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Thats what MCasuals has done is scripts for both DS an Blender it fixes up the shaders and fixes some FBX Issues, not saying you wont tweek the shaders but from what I saw it worked, they have some examples on their deviantart account while the development was going on.
OK, well, it does look like there are different levels of annoyance and confusion with these products. And who wants to be annoyed? But, please put up with me.
From these products, and any import apps or plugins that may be needed (I used to use Reality for both Poser and DAZ Studio) which option or options would be the easiest [I didn't say easy] to use and would produce fast and very fine results? Hang the cost for both the main application and any required plugin or plugins. Mentioned above are V-Ray and Modo, Arnold/Maya, Cinema4D, Blender, and Cycles. There's Octane, too. The MCasuals scripts look geeky, if I may use the term, to me. Not trying to be insulting, but I would like a plugin that I don't have to tweek or fix in order for it to take the DAZ Studio file and send it to the rendering application.
So what I'd like is a recommendation, such as this: With the new Mac Pro, and DAZ Studio, (and maybe this would work for Poser, too), buy whatever product, [insert name] and use this plugin, [insert name--for DAZ Studio] and that plugin for Poser, [again, insert name], and you'll [I will] get GPU Open CL and Open GL rendering. Or, you will not [I will not] get GPU, but I will get relatively fast CPU Open GL and Open CL rendering in Catalina. Can anyone make a recommendation or two like that?
aararibel caado wrote: I'd use V-Ray and Modo to render on my maxed out Mac Pro. You'll face a lot of initial work setting up shaders, but with PBR Iray materials, it shouldn't be too steep. You'll also get additional options that Iray in DS does't have.
OK, now does this include the plugin? I tried to find information, but I really couldn't. And does the V-Ray plugin work for both Poser and DAZ Studio? Just DAZ Studio? Is there a separate plugin for Poser?
As of now (and likely for the future), there is no plug-in for Daz-to-Modo/V-Ray. In Modo, you can save the equivalent of Material presets, so you could quickly retexture anything you'd previously imported. But since none of the available formats I'm aware of carry over anything more than color, bump, and transparency maps, you'd need to manually apply each map again once you bring it over. It's a process that makes the most sense when you either do a lot of your own texturing or use a lot of the same props over and over again. Alternatively, in the money-is-no-limit scenario, you could surely hire somebody to write a robust export script for DS, what writes out a text file with all the material settings, then hire somebody to write an import script for Modo, Maya, C4D, etc. As long as the export script is produces a clean file, I'd expect the import file wouldn't be hard. But I haven't tried that.
Realistically, I think Windows is probably the best option. You could do all of your set-up on a Mac, if you prefer that OS and environment, but have a GPU-focused render box running Windows for rendering and simulations where Nvidia cards give you an advantage.
@aararibelcaado-- Hi, and thank you greatly for continuing to respond to my questions.
Well, I used to use Reality for DS because I did not like 3Delight as a rendering agent. But, transferring shaders to LuxCore was a big pain. Did I save any time? Nope. Once iRay became available, even though it's CPU rendering, I liked that so much better than 3Delight that I stayed with DS rendering. I use Poser, too, but I liked the Firefly renderer much better than 3Delight, and then when Superfly became available, based on Cycles, well, that blew me away and I stopped using Reality and LuxCore for Poser.
What you said about having a GPU-focused render box running Windows for rendering and simulations where Nvidia cards give you an advantage: That sounds massively interesting. But how would that work? Is there some way to transfer a large DAZ Studio scene .duf file from a Mac to a Windows machine, and have all of the necessary components in the .duf file? (i.e., characters, materials, props, etc.) Or, would I have to transfer the entire DAZ set of folders with data/People etc. from my Mac to a Windows machine? If it's the latter, then wouldn't I be setting the scene up on a Windows machine to be certain that all of the file links will hold? Sorry, but I don't understand. Please explain. The GPU-focused render box running Windows sounds excellent, if the .duf file can be transferred via a flash drive, for example. Can it?
I haven't done this, but I assume if you have yoru library on an external thunderbold 3 SSD drive, you could connect it to both your Mac and Windows machine, so both of them can access your saved files and runtime. Obviously, you would want to make sure you don't have Daz open on both the Mac and Windows at the same time to avoid conflicting saves, but I'd expect that to work easily. But once you get to the Windows side of things, I'm out of knowledge.
