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Why is 'Blender' so popular for creating daz characters?

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  • TheMysteryIsThePointTheMysteryIsThePoint Posts: 3,027

    j cade said:

    "ooh whats that do?" click. "ooh whats that do?" click 

    Lol, I think this is actually the best advice so far.

  • TheMysteryIsThePointTheMysteryIsThePoint Posts: 3,027

    kyoto kid said:

    TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

    kyoto kid said:

    As to the "Spaghetti System" (nodes) I'm with you there. I recently opened the Shader Mixer for a hair product, and in comparison, it made the wiringagram for a 747 look like child's play.  Yeah I'll eventually have to get used to it (I prefer the shader system in Carrara, as you can see the effects instantly but that only works for Carrara).  

    There is a distinction between node setups made by an automated process, say, the Diffeo plugin, and are not necessarily intended for human beings to ever see, or at the least, with little to no effort was put into making them readable, and a node setup made by a person like, say, the Default Cube guy on Youtube who knows that he'll have to come back to his work time and time again.

     

    ...opened it up to figure out why a certain PA's line of hair content would not convert to 3DL from Iray using the conversion script.

    That's interesting... were you able to figure it out?

  • ShelLuserShelLuser Posts: 749

    I'm mostly reading here because I don't have good experiences with Blender myself and I don't want to become too negative here. Even so, despite the fact that I admire the project for what it is I personally plain out dislike Blender.

    Although I am commenting on your post I also mean to address some of my comments in general, not necessarily towards you alone.

    Having that out of the way....

     

    ebergerly said:

    And when you do stuff like what Blender did years ago and design your software to have a right click of the mouse to select an object, you have no clue what you're doing. Every single piece of software since the beginning of time, in this universe and every other universe, selects and places stuff with a left mouse click. 

    And when the Zbrush developers push out that ridiculous excuse for a UI, you know it's a bunch of guys who couldn't care less about users, and only want to write code that does stuff and push it out the door. 

    Well, that's the main and overal risk which open source software in general brings: you can't fully rely on it. In the end it's either their way or the highway, and if you don't like the way things are being done you can just go fork yourself. Although I'm jesting a little bit I'm also serious: "forking" refers to copying the project - as is - and then using that as a starting ground to build up a project of your own. So your project spawned (or 'forked') from the original.

    The whole "we use the right mouse button because..." clearly illustrates this and there are many more examples to be found in other OSS projects. In fact... I dare argue that this whole attitude issue (= my personal opinion) changed as soon as Blender became more commercial. Yes, you can still download it for free, but hopefully it didn't go unnoticed that there's a whole company behind the project? A company which sometimes even provides job positions.

    And what do you know.. the moment that money became a priority they turned a lot of things around and started to cater more to their target audience...  As I mentioned earlier: you get what you pay for. Note that this payment doesn't always have to involve perpetual purchases, there are more ways to make money.

     

    As for the ZBrush interface... All it takes is an open mindset. You make it sound as if it's completely different than anyting else but that's actually not true. Yes, you get that impression at first but...  The main differences are that the main menu's are laid in alphabetical order (which is something to get used to, but how long would that take?) and the fact that you can't scroll through long lists / menus using your mousewheel, instead you have to drag the whole thing up and down.

    Even so, if you don't like the way things look and behave then you can customize just about everything. Toolbars, docking sections, etc.

     

    As with any software, some users bang their heads against the wall for years and finally get the hang of it, and then decide they've invested so much that they have to claim they like the software and become fanboys. But that doesn't make it good. 

    True that, but that's something you'll see happening everywhere.

    And it also points out an important issue here... there's a thin line between a "bad interface" and users who are so inflexible that they're totally incapable (or maybe unwilling) to learn something new. Take for example MS Office when the Ribbon interface became a thing, or when you have a software environment which simply behaves completely different by design (I see this in my audio profession with environments like Ableton Live & Reason, both have a rather specific interface).

