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Heh, I use Hexagon for morphs if at all possible. I have used Blender for some morphs, it depends on what I need to do. But Hexagon can be easier than Blender for some tasks, especially with the real bridge between them (one that goes BOTH ways.) That is a what I consider to be a bridge. IMO a bridge is only a bridge if it goes both ways. If you take a bridge to the outer banks but cannot get back, that's not much of a bridge is it?
That bridge was a major wishlist for Blender but now I hardly notice the export/import routine. As I said, I quite liked Hex but it crashes far too frequently for me and I am not disciplined enough to keep saving every 10 seconds. Also, the sculpting tools in Blender are progressing significantly and are maybe not that far behind ZBrush for the average DAZ Studio user.
Sounds exciting! By "this year" did the hints mean "some time in 2023" or did they mean "within the next year, starting today"?
Someone mentioned a hint (I think it was during the Victoria 9 demo) that we wouldn't see DAZ Studio 5 until spring, 2023...
Did the hints mention what features we might be looking at?
-- Walt Sterdan
One of the hints was the Nvidia Omniverse advertisement saying "Coming soon to Daz 5" another was a page saying the next update would come out with a stable DS 5 release and there are other smaller indications hinting that something big is going on.
Ah, right; Felis mentioned the Omniverse ad a couple pages back, on July 2.
I hadn't heard that the next update would be a stable DS 5 release, that does sound promising, thanks! You couldn't point me to that page, could you?
Thanks!
-- Walt Sterdan
This part especially, yeah. Exactly. I want to love Blender so much, but I never hit the point where I felt like, "Okay, I know enough about the basics that I can tool around the program and start doing stuff now!" Getting grounded in the fundamentals of the software is not necessary to understand the program; it's necessary to understand the tutorials, which then deal with much more complex processes. Learning Photoshop via tutorials is pretty easy, because you can look up "how do I fake a depth of field effect" and find a five-minute walkthrough of how to do that one thing from start to finish. You can't do that with Blender (or ZBrush, usually, although ZBrush is much easier for me because it's so focused).
I think the key difference for me with Daz is that at the end of my first two hours playing around with Daz, I had made a picture of something I wanted a picture of. It wasn't a good picture, but it was better than I'd previously imagined I could do. At the end of two hours in Blender, I usually have 1) made nothing; 2) spent most of that time trying to figure out where I accidentally did something slightly different from the tutorial (or where the tutorial is outdated) that got me wildly different results. I've gotten more comfortable with it, but it still feels like I'll never get to a point where I don't need my hand held through starter projects and can start being creative with it.
I can't even fault Blender for it, because it is trying to do everything and there are plenty of people it clicks for. But most of the artists I know who want to learn 3D already have a perception of it being something that's way over their heads and frankly terrifying to try to learn, and if they are mostly looking to manipulate 3D assets for use in digital work, it's really hard to be like, "Weeeeellllll you should learn Blender so you're not dependent on premade assets" as though they're not more likely to progress to that after they're more comfortable with 3D. If someone's ultimate goal is to learn to model it's probably better for them to start with Blender even if it's frustrating, but if you just want to pose figures and props to make scenes, Daz excels at that (without having to learn modeling first because every other function in the program assumes you know your way around it).
I use Blender daily for video editing
and occasionally for modelling techniques I cannot do in Carrara or Zbrush
I don't usually render in it unless video production counts
Once I remove textures, I never get anymore crashes. I saved a Genesis material preset for Hexagon. If I need to, I'll save a material preset for the character I am working on (for the import back), then apply my Hex Preset.
Its about the speed. With how I have it set up, I can do this faster than I can with Blender. Which would be a given because I am slower in Blender anyway. And I don't have to worry about an accidental incorrect setting on import/export. I have done that because I am doing other things besides just Genesis.
Also, Hexagon seems to handle Genesis topology better at times. Maybe that's just my imagination, but there are times where the brushes in Hex just seem to look smoother than Blender's. I think it is a real shame that Hexagon development went dormant.
I am not a modeller so maybe that's why I find the Blender sculpting brushes feel more natural to me than the edit tools. That's not to say that I found Hex difficult - it was surprisingly easy to make morphs after following a couple of tutorials. But I'm now getting more and more comfortable with the Blender sculpt brushes and I can only see them improving whereas Hex is stuck in limbo.
If DAZ were to follwo their own lead with the bridge plugins, they should probably make one for exporting Obj files to Blender for morphing (much like the Hex and GOZ bridges). Or maybe even USD files!
This is a thread about Daz Studio 5. I appreciate that the lack of concrete information does the limit the scope of what can be written, but please don't turn it into a discussion of other applications.
Always interested in hearing any hints you might have been privy to, Richard. Any tidbits you can drop our way? Were there any official word on features anywhere besides the Omniverse mention, any vague timeline for release?
-- Walt Sterdan
The other apps can be relevant because of the bridges to them. Hexagon is actually a good question, will DS5 continue to have a bridge to Hexagon and the older applications that are, shall we say, dormant? Or will DS5 stop supporting bridges to old apps? As someone who uses Hexagon, this is a big deal to me.
DS owns Hexagon, so there is also that tiny chance that Hexagon gets an update itself as part of the "DS5 software family". Wouldn't it be awesome if a new Hexagon was part of DS5 itself?
Besides, how DS5 handles bridges in general could be in for a big change. Something like full USD support could change everything.
Sorry, no - and if I did it would be a case of "I can tell you, but then they would have to shoot me."
Yes, Bridges are reelvant - but not discussions of the relative merits of the different applications in general.
A discussion about DS5, especially with so little information coming from the developers, is inevitably going to include speculation about the overall direction that DAZ is taking. This will include questions about legacy software that may or may not be completely abandoned which naturally raises questions about alternatives. These attempts to control the narrative or to quell speculation could all be avoided if DAZ were more forthcoming about their intentions and progress. Otherwise, user anxiety about possible subscription plans and speculation about (possible lack of) backward compatibility, new generations of figures, USD, render engine changes, etc., etc, are all going to appear here.
Animation is relevant too? Can we expect some improvement in those tools or at least some fix on the various bugs?
This is a serious question from a long-term and quite expert user of the software, the inabilty to copy-paste keyframes or just move them around is the most important things to be fixed.
I don't know. all I can suggest is watching the chnage log - but of course. historically, not every feature has been listed there.