I copied all my Studio assets to a new PC a year ago, and adjusted the settings in Studio on the Windows machine to get the paths right. My usual workflow is to build a scene in Studio on my Mac (which is still my daily-use machine), do small-sized test renders to get the lighting and stuff right, then simply copy the .duf files (or other new files like textures) into a shared folder on the PC, then move from there into the Studio hierarchy on the PC. Everything works fine; I will often do some fine-tuning on the PC (and then copy the .duf file back to the Mac).
Some patience required, but there's nothing magical.
Thank you very much, for this Ostadan. So, I would have to copy over my DAZ Studio folders with data/People/etc. I still have questions:
Would I need to format the PC in some way so that I could see what I was doing? (I mean this in terms of copying from the Mac to the PC.)
To copy to the PC, are you using a flash drive, or do you have the computers on a home network, or what?
Why do you copy the .duf file back to the Mac? Just to save?
When you render, do you just ignore the Mac and render on the PC?
What kind of PC and what nVidia cards do you use, or do you recommend?
Are you using DAZ Studio 4.12 on the PC? I've been reading about all the problems. I'm using 4.11 still on the Mac. But I can't copy that to the PC, so I guess I'd have to download 4.12, the PC version?
Someone sent me this link for sharing files, from the Mac to the PC. Does this make sense? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6GWr9kjQ9Q
I wish I knew. I'd hate to buy a PC, and then not know what to do with it. Any sites that provide this kind of detailed guidance, with, perhaps, friendly forums, the participants in which could take a non-PC user like myself (being in this case a complete newbie) and guide me though it?
I just watched the youtube video (link above) again. If I download a PC version of DAZ Studio, could I just drag use the .duf file from my Mac (via file sharing), have both Read And Write selected on the PC, and click "Render" on the PC? Or, would I still need the full set of DAZ Folders? If I do need the full DAZ set, can it just be done via this file sharing method?
For the initial copy of the DAZ assets, I had to jump through some hoops due to the volume of data involved. I hooked the computers together with a gig-ethernet cable (since my router is old). I tried various ways of copying things around and honestly don't remember what I settled on. I believe TeraCopy was involved at some stage as being faster than the usual Windows explorer for copying big stuff. Again, I don't remember the exact problem this solved.
To copy new scenes and assets to the PC, both computers are attached to my home router (not the cable router), which also provides my wi-fi. I remote-mount ("Connect to Server") a folder named 'Transfer' onto the Mac and just drag the needed files into there.
My build is an i7 CPU (I had a friend working at Intel who got me a good deal; I might have gone with a Ryzen otherwise), and an RTX 2080. I do not have enough experience with other hardware to make a useful recommendation. I am running 4.12 on both systems, usually with the current Beta. Occasionally I have a scene that crashes Iray and Studio on the PC in the beta but works OK in the standard 4.12.
I copy things back to the Mac so that everything is the same on both systems, in case I want do do additional work later, like adding something to a scene.
When I do the 'final' render, it is usually on the PC. Some simpler scenes can be done in CPU on the Mac in 'reasonable' time. ("Better; faster; cheaper: choose two").
It might be possible to share your DAZ assets from the Mac to the PC, but it would be fairly tricky, since Studio will want to have all those network paths configured in. And at that, it might be slow to load scenes from the shared folders. I found it simpler just to copy the whole lot and keep things in sync by hand. Others may feel differently about it.
Sorry I cannot be more detailed. I just happened to do things one way, and it's working for me. THere may be other and better ways to go about things. In any case, I can assure you that working on both Mac and PC with the same scenes is very practical. The first time the Windows box zipped through an Iray render of one of my existing scenes in just a couple of minutes, I was one happy boy.
Thank you very much for your response,Ostadan. I am grateful.
I looked at the mcasual scripts page again. Now, is anyone using this? It is for both Windows and Macs, isn't it? Because he gives illustrations only for Windows, but I think I can figure it out for Macs.
Maybe I have missed someone else's posting then it could be that I downloaded the Mac zip loader on a PC and then transferred it to a Mac but I get this everytime I try to install the Mac intaller on my main drive (Error changing permission to 040755 in Application/ Daz 3d/ DazStudio4 64-bit/bin). So what do I have to do so I can install 4.12. I hope I don't have to download on the Mac don't have a good speed internet at home.I figured it out had to uninstall everything then it installed
Just trying to clear some space on my Mac and I found huge amounts (maybe a quarter) of Daz content duplicated on the "shared" folder; I have never put it in there and most has been there (in a folder I never use) for years. I have always installed manually as I have never got Install Manager to work even though I have tried it many times. I assume this is Install Manager doing its usual thing of putting content in apparently random and illogical places and I am free to delete this apparently duplicate content.
