Mac Software: Cheetah & DAZ Studio
marble
Posts: 7,500
Hi,
As I await delivery of a new iMac, I was browsing around to see if I could add to my collection of reasonably priced creative software. I stumbled across Cheetah 3D and wondered if anyone here has any experience with it? They have similar forums where DAZ Studio is mentioned quite often but I can't get a feel of how the two work together.
Of particular interest is the render engine which seems to produce realistic images quickly (my impression is that it is much faster than my current favourite: Reality/Lux). Cheetah also has Soft Body and Particle physics. But the thing is that, as I look through their gallery, I see very few images with people so I wondered whether it doesn't handle people so well? Perhaps there are problems with clothing, rigging or hair. They do claim to be able to import .fbx, .obj and collada.
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Comments
no experience with Cheetah. however Blender is very stable on Mac, I'm running it on a core 2 duo on my laptop and dual xeons on my desktop, Blender has a bigger user base and has far more resources and tutorials because of that. In addition Blender 2.6 and after offers the Cycles rendering engine which can be utilized by Daz Studio via this method.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/2877/
All rendering engines are different, so faster or slower are a factor, but so is end product.
Strat, have you looked at Blender 2.66?
Some of the new features are FANTASTIC...like the new sculpting tools...very Zbrush like.
As to Cheetah...it's pretty much the Mac 'everything' 3D app.
I don't have any personal experience with it, but I've heard good things about it.
I'm a born again Blender fanatic, It's freekin' awesome. I've heard the complaints about the complexity, the interface, and "it's not a real application because it didn't cost as much as my yearly mortgage." Blender is insane and it rocks, yeah it's complicated but you can just about predict earthquakes with it.
I've never come across anyone using Cheetah and I've been a mac tech for over a decade, I'm sure it's good but the fact it's Mac only might make me a little concerned, not in the quality, just the limitations of the user base support, they've alienated 90% of the computing owning population by single platform development. However the bug resolves are probably easier for them.
We have a 2012 iMac as well in the office, the i5 with the 21, it's nice!
I've got 2 Macs....an old iMac (g3)...so old it can't run OSX and an even older one...as in ANCIENT Color Classic...
I looked through that thread - I wonder why so many of the images posted have no hair textures? I'm also not sure how it works - can Blender import the textures from the DAZ Studio content folders or do you need to find a native shader and apply it to a particular surface within Blender? I gather that the script described in that thread does some of that work - I guess in a similar way to what Reality does as an interface between DAZ Studio and Lux?
Also, I didn't get a real feel for the render time in Cycles compared to, say, Lux. For me, on my present i7 based Windows desktop, a scene containing one Genesis figure and a couple of props with one mesh light would take about 2.5 hours to reach 500 samples per pixel.