The reports of G2's demise are greatly exagerated.
AnotherUserName
Posts: 2,727
So I did something I normally wouldn't do and decided to purchase V7, still brand new and barely a week old. Typically I like to wait for awhile and let prices come down. I purchased the Pro pack, I have also purchased the evolution head and body morphs.
I really like the way V7 is articulated. The addition of new joints in the neck, torso, etc. allow for more realistic pose possibilities than ever before. I also appreciated the fact that her materials came with Iray and 3Delight versions. She seems to save/load faster in her G3 format and has a variety of HD morphs already at her disposal. Overall, the G3/V7 format seems more advanced than G2/V6.
However...
I decided to run some basic render tests. I started out with a nude V7 with Leyton hair in Iray. My environment consisted of the DAZ Studio HDR Outdoor Environments. I composed the scene, prepared the camera and lights and pressed the render button...
...and waited...
...and waited...
Now, my computer has a GTX 770 video card in it, nothing spectacular but decent. Typically, I run Iray with the CPU assisting because it is faster that way. The first V7 render took approximately 10 minutes. The second, almost 18 minutes(closer angle, different pose). Had I taken the same shots with V6 HD ( as previously tested) the render would have completed in less than 3-4 minutes.
Ultimately, I feel that G2 is still the preferred option for the hobbyist. Used with such product as Beautiful Bends for Genesis 2 Female(s), I think that G2/V6 will render just as well as G3/V7.
In closing, a couple thoughts. How sustainable is this market DAZ? How excited is the typical user going to be when G5/V10 launches? So much more realistic, yet so much more advanced than the average PC can possibly handle... How well received do you think that product for G4, etc, will be when it has already been purchased for a couple generations prior?
Dont get me wrong. I really enjoy your product DAZ. Its just that, eventually, you are going to outpace yourself. If that happens, I dont think that your consumer base is really going to care that much.
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Comments
Quick Edit:
I just realized that I was rendering without OptiX Prime Acceleration. Still, G3/V6 renders take approximately 6 minutes longer to complete than G2/V6.
Some of us have already reached that point as we already have 100's of gb's worth of runtime. I started with V3, loved V4 but remember hearing people comment on how much they already had invested, then came genesis where people could finally use all their old content even things that they hadn't touched in years...I remember converting A3 stuff and thinking 'Wow, I can finally use this again, then came genesis2 and slightly less(at least initially) backward compatibility and Genesis 3.
I actually never really invested in Genesis2. I've bought a few things here and there but not heaps. I used to buy everything that was released for V4 and Genesis.
That said I am really excited about Genesis 3 and have invested what I can so far. So I have the things you mentioned above and also a couple of other products like Raw's character and the pose converter by 3DU.
I think these things have cycles...as some people fall away from buying new people come and take their places. There will always be new people starting to use 3D...doesn't necessarily mean it will be the same people.
I think, as long as content is provided with 3Delight as well Iray options, as well as non-HD and HD morphs, everyone will be happy. As impressive as Iray is, I simply don't have a need for it, being a humble hobbyist, but I guess that the real target market for Iray is professionals.
Also, I think that G2 will be around for a lot longer than the original Genesis figures (and V4/M4 are still very much alive and kicking).
I dunno. I'm a hobbyist and in the end I think I prefer Iray for various reasons. The main one is that I also do photography as a hobby, and I like that I can set lighting to real-world intensity in watts or lumens, and then set the camera for an exposure (f/stop, etc), and get the kinds of results I would expect to get from a camera in that lighting environment. In 3DL, the renders were faster and I had more fine control over lights (if I didn't want something to light up, I could prevent it, which you kind of can't in Iray), but I spent hours and hours getting the lighting to work the way I wanted.
Iray was taking that long at first too, until I realized that instead of changing light intensities, I should be changing camera exposure settings and leaving the light intensity at 'normal' levels. That probably cut my workflow time by an order of magnitude.
Iray is a path tracer, which means it theoretically won't get to the "correct" result unless you let it run forever. It gets progressively closer and closer to correct as you let it run, so it's "done" not when it says it's done, but when the image is acceptably free from noise. One way to think about how it works is:
1. Draw a random sample of colors for each pixel.
2. Average the colors with all previous samples.
3. Go to 1.
As it takes more samples, the render gets closer to the correct result. So render time is dependent on
A) How long it takes to obtain each sample
B) How many samples are required to get a noise-free image.
For A), it depends a lot on the materials in the scene and the number of "bounces" that it will trace for each path, which you can set in the "Max Path Length" setting. More complex materials = longer time required to obtain samples, and same for longer path length.
For B), Iray for DAZ has some built-in settings that let you limit how long it will run, like setting max samples and "convergence ratio" which will attempt to guess how much noise there is in the render. But basically, it is not always necessary to let it finish on its own. Sometimes, after 2-3 minutes the result will be almost indistinguishable from what it looks like after 10 minutes. In that case, you just stop the render early and that's your result.
As a side note, to reduce average "noise" by 50%, you need to let it run 4x longer.
I would guess that the reason V6 is so much faster than V7 is that she has simpler materials, such as no Iray SSS (SSS in particular takes a long time for pathtracers to sample). I don't know how DAZ translates 3Delight shaders to Iray, but I would be surprised if it automatically converted 3Delight SSS to Iray SSS.
[Edit] Unless you're saying that your V6 HD renders were done in 3Delight...in that case it's not a valid comparison, as 3Delight (biased) is a completely different renderer from Iray (unbiased).