I don't know if this is strictly a Mac problem or a human error but here is my problem.
Maybe this problem has been solved before but this is driving me bats. I installed my content on a dedicated drive with the DIM. I changed Daz Studio to show where that content is. But when I open Daz Studio it tries to find my content on my Mac boot drive even though I changed it to look at the dedicated drive. How can I fix it so it will see my content
So I think I found my problem. When I changed the settings for Daz Studio to see where my content goes. I also changed the setting for the CMS Cluster. I think I need to set that to the right directory but I don't what that directory is?
Well that may have been part of the problem. Daz Studio is looking for files on my main boot drive but all my files are on another drive. So when I install Genesis 8 Female I get get her but it can't find the eyelashes. So I can't start making art if the character doesn't load correctly.
I have worked on this all week almost. I first downloaded Daz Studio. I couldn't get it to see the Daz directory that I had on a seperate drive. So I downloaded what I had from Daz 3d. The problem is I didn't have a high speed internet to use my Mac Pro to download. So I went to the local library and downlowded what I have got through Daz so far. I also downloaded the Dim and PostGre. The Postgre was a manual download.I installed both and then used Dim to download what I downloaded. 1st problem is the laptop I download my files on was a Windows laptop. So the plugins were all Windows. Which I have since uninstalled and reloaded the Mac equivuilant. Second I have followed most of the trouble shooting problems in this section and still I can't get the CMS to work with the Postgre. I tried to set the permission to 700 last night before bed but it seperated at every space not sure how to get pass that.
I think I'm screwing it up even more by following these troubleshooting technlques. At first I was getting the CMS and Postgre to work together somewhat. I was getting a blank square with a white triangle at the bottom. Now I can't get it to see any of it. Can someone please help?
Ok I uninstalled everything related to Daz Studio. I went in and deleted Daz 3D in Application Support. Uninstalled all my Daz objects off of Dim. Then I formatted my drive that will hold my Daz directory. So in essence started fresh. Installed Dim. Installed Postgre and Valentina. Installed Daz Studio. I am able to load in Genesis 8 Female from the content library side. Spent most of Saturday and Sunday loading in the rest of my content. From the contet side it works but can't get CMS to start not sure why. Can someone please help. Have gone through this Mac Faq and can't find out why it's not working.
What version of the OS are you using? I don't understand myself why this isn't working.
I'm using Mac 10.13.6 or High Sierra. CMS is not starting , can't sign in and PostGre is on the computer. I've reset the database, reloaded the metadata, I've gone through most of the things that Totte has asked people to do to check and they almost everytime has worked. Here is the log file for Daz Studio
Hmmm. I'm not sure. I'm using just Sierra. Is your DAZ Studio app on your internal drive? I don't think that makes a difference. I'm assuming you used your Content Directory to show DS where your content is located. Maybe Totte or someone more knowledgable can help you.
Thanks for trying and Yes Studio is on the Boot Drive and my content is on a different drive
Hi,
Sorry, forum just decided not to notify me of new posts, happens sometimes.
For me this is the clue: "2020-01-21 16:17:46.609 WARNING: /src/sdksource/cloud/dzcloudtasknotifier.cpp(178): Unexpected exception in CloudFIle::lookupFromDb: Unable to connect to the database"
Do you have the Daz Connect directory setup correctly (it exists where DAZ Studio think it is?)
Because if the Connect directory cannot be found, the connection to the cms fails.
Try that, and shout if it still fails.
Totte, I'm really not sure where to point this at. I re-installed Daz Studio and I didn't change the original directory that it was pointing to But I changed where my Daz content and Poser content is. So when you said that I need to change it, I changed it to yhe hard drive where my content is. I still couldn't connect. So if my Daz Studio is in Application/Daz3d is that where I should tell it?
Look under Prefences -> Content tab, click the big Content Directory Manager button
Open the DAZ connect row in the list, does that directory exist?
Yes at first it listed on my boot drive but I can't remember where. I changed it to my application folder should it be in my Share folder?
It should point to a directory for DazConnect, which can be any root "runtime/library" on your contentr drive, but if you have installed things with DazConnect it must point to that directory to use those items, bit it should never point to an application directory. All content directories are just that, content.
I did a search through both my Boot Drive and My Content Drive and can't find Dazboot or Daz Connect
Can you screenshot your Content Directory Manager with the all groups open,
Here's the Screen Shot
You don't want both /volumes/daz/ and volumes/daz/daz/, nested content directories (one inside another) are going to cause problems.
Actually I had just the Daz/Daz listed under that it keeps adding the other directories