What's the single most annoying issue about Daz prevent you from using it more often?
windli3356
Posts: 231
[What's the single most annoying issue about Daz prevent you from using it more often?] For me it's definately the speed.
Even before my library gets too big, doing anything in Daz just became TOOOOO SLOW,
just load up a G9 character template? 15 secs-20 secs
a morphed character with hairs, cloth and fancy mats? 30 secs - 1 min,
with muliply characters and enviorment? 2-5 mins.
animation? 1-5 hours for a 60 secs video at 1080P, forget about it
I have one of the fastest PC money can buy but still can't get used to how slow everything in Daz is, there are times I loaded a character with que time so long and I ended up doing something else and then completely forogt what I was working on.
I love Daz but if the speed doesn't gets faster in furture updates, I'd lose my motivation
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Comments
There are certainly bugs that frustrate me (navigating content is the biggest one) but I don't think there are any that prevent me from using it.
Yeah, sometimes renders take a while, but so be it. Same with loads; it'd be great if they were faster, but frankly I'm just amazed that I can finally do any of this at all! Back when my dial-up modem was taking longer than some of the times you quoted to load an internet page or fetch what little email I got, I couldn't even conceive that someday I'd make art like this!
Now I just do what I did then, if I know it's going to take a while: go make a cup of tea and maybe do a chore, and come back when I'm done to see how it's doing.
(If I was a professional with deadlines to meet, that would be a different story, but I'm a hobbiest with the luxury to take things as they come.)
I'm fine with the app. It suits my basic needs of posing and making a custom drawing reference. In fact, I do like it since it's the easiest 3D app I've ever learned...though I started before Iray.
But, I don't feel like any of the renders I make with DS are properly "my art" because I didn't create the assets. Plus, I'm limited to what I own and what is available (either for purchase, for free, or if I can convert/import it to DS.) Honestly, it's just less of a headache to draw and color an original drawing, than it is tweaking settings. So that's why I'm not too inclined to use it purely for art.
LOL, my lack of talent. I will wait for inspriration to hit me again and grind through it. You are right, setting up a scene that isn't a plain jane bust portrait is so time consuming. My loggest time sync is getting the poses realistic looking and the lighting, I am a total flop at improvising lighting.
I like the look of 3Delight but support has completely fallen off and the converter from Iray to 3Delight isn't what it used to be.
I felt much more creative when I was using Poser, but the entire thing was pretty new yet. I've been involved over 20 years and don't feel I've advanced much at all, and that's on me. The real weakness is spending too much on assets that I never use. That's on me too. My original intent was to learn to make my own, do all my own poses, even characters using the available morphs, but I succembed to push button art.
Personally, I am all about AI now and don't open DS near as often as I used to. I find I can produce what is in my head much faster and more realistically with AI now than I can with DS. The only thing that will get me using DS more would be AI tools inbedded in DS. I used to hate postwork because I always felt it was my idea of what was was right or wrong on how things looked and that I wasn;t that good at it, but with AI inpainting, i LOVE postwork now!
I keep trying AI Art, I have an account that I pay a quarterly subscription at NightCafe.Studio, but it never listens to what I ask for, I guess that proves it's really small after all.
Paywall.
The biggest thing holding me back from using DAZ Studio more is the lack of a 64-bit lip sync option for Mac and the inabilty to render out a movie; it's a real hassle running my 2012 iMac just to use the 32-bit lip sync, then transfer all the work to a 64-bit machine to render in individual frames, convert the frames to a movie, then add the speech audio to the movie. Too many hoops for something that I used to do in 2012 in one fell swoop.
The second biggest thing is the non-release of DAZ Studio 5 and its Filmaent rendering engine for Mac. My goal is to take another run at 3D animation in the new year, but I'm no longer waiting for DAZ Studio 5, Filament, a 64-bit lip sync option nor purchasing new assets. Until DAZ Studio 5 is released, I'm considering DAZ Studio to be "done" for me and not worth further financial investment and only limited time investment. Too much of why I originally bought assets is no longer a vialble option. Maybe 2025 will turn things around for me, but after waiting over four years for Filament on the Mac and over three years for DAZ Studio 5, I'm not holding my breath.
