Been gone for awhile... Whad I miss?
MGCJerry
Posts: 28
I haven't looked here in a number of years. Long story.
The last time I was here, the "new" forum was just put up. Artzone was gone, People were fighting over Genesis. So, whad I miss?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Welcome back.
People are now fighting over Genesis2 vs Genesis
Welcome back!
We're now on Genesis 2 Male and Female. Some people continue to use G1 and indeed the old Gen 4's, but not as many (new content for Gen 4 is mostly at other sites, the largest of which has about half DAZ3D's traffic). The other big news is the Iray rendering engine that is part of the latest beta of DAZ Studio and will be the main engine going forward, although 3Delight will continue to be part of the program.
Iray is a GPU-based unbiased engine capable of very realistic lighting, which falls on the speed continuum between Luxrender (it's much faster) and Octane (it's much slower than Octane). It can use the CPU but is incredibly slow, and needs one or more recent Nvidia graphics cards to go its fastest. There are threads about rendering in the engine ongoing now, and I have some tutorials for it on my deviantart and YouTube.
Sum up of what happened during my absence:
Since my last posting, my father passed away, year and a half later, my aunt passed away, then a year and a half later mom passed away... Natural causes. Now that I moved in with my girlfriend & her mom.. My girlfriend's mom has been diagnosed with brain cancer (July last year) and is declining now and its been a year and a half since mom died. We keep telling her to fight, but she has been given less than 6 months and can now no longer walk.
Ah, so I didn't really miss much except for the technology used. :p Seen that Carrara 8 Pro is on sale, for $85 and I'm tempted. Been wanting to visualize a project in 3D and was curious if anything changed.
I only have the base V4/M4 figures that came with Carrara 6 Pro. Nothing else for Gen4. Otherwise the rest of the figures are purely Gen3 (Steph & David mostly).
Does this Iray only work on nvidia cards or does it also work on ati cards? Then again I haven't used Studio since 3.2 or something. I'm more familiar with Carrara & Poser 6... Yes, all of my application and content is "ancient" by modern standards. Happy to see video cards finally being utilized for what they were designed for when it comes to 3d productivity.
Edit:
Just bought Carrara 8.5 Pro... Why not, it was on sale and it might help with some visualizations for projects.
It won't really use ATI cards.
Carrara has some great plant and landscape effects and cloth, hair and physics sim. It's pretty bad at skin shaders in 99% of the renders and animations I've seen from it, but that doesn't seem to stop people.
Anecdotally only (from my deviantart page and people's reports), ATI CPUs may not be able to use the OptiX acceleration that speeds up renders by factors of two or three.
So essentially, as a dual ATI user, Iray is of zero benefit. I never had an interest in ultra-realism. 3D has always been a visualization aide, and was also used to create RPG characters. Most of my renders were always simplistic so I can continue rendering on CPUs. ;)
Seems like I'm starting back at the beginning... Its been a few years since I got any new 3d software. Got Carrara 6 Pro when it was new. Now that I have Carrara 8.5, I see there are a number of issues I'll need to 'fix' before it becomes of any use to old poser figures (if its even compatible, its not looking like it).
BTW, the gallery system here is really neat. For a fancy ajax system (which I typically usually hate), this gallery is easy to use and not overly flashy. Great work web guys!
Once you get used to C8 you will love the bullet physics.
also added since 6 you get 3Dpaint.
It is 64 bit too unlike C6 so you will not miss the slowness of iRay or 3Delight in DS once you start rendering.
Sickle may not be familiar with PhilW's portrait renders, I like you do animation and realism not a big priority with me, some do produce some pretty photorealistic results but obviously for images not animation.
I think the current official release of Studio is 4.7. No Iray in that one. But it comes with the starter essentials for all three Genesis base figures and some extras (clothing, hair, and a dragon.)
There's been a lot of new features under the hood in Studio in the past 4+ years that you've been away.
And it's a free download.
I don't really do animations either, at least not intentionally. I don't see myself using 3d paint much, but I do see myself using the physics a lot. C8 also seems to render faster, but being 64bit is a huge improvement overall. I always had to be careful not to load 'too much' (way back when), but at least now I have some freedom if I do decide to play around with some 3d characters again. But, I'm no artist and my "work" reflects that with its simplicity and amateurish mistakes.
I never did get into Studio. Tried several times, but it just wasn't there. However, I've pointed a lot of people to Studio who wanted to see what "3d" was about.
Its also nice to see some familiar faces/names from when I was last active.
If it means anything, I remember you. Welcome back! =)
Surprising since I kind of lurked in the shadows and didn't participate too much. Thanks for the welcome back Fisty.
From what I have read speed is the only problem, and also from what I have read if you want to render any sort of scene beyond a portrait using the GPU you will need a Nvidia card with at least 4GB of ram to get the speed - these aren't cheap.
Or are you saying something else and Daz has screwed us ATI uses.
Iray uses CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) which is NVidia's alternative to OpenCL which ATI/AMD uses.
From what I have read speed is the only problem, and also from what I have read if you want to render any sort of scene beyond a portrait using the GPU you will need a Nvidia card with at least 4GB of ram to get the speed - these aren't cheap.
Or are you saying something else and Daz has screwed us ATI uses.
NVIDIA GT 740 with 4GB of Ram runs about $100. I suppose that depends on your definition of cheap.
Technically the other way around. OpenCL is Apple's alternative (then passed into open source) to CUDA, which allows both NVIDIA and AMD cards.
NVIDIA GT 740 with 4GB of Ram runs about $100. I suppose that depends on your definition of cheap.
Definitions of cheap are usually defined by income, mine is very small. I am saving up with the idea to upgrade my computer; that of course does mean that I'll be spending less here. Also if you have to replace mother board and nearly everything else it then can become very expensive.
I was just confused by what Sicklyield said her comment seemed to imply that those without Nvidia cards were not getting the same performance even using CPU as those with - I didn't think that was the case.
Definitions of cheap are usually defined by income, mine is very small. I am saving up with the idea to upgrade my computer; that of course does mean that I'll be spending less here. Also if you have to replace mother board and nearly everything else it then can become very expensive.
I was just confused by what Sicklyield said her comment seemed to imply that those without Nvidia cards were not getting the same performance even using CPU as those with - I didn't think that was the case.Not the case, that I have seen. There are no reports of that either.
Thank you for the clarification
Like I said, anecdotal. On my blog people were complaining that turning on OptiX slowed down their renders instead of speeding them up, and when I checked, all of them were only ATI-only hardware.
I stopped using OptiX because it kept seizing up my machine... maybe I should try it again.
I haven't even used my "new" copy of Carrara much, but I'm going to go poof again for a bit. Death #4 in my family. *sigh* (June 2nd).
Geeze.. you can't catch a break can you.. remember you have family here too. /hugs