    Which is also where my earlier "you get what you pay for" comment came from: is something bad when the project owners can make a good living out of it? ;)

    ... could something be bad when said project owners are using / relying on others to do their work for them, unpaid, while they are still making good money from the whole thing?  I mean... the Blender project is hiring, but they also happily rely on the open source driven efforts.

     

    I think the folks who developed DAZ Studio could give the software world lessons in how to design a good UI. Beautiful work. 

    Fully agreed, I even dedicated several blog posts to that. IMO it's somewhat mind boggling if you think of all the amazing stuff you can do with Daz Studio, and basically all free of charge.

     

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 41,249

    TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

    kyoto kid said:

    TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

    kyoto kid said:

    As to the "Spaghetti System" (nodes) I'm with you there. I recently opened the Shader Mixer for a hair product, and in comparison, it made the wiringagram for a 747 look like child's play.  Yeah I'll eventually have to get used to it (I prefer the shader system in Carrara, as you can see the effects instantly but that only works for Carrara).  

    There is a distinction between node setups made by an automated process, say, the Diffeo plugin, and are not necessarily intended for human beings to ever see, or at the least, with little to no effort was put into making them readable, and a node setup made by a person like, say, the Default Cube guy on Youtube who knows that he'll have to come back to his work time and time again.

     

    ...opened it up to figure out why a certain PA's line of hair content would not convert to 3DL from Iray using the conversion script.

    That's interesting... were you able to figure it out?

    ..nope, but I think I now know how to get from Upminster to Warford.

  • j cadej cade Posts: 2,310

    ShelLuser said:

    I'm mostly reading here because I don't have good experiences with Blender myself and I don't want to become too negative here. Even so, despite the fact that I admire the project for what it is I personally plain out dislike Blender.

    Although I am commenting on your post I also mean to address some of my comments in general, not necessarily towards you alone.

    Having that out of the way....

     

    ebergerly said:

    And when you do stuff like what Blender did years ago and design your software to have a right click of the mouse to select an object, you have no clue what you're doing. Every single piece of software since the beginning of time, in this universe and every other universe, selects and places stuff with a left mouse click. 

    And when the Zbrush developers push out that ridiculous excuse for a UI, you know it's a bunch of guys who couldn't care less about users, and only want to write code that does stuff and push it out the door. 

    Well, that's the main and overal risk which open source software in general brings: you can't fully rely on it. In the end it's either their way or the highway, and if you don't like the way things are being done you can just go fork yourself. Although I'm jesting a little bit I'm also serious: "forking" refers to copying the project - as is - and then using that as a starting ground to build up a project of your own. So your project spawned (or 'forked') from the original.

    The whole "we use the right mouse button because..." clearly illustrates this and there are many more examples to be found in other OSS projects. In fact... I dare argue that this whole attitude issue (= my personal opinion) changed as soon as Blender became more commercial. Yes, you can still download it for free, but hopefully it didn't go unnoticed that there's a whole company behind the project? A company which sometimes even provides job positions.

    And what do you know.. the moment that money became a priority they turned a lot of things around and started to cater more to their target audience...  As I mentioned earlier: you get what you pay for. Note that this payment doesn't always have to involve perpetual purchases, there are more ways to make money.

     

    As for the ZBrush interface... All it takes is an open mindset. You make it sound as if it's completely different than anyting else but that's actually not true. Yes, you get that impression at first but...  The main differences are that the main menu's are laid in alphabetical order (which is something to get used to, but how long would that take?) and the fact that you can't scroll through long lists / menus using your mousewheel, instead you have to drag the whole thing up and down.

    Even so, if you don't like the way things look and behave then you can customize just about everything. Toolbars, docking sections, etc.

     

    As with any software, some users bang their heads against the wall for years and finally get the hang of it, and then decide they've invested so much that they have to claim they like the software and become fanboys. But that doesn't make it good. 

    True that, but that's something you'll see happening everywhere.

    And it also points out an important issue here... there's a thin line between a "bad interface" and users who are so inflexible that they're totally incapable (or maybe unwilling) to learn something new. Take for example MS Office when the Ribbon interface became a thing, or when you have a software environment which simply behaves completely different by design (I see this in my audio profession with environments like Ableton Live & Reason, both have a rather specific interface).