Sounds too much like me.
After doing some little test videos using custom toon figures and wrestling with the 32-bit lip sync, I took a run at doing similar animations using Cartoon Animator and found it to be more fun and much easier. It allowed me to do mostly-original characters (custom bodies, I used stock heads for the first tests) and complete 40+ minutes of animation in about 80 hours.
https://www.youtube.com/@StudioHrimfaxi
I then got sidetracked with OpenArt AI, building a custom model style so that I could use it like a plug-in to convert DAZ renders into custom-stylized 2D toon art. My plan is to use those renders to create new, 2D animatable figures for Cartoon Animator and Moho. It's about a hundred times easier to create original characters in 2D instead of 3D that I'm almost back to where I was "at the turn of the century". With all the different attempts to render DAZ figures as decent 2D toon and comic book art, I'm finally doing it quickly and easily.
Then I got the idea to convert *those* 2D toon images to 3D models for printing. Along they way I caught a nasty virus that resulted in a couple of months of being physically drained and resulting in a few heart attacks and four cardiac stents.
Once recovered, my wife and I decided to downsize and traded our small house in for a teeny, tiny house; with fewer rooms, all smaller; to fit in the new house, I donated all of my 3D printers and materials to a local school and my son's friend.
Then, after we renovated our new home and moved in, I decided I still wanted to 3D print... I got the smallest, cheapest 3D printer that I was familiar with (a MALYAN M300 Mini Delta 3D Printer, just over $100 on Cyber Monday) and to test it I began printing my "DAZ_Renders-to-2D_A.I-filtered_art-to-3D_A.I._model_to_PLA_prints" method.
So far, the first couple of dozen prints worked perfectly, zero failures. In January, I plan to start adding detail to the generated 3D models on my iPad using Nomad Mobile and my Apple Pencil, then learn to paint them.
So it turns out I'm starting to use DAZ Studio a little more now, but just as the starting point for what I want to do. I plan to do at least one more 3D animation using it in 2025, but I'll be using it more for creating orignal 2D characters and animations, and original 3D miniatures based on the 2D characters I'll be animating.
Ironically, I started with a pre-release beta version of Poser 1 in 1995, software that I'd planned on using just for rendering reference characters and poses to use for making 2D comic art; 30 years (and $65k in assets at DAZ alone) I'm back to where I started, using DAZ Studio for making reference characters and poses...
i dont have any major issues with the software that stop me using it. there's probably many things i would like added though.
I use Daz a lot, but I've a long list of things that in Daz that can be done better elsewhere. I couldn't choose just one.
For me it's the system requirements. I have a lot of things I want to do with DAZ Studio, and a few purchased files I want to use, in which I'm basically waiting until I have an RTX 4090 (or at this point 5090) with enough video ram to handle it. I have been waiting like this for years. I still use the software. But I think I'd be using it every day if I didn't have to wait so long for any little thing, or have to wait all day for a big thing.
Oddly enough, AI has caused me to use DAZ Studio more often rather than less often. It solves a lot of the realism problems in the design of the characters. I create a scene in DAZ Studio and watch the AI make it look better. If they had any idea how, DAZ should have an AI post processing device buitt into the software.
No existing core features are behind a paywall - only things that were commercial add-ons or new things. The free version itself is still gaining new stuff (though there are also things in the new beta that are, at least for now, tied to a premier account).
For me - G9's poor limb bending.
A 60-second video is a minimum of 720 renders, and that's if you're animating on 2s (12 FPS), meaning that you'd have to be rendering more than 12 frames per second to get a render under an hour, and that is incredibly fast. That requires not just hardware (more on that later) but also optimizing lighting, textures, geometry, etc.
