Future of OpenGL rendering in DAZ Studio
cain-x
Posts: 195
This topic has popped up here and there over the years but there has not been anything definitive as to the direction of OpenGL in DAZ. Will there be possible development in this space to allow more control over OpenGL rendering and previews? Iray in interactive mode is alright but it still isn't as quick when trying to prototype a scene and getting the lights/shadows to be where they are. Think Eevee in Blender. It would make scene building so much easier. Perhaps even doing game like renders using OpenGL is OK for most folks that are heavy animation.
Is there a feature request for something like this?
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Without trying to throw a wrench in the works, it has been mentioned elsewhere that Apple are planning to drop OpenGL and/or OpenCL from future versions of MAC/OS. It does not make sense for DAZ to support two, separate,GUI tools as, even with a abstarction/API layer, betwen main program and the UI code yhey coudl only syupport what is common to both (which, admittedly *should* be the majority of stuff). The question, sort of, becomes, do they start aiming the GUI toward another interface model?
If you want a feature added submit a feature request ticket. Otherwise If you are looking for speed I would recommend Blender or Unity these software have game engine rendering and are faster than Iray for rendering animation.
Opengl in daz studio is quite basic, it may be good for toons if you don't care for shadows that are actually messed up. But 3Delight without raytracing is incredibly fast so it may be a good alternative.
DirectX, Vulkan, & Metal for each of the big hardware platforms seems to be the future for cutting edge SW. I think you'll continue to see openGL used in DAZ Studio and other SW that is still actually being updated for a long time though because to remove it's use means writing a lot of programs all over again.
Understood - I did not realize that OpenGL is on the decline.
Just looking for a sense of direction from the DAZ product managers and the community. Whatever the next implementation is, I think DAZ Studio needs a better real time ViewPort renderer that is close to Eevee. Representation of where shadows would land would be a great start. I think hardware and software enhancements are at a point where a maturing product like DAZ should have.
I would use Blender more for rendering if DAZ scene export via FBX wasn't so broken and messy to fix. That's another topic.
You might be better off just waiting for graphics cards to improve enough for the iray viewport to become properly viable. Maybe the DAZ devs and nvidia can do some more optimisations with the interactive mode to make this happen sooner.
OpenGL is only deprecated on Macs. It's still going strong on PC. I think it'll slowly die over time as new products come out using Vulkan or DX12 however. I expect if the devs were to start over they'd probably choose Vulkan on PC and Metal on Mac. It's a lot of work to switch them over though. You can get close to Vulkan performance in many scenarios with OpenGL extensions, things like multi-draw, instancing and so on. The problem with it is finding the fast path is luck more than judgement.
I think if I were making a new engine for a program like Daz today I'd probably build it around an existing engine like Unreal. There's no point in reinventing the wheel is there.
It's more likely that openGL / openCL survive as an all platform graphics language that gets translated into DirectX, Metal, & Vulcan by a computer API translator that does 95% or more of the translation correctly in 10 minutes what would take a human days and weeks to translate. Then that saved time is used on iterative testing and code optimization and translator mistakes (which get incorporated into the translator as well).