    Which is also where my earlier "you get what you pay for" comment came from: is something bad when the project owners can make a good living out of it? ;)

    ... could something be bad when said project owners are using / relying on others to do their work for them, unpaid, while they are still making good money from the whole thing?  I mean... the Blender project is hiring, but they also happily rely on the open source driven efforts.

     

    I think the folks who developed DAZ Studio could give the software world lessons in how to design a good UI. Beautiful work. 

    Fully agreed, I even dedicated several blog posts to that. IMO it's somewhat mind boggling if you think of all the amazing stuff you can do with Daz Studio, and basically all free of charge.

     

    The Blender Foundation doesn't have owners, its a non-for profit foundation. Also its been around the entire time. It seems rather like you're suggesting blender was an open source project in the ether that did things weird because open source then the blender foundation came along and made things "more commercial" and the software improved. But the organization around Blender has been there the entire time, with the same exact leadership. Why is now when they became more commercial and not when they added a fancy new render engine or the last time they completely redesigned the interface to be more user friendly? (I will die on the hill that 2.8 ui has way more in common with 2.7 than 2.5 had with 2.49)

     

    also yes there are lots of things that are are bad even when the project owners can make a good living out of it

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255
    edited February 2021

    I think one of the fallacies about the whole "open source" model is that people tend to overlook the negatives solely because they get free software. And they don't want to realize that, unlike for-profit software developers, there is nothing whatsoever that forces the open source developers to provide software that users want and need. Open source means anyone with a few hours to spare and some coding background can tweak the software any way THEY want, and any way that they find fun. Otherwise, why spend time on it if it's not fun? There's no marketing department making surveys to see what users want and need, there's just some guy who's playing with code. No need for documentation (which most developers despise) or anything else they don't want to work on cuz it's not fun. 

    So then people get this free software and are surprised that it's not meeting their wants or needs. Poorly designed, no documentation, bugs, counter-intutive, and so on. What do you expect? Well, since it's free that erases all the bad stuff.  

    That being said, it's also the case that you get paid, non-open-source software that's just as bad or worse. But hopefully market forces and sales figures will tend to make those improve over time as customers complain. Sometimes....

    Post edited by ebergerly on
  • wolf359wolf359 Posts: 3,837

    @ShelLuser
     All of the "amazing things" you can do with Daz studio "free of charge "are centered around the
    Displaying genesis models and props and frankly not much else.


    Remove Genesis from the equation and you have an app that is useless except perhaps to import some basic,UV mapped .obj files and using the free IRay render engine as long as you restrict yourself to one GPU hardware manufacturer

    All of the nice content in the Daz store was modeled in 3DCC app Like Blender.Maya or Zbrush etc.
    and you stil have to buy that content(clothing & morphs etc before Daz Studio becomes actually useful
    and you still are LIMITED to what the PA's have determined will sell  (Male clothing??)
    And your future spending is imposed by the planned obsolesence Built into the Daz/Genesis business model.

    Having a nice kindergarden interface is of limited value if you have such major EXTERNAL dependencies
    and internal limitations IMHO.


    The difference in mindset here is between those who only consume( the Daz/ Pose/Iclone core user base) 
    and those who produce & consume.( Blender,maya ,Max users etc)

    Blender is centered toward those who are producers of content as well as animated
    Film productions

    Since switching from Maxon C4D to Bender 2.8X and beyond, in April 2020
    I have spent less than $300 USD on my Hobby(Hard-ops/boxcutter/decal machine/Physical Starlight& Atmosphere Addons)

    Probably less than the average Daz studio Consumer  spends on their "free" Program
    per year and if a Blender update breaks my addons and/or the developer quits/Dies  we can always install and run a previous version by Downloading it from the Blender web site.


     

     

     

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 102,759

    Unfortuinately this seems to have turned into a various things-war (app, development model) so it has been closed.

This discussion has been closed.