Has development stopped?
marble
Posts: 7,500
Just thinking that it seems a long time since we had an update either to the Beta version or anything of significance in the change log. Is this a consequence of the pandemic? If so, it doesn't seem to have stopped the marketing people churning out new products and sale deals. There are a few show-stopper bugs that really need some attention but I see no mention of them in the change log. Top of my list would be the failure to save certain morphs when saving/reloading a scene.
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Doubtful, it was 7 months between 4.12.0.86 and 4.12.1.117, and it's only been 2 months since 4.12.1.117.
There's usually several beta releases between general releases.
I too am waiting to see a new release and read the responses of how well it performans.
Don't complain just use Blender.
Do you ever check out the development thread detailing what is happening?
+1
Although in fairness, I use both and any other tool that might help me.
I think Marble has a valid point. We buy the content with the selling point that it can be used for Daz only to be stopped by some major bugs that render the current version useless to animators. We check back daily for updates but there are none and we are left to wonder when we can use our purchases and we ask on the forums but there is no response. I don’t know why Daz doesn’t respond or communicate with their clients but they don’t and many of us are frustrated. I like Daz and don’t want to see it go south and it’s disrespectful to the paying customers to leave them in the dark like this. We shouldn’t have to go to blender and it’s besides the point anyway.
Have you raised a ticket.
The forumns are general not monitored outside of the moderators.
I did raise a ticket. I raised a couple of tickets in fact. The last message I got from support was that they were closing the ticket because I did not provide a response but there was no question to which I should respond. I reported an issue, they confirmed the issue, waited a couple of weeks and then closed it. That's what they call support? I spent my working life in tech support and would have been fired for ignoring customer reports in such a way. That is why, I suspect, many customers voice their frustration on the forum rather than raising a ticket. What's the point if they just get ignored?
Now, during my time in tech support and after the advent of internet forums, a lot of the mundane questions were left to the forums to deal with while the support staff could get on with actual tickets so I understand that approach. But once a ticket is raised it should be considered good practice to inform the person who raised the ticket of any progress or otherwise. Over the years I have raised several tickets with DAZ support and rarely do I get any useful feedback. Of course, I'm talking tech suport - sales is a different entity and they do respond quickly when, for example, I ask to return an product that does not meet expectations.
As for Blender, I would prefer to do everything in DAZ Studio if possible but I realise that Blender is better at some things. I just need to shift my focus and I am follwoing a few tutorials at the moment hoping to ease my way into doing more in Blender. But the last time I moved a scene over to Blender and rendered in both Cycles and Eevee I was not impressed by the results. Perhaps the diffeomorphic DAZ Importer has improved the material conversion so I will try again but I suspect that I will need to learn a lot about using the Blender node system which is something that has always put me off. That's just a mental block that I need to overcome but those are a bit stubborn to shift in the mind of an old man like me.
+1000
People complain about better animation tools, better modeling tools, getting the source, and being informed about development.
It really does seem like a lot of people around here would really like Blender, doesn't it?
@Mag_bfaa50c8df He does have a valid point, you do as well, but it really does not seem as if the situation is even recognized by Daz as something that needs to change. Companies being this tone deaf torwards disruptions is unfortunately not an uncommon thing, particularly in tech; I have an enormous amount of affection and good will for Daz, I would like to see them grow and prosper, but I also did for Cray, SGI, IBM, HP, and Sun.
Yes.
It is just that, for me, there has been a looong learning curve to get to where I'm mostly comfortable with what's available in DAZ Studio. I'm not a modeller, only attempt very basic animations and have no skills when it comes to creating/adjusting materials, textures or other surface properties. So Blender is a big deal when it comes to getting to the point where I can switch between that and DAZ Studio.
No excuses - I know that I will need to tread that path sooner or later but I tend to start a project, tell myself I really should try to animate or render that scene in Blender but then take the easy option and accept the results I can manage by doing it in DAZ Studio. It's purely a comfort zone thing and it gets the project moving but doesn't enhance my skills much at all.
Yeah, 10 years of my tech support career was with HP (Unix and networking).
I did about a year's worth of software consulting in their Inkjet business unit in Rancho Bernardo, San Diego in the mid nineties. Even as a consultant, i.e. a professional scape goat, I could still tell it was a wonderful company.
It was a superb company in the 90's (I worked from the Bracknell HQ in the UK) until the Compaq merger changed the culture and a lot of good people left.
Ouch. Not really, no. But at the same time, yes. It takes a long time and lots of practice to learn another package, notwithstanding the fact that importing and using Daz rigs, clothes, morphs and so on in another package is hard, even with exporters. It's better if Daz bugs get fixed imho. That is the path of least effort (for us, not the developers).
