put together a sound business case as to why they should do what you want; note the use of the word sound; you need verifiable data included in your case, otherwise it's worthless.