Iray Memory Assistant - a bit annoyed (@ DAZ not PA :-D)
HamEinar
Posts: 121
Am I the only one thinking that this shouldn't be a required purchase but an integral part of DS?
Post edited by HamEinar on
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I'm not sure what you mean by required unless you feel that it should be required in which case I'd point out that the PA who created it does not work for Daz, they were creative enough to think think about the issue, and work out a solution.. so I actually think they deserve to make an income from it.
I don't begrudge SimTenero the income as his support for Randomiser has been exemplary. I don't really need this, but am buying it in part because of that support.
I do, however, feel the OP makes a point; but Daz Studio is free - and the more features included with it, the more likely it is to be subject to some cost.
It's a useful function, but not essential for Daz's operation as a renderer. Of course I feel the same about Connect and DRM, but that is a different discussion. I raise it merely to show that Daz is more than happy to add aspects that have limited use for some users - and no use for any user.
I had a momet of anxiety when I saw the thread title and thought something might not be working, so in a way, kind of relieved that wasn't the case
. In fairness to Daz, I'm not sure how common this kind of feature is among animation tools that use external renderers and it was a fair amount of work to research and create. I do hope its useful though!
Thanky you Khory! This was one of those things I started making because I needed it, and quickly realized I probably wasn't alone.
Thank you nicstt, I really appreciate that! I'll try to bring the same level of care and attention to this as well
.
Daz and the dev team do happily add aspects to studio. Things like Iray and smart content for example. Even connect which for me is a must have. That in no way changes, or is really even relivant to, the fact that this product was thought of and produced by a very smart PA.
I have been waiting for this to come out since Iray was introduced. Great job, you did what Daz failed to do. Make something critically nessecary available even if it did cost us something. This is a real time saver. If you are unsure if the scene you are about to render is not going to fit in the memory of your video card you can find out what is too large and lower the resolution of texture or go with a shader to knock down the amount of space it will take to render in your video card.
Kudos to you
:-) I can see how this might have come off as an attack on the PA - definitely not my intention, as it IS a vital tool for users looking to use Iray without all the guesswork!
However, seeing that Iray is such an integral part of DS, I still maintain that this should have been included in the base-software (tempted to say that they should have focused development hours on stuff like this instead of DRM and Connect, but I won't ;-D).
I've bought this and it really comes in very handy (thanks to the PA for the quickfix using it in 4.8).
You never know, DAZ might buy this and add it to DS at some point in the future, It wouldn't be the first time, it happened with other gadgets before.
One reason for DS's not including a similar tool may be that it is an extimator, and the developers may not have felt happy with a built-in tool that wasn't always going to give the right answer. With an add-on like this the limitations can be more explictly addressed.
Thank you for the kind words!
No worries, I totally understand :-)
That's a very good point, Richard. Honestly, I wrestled with deciding whether or not to move forward with this product for that very reason. Ultimately, I decided it would still be a valuable thing to have, even if I couldn't promise super accurate results. But I did have to go out of my way to stick disclaimers everywhere about the reliability of the estimates, so I can see why Daz internal devs might want to steer clear.
I also don't know that they have much, if any more visibility into Iray than I do. Comparisons have been drawn to Octane's memory use tool, which is understandable, but the folks at Octane making the memory tool also have access to the source for Octane itself. I could be wrong, but I doubt Nvidia shared any source code with Daz. So, while it's possible to account for the amount of data being sent to Iray, it's not always clear how that data is being transformed inside Iray and what the memory impact will be.
Thank you so much for the troubleshooting help, Bee! With your help and Kevin's super generous help late in the day on a Friday (Thanks Kevin!!!), we were able to get an update rolled out very quickly.
I hope an inventive person like simterero is able to get us VR support for Daz Studio. I have posted in the commons forum but so far but people are avoiding my comments about VR like it is anti DRM or something. I must not be getting something intregal about VR that the rest of the Daz community does? Is VR bad for Daz business? I would think it would drum up additional business? I could be wrong. I thought 3D printing would be good for DAZ but it turned out to be too expensive for our cheap community. I myself was turned away by the high prices because it seems too much money for plastic toys. I like rendering because I'm to lazy to take up traditional art mediums and create artwork the old fasion way although I do have training and was employed in my youth as a graphic artist. I like VR because I love 3D gaming and I am going to get some of these glasses for gaming but I would also like to use them in Lightwave and if possible inside of Carrara and Daz Studio. I don't mind paying for VR support.
VR support would have to be done by DAZ itself. The plugin API doesn't expose the underlying rendering code, which would be where any stereoscopic code changes would have to reside.