When I worked for a major telecom switch manuafacter as a programmer most of their development machines were running H-Pox but that was just as a host for the realtime OS and develop tools (all GNU based). Most of my career was as a Sun/Solaris or Xenix/SCO Unix programmer though. I've also developed on AT&T, Ultrix, True64, Linux, FreeBSD, DYNIX, osX, LOL, and a host of others. HP/UX was pretty good & easy OS but nothing Windows 10 or even Windows 95 users would get excited over.
Everyone thinks these huge tech companies are the cutting edge and couldn't possibly fail but it's telling that of all those Linux and FreeBSD (osX is based off of FreeBSD) are the only ones still around. FreeBSD & Linux were free to those businesses and developed and tested by the general public. Huge saving for those businesses and big development staff reductions as well. Huge telecom companies have come and gone too. And mostly just in 30 years time from inception to antiquated technology for the most part.
In those days there was a distinct separation between "serious" operating systems used by corporates and the so-called personal OS. So Windows was always dominant in the home market and there was fierce competition for the coroprate market. At HP, with HP/UX, we were mostly up against Sun (Solaris) and IBM who still had a big footprint with mainframes before shifting focus towards AIX. Most of those other flavours of Unix you mention would run on a PC and were seen as alternatives to Windows but most of them fell away and indeed, Windows made big inroads into the corporate workspace and replaced a lot of unix based servers. After I left HP, they too concentrated on Windows based architechture. Personally, I think it is a pity that Unix (Linux and OSX) struggled against Windows but here I am, typing this on a Windows 10 PC - mainly because I'm no longer interested in the techie aspects of getting DAZ Studio to run on Linux.
@Robinson OK, we will see which happens first, even slicker ways of getting Daz content into Blender, or Daz addressing that short list :)
Well, as I've just spent two days watching Blender tutorials I'm now all in favour of those slick ways to get my DAZ Studio scenes into Blender. The scope of possibilities now seems so far ahead of what DAZ offer that I think that DAZ should perhaps jump on the Blender bandwagon and help facilitate more and better ways to get content into Blender. I'm sure that would be much cheaper and easier than trying to out-feature Blender yet there is no reason for users like me not to continue to create scenes in DAZ Studio as I will probably continue to prefer the things it does better than Blender.
Daz studios is a 3D character creation&manipulation software who Main competition is Reallusion Iclone/Character Creator 3 pipeline
Both companies have program specific 3Dcontent stores although Reallusion is more focused on the Multi-billion Game content industry with thier live link plugin for the Unreal engine.
Blender is a complete 3DCC application that competes directly with Maxon Cinema4D,Autodesk Maya,Max even Houdini in some areas.
IMHO the notion that Daz inc needs to make any special effort to make thier content easier to move to blender make no sense as they already support all of the industry standard export formats except for universal scene description.
If it were so straightforward to export to Blender using the industry standard formats there would be no need, nor enthusiasm, for add-ons like the Diffeomorphic DAZ Importer. The fact that there is so much discussion about that here on this forum tells me that there is a need for enthusiasts to take their DAZ content and see what they can do with it in a more comprehensive application. Others do so with Unity or Unreal or, like yourself, the Reallusion suite. Not all of us can afford the commercial packages though so Blender is the obvious alternative.
Right now I think Unreal has better new tutorials than Blender. Unreal has better output quality in many examples, but I don't know yet how Daz Characters do because many of the plugins have a game focus which cuts down resolution and quality, though there's info saying Unreal can handle the full resolution. iClone has a better way of getting textures to render in Unreal. Still gathering more info. Still wondering how Iray will do with the new NVIDIA cards coming out later this year.
I might well have seen you then as I went to the Pinewood campus quite a few time for HP-UX courses
Neither iClone nor Unreal support JCMs, and so Daz models look terrible in them. Did you notice the gratuitous way in which they covered up the characters elbows in the PS5 demo?
Yes, I spent a lot of time at Pinewood helping to set up and run courses and occasionally standing in as a tutor.
Has anyone tried the Blender cloth sim on clothed DAZ characters imported into Blender (diffeomorphic DAZ Importer) for posing and animation? I know a lot of people do that with Marvelous Designer (which I have) so perhaps it might be better to include MD in the workflow somehow?
You can use JCMs with Unreal. http://davidvodhanel.com/daz-to-unreal-jcm-examples/
You just need to connect the morphs in an Animation Blueprint.
Thanks for that... I asked a prominent UE4 instructor on Udemy that direct question, and he responded that sadly, there was not a straightforward method. He seemed to believe that they weren't automatically driven by the pose, but it seems like th solution you pointed out, does.
And with that, dangit, UE goes back on the growing list of things that I'm supposed to research.
Edit: But I didn't see anything about Joint Controlled Joints.
Joint Controlled Joint? Don't think I'm familiar with that one.