What render engine are you using? Iray and Octane can be GPU-accelerated, so they can potentially be much faster than 3Delight, which is CPU-only (I don't remember if Filament is also CPU-only or can also be GPU-accelerated). The trick to GPU acceleration is that it requires an NVidia GPU (at least for those two engines), so do you have one? If so, which one?
For me, for Daz Studio, it's how buying a newly released graphics card is a paper weight for a fairly long time,until the software catches up.
the PITA of compensating for all the features Carrara has that it lacks
I do use it but lots and lots of compositing with png sequences is needed to do things I can do in one go in Carrara with Octane render
The things preventing my use of DS becoming greater in depth are
Regards ,
Richard
Agree that time is never enough.
I think the videos of the master class are great. Although it takes a lot of time, it is worth it. My questions are never answered in the official user manuals of Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc. Usually answers are obtained from various forums and videos.
There are a lot of annoying things about using DAZ, but currently DAZ is my number one priority in using all software, and it's easy to have fun.
i'd love some better/simpler modelling options and perhaps a way to paint on surfaces.
..I agree, Some PAs still offer two material sets but that is becoming less and less common. As I mentioned in another thread there have been a few very useful tools that improve the control and performance of 3DL allowing for render quality close to photo real results, but without the need for a pricey high VRAM GPU. Two of the best are IBL Master (which is still available in the Daz store) and the AweShading Kit (no longer sold here but available at the "other store" for free).
While a GPU is not required for rendering, a fast high core count CPU, like a 12 core/24 thread Ryzen 5900iX or 16 core/32 thread 5950X is preferable With IBL Master I was getting render times for fairly complex scenes with multiple transmaps, reflectivity and refraction, as well as multiple figures in about 15 - 20 minutes on a 4 core/8 thread first generation i7.using progressive rendering.
Definitely slowness. I hate the time it takes to load characters if you have a lot. G8F takes like 40 minutes to load sometimes. I haven't checked with the new beta because I'm using mostly G9, G3 and below with FilaToon lately. I haven't even used G8 in a while because of the ridiculously slow load times and always getting a duplicate formula warning. G9 is starting to get a bit slow to load too now that I have more characters and morphs.
Also, after using DS for a period of time, the dials start to get slow and just adding a hair or clothing item can get slow to load. I have to keep releasing RAM with Norton Utilities or my 64GB RAM gets full super quick. Sometimes it crashes if you use it for more than an hour. Also, finding things! Smart Content is a mess with many missing icons and random organization and misspellings causing duplicate folders like Environment and Environments and so many dials in the wrong place, there's no consistency. And many PAs don't label their icons and in Smart Content you can't tell if an item is for G8 or G9 when there are both because they are not labeled! Because there's no consistency with all the PAs, the app is really a mess if you have a lot of content.
Slow loading times, hands down. I hardly ever buy items from the DAZ store as they're too huge and take forever to load. The competitors offer more lightweight items so I buy from them
Dito on the lack of documentation
Mostly clothing. The Marelous Designer workflow for me is doable but tedous. dForce does not give me realistic drape 95% of the time and is very slow.
1. The absence of a manual or almost any other useful documentation. Should we really be watching YouTube videos or scouring these forums for useful accurate info. when we could find the answers in seconds by looking in a properly indexed manual? I think most users are burning through some of their available time on trial-and-error experimentation which wouldn't be necessary if Daz Studio was well documented.
2. The increasing amounts of time lost to using resource-intensive assets--Slow load times, sluggish performance of the app, time lost to freeze-ups and CTDs, time spent on installing and uninstalling assets which require extremely large amounts of hard-drive space.
3. dForce simulation. A couple of minutes here and there adds up.
3) Better render technology. Iray is nice, but something faster and more realistic would be nicer.
2) The absence of better cloths and hair simulations
and nr:
1) The absence of realistic joint bending and expressions technology for all characters.
Including realistic muscle, bones and fat tissue simulation.
(I just hate, to add tons of custom JCMs to characters to make a pose look more real.)
I know, that is too much to ask for, but this is my honest answer to this question.