3D printing is getting cheaper. Good 3D printer kits can be had for under $400. Fully assembled 3D printers for under $500, with really good ones for under $1000. Considering many in this hobby spend more on just one of their GPUs, I'd hardly say it's too expensive. I'm considering picking one up with my tax refund.
VR support for RENDERING could be done. It's really just a matter of creating extra cameras, rendering two frames, and combining them into a proper format image/video that the VR Headset can display (with whatever player/viewer programs already exist.)
Actually, I'm big into VR, so I've already been working on a few different things related to VR
. It's too early to share details, but I'd like to have at least one or two projects ready to roll when people start recieving their Rifts and Vives this year.
I've got a Oculus DK2, but the pre-order prices for the commercial Rift weren't swingable. So while my equipment is a little dated, count me in for testing any VR-related stuff!
I have not yet seen the update rolled out for Iray Memory Assistant so it will work with 4.8. Has it actually been released yet, if so, does it get rolled out slowly to a few users at a time or do we all get the update at once?
Thanks, looking forward to getting more insight into the Iray memory issue.
A few people have already confirmed getting the update, so it should be available to you (it gets rolled out to everyone at once). Do you haver it installed through Connect, Daz Install Manager, or did you download the zip and manually install it?
as I said in silver dolphin's other thread you can pair two cameras and have two viewports open now,
the coding bit would be getting that output into a pair of Amoled screens on a VR headset
Not to sidetrack, but how you achieve something in VR depends on what exactly you are trying to achieve :-D. If the goal is to have the preview window hover in front of you, as if there were a large 3D monitor in front of you, I think there are already some tools out there that could make that happen. If the goal is to be "in" the scene, there's a lot more to it :-)
I did not want to derail this thread but that would be a matter of camera perspective I imagine, if you used an almost 180 view, 360 not really needed as panning the camera with the head would suffice
I do not own a VR headset yet, have looked at them in display cases not tried one on to see how well the screens envelope the eyes so cannot really speculate
You are definitely on the right track! The optics in a VR headset introduce a lot of image distortion and chromatic aberration (that rainbow effect you may have seen around objects through a powerful lens). The rendered image has to compensate for these effects before the image is sent to the headset. That bit can be tricky. It's not so much that its difficult as it can be a process intensive operation that can slow things down.
I use DIM and no update received yet.
Any chance you could check in your Product Library on the webpage and see if the newer version is there? If not, PM me and I'll get you squared away :-D
I downloaded the files from my Product Library webpage but they appear to be the same files I have already installed via DIM. How will I know the newer version from the older version?
I just tried my first Iray render (brutal on the computer - had to abort with just a fraction of a percentage point done, see attached) and am quite taken with the idea of the memory assistant. So the assistant is good for everybody, or is it solely for high-end renders on high-end machines? Maybe it can be used to arrange for just little bits of renders near the top of the screen, for subsequent inclusion in postwork?
Regarding 3D printing "seeming like too much money for plastic toys", exactly how much $$$ are we talking about? My first thought was that you can make fantastic little tools for texturing clay, plasticene and lost wax models... so it would be a possible means to a further end. And depending on the detail that any given process would yield -- like if it could beat out lost wax castings - then I bet scale modelers would love to have little figures of themselves at trackside, or in the cockpit of a model plane.
Simtenero, I'm posting here since this seems to be an active thread, but the Iray Memory Assistant seems to be underreporting my system information. When you report "Available SysRAM" and "Available VRAM" what are you measuring? And what are you reporting as Mult Processors?
Thanks for the great tool!
Tom
Hello Tom,
I'm pulling the available System and GPU RAM from Daz's log.txt, which reports the current availability of each on startup. I've validated the numbers against System Information and Nvidia's SMI driver utility (which is where I believe DS is also pulling those numbers from) and have confirmed they are accurate. These are the baselines for the availability figures (when available, there are conditions that can limit the script's access to the log file, in which case, it reports on estimated total use, rather than estimated avaialbility).
It can definitely be a surprise to see that a big chunk of GPU RAM isn't available. There are a lot of possible contributors. For more information on both baseline availability and how I arrive at the estimates, check out this thread:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/72884/simtenero-iray-memory-assistant-commercial#latest
If there's anything I haven't addressed there that you're curious about, please feel free to ask!
The Update came on the very first day of availability (Great Service!)
So if you have not DLed it on the first day (or maybe even late on the first one) you probably have allready the updated Version.
Yes, you are right but was Daz allowing people to send in their projects to be printed. I don't think so. I think if you had a need for scale models then you would invest in a 3D printer and not buy premade models released by daz. I think they wanted to have something new to sell but forgot that people want more control over their art. When it becomes affordable I may purchase a 3D printer but it is too expensive for me right now.