MBirdCZ

So... Lately I noticed an increase in the frequency of DAZ newsletters titled "DAZ welcomes - ..." and in place of the "..." a lot of familiar names and my favorite content creators from Renderosity,

Renderosity has basically been (and still is) my go to site when I'm purchasing new content for my DAZ runtime. The site had/has a lot of great creators and the prices are quite reasonable (especially during various sales).

On DAZ store however, in most cases, the base prices are so high, that even when on sale, the discounted price is way above the amount that I'm willing to pay for content. Not even mentioning the, now-days pretty much "money-grab" norm on DAZ of selling the 3D model with just a very basic (and often not very good/usable) texture set for a full price and then a set of materials for that model as a separate product (that on Renderosity would be part of the base package and would come included with the 3D model).

This makes DAZ store even more NO GO for me and if this trend turns out to be the worst case scenario, with all my favorite content creators leaving Renderosity and moving to DAZ store, instead of just adding DAZ as another potential point of sale for their products, then I think that, in the future, I will no longer be purchasing any new content anymore...

So... NVIDIA released their new GPU flagship - the RTX 4090. A GPU that since its announcement has been surrounded by controversies. However, despite its extreme price tag, extreme power consumption that can literally melt the power cables and connectors, extreme size - that alone makes it not physically fit into many PC cases, one thing is absolutely certain: The RTX 4090 indeed is one extremely powerful GPU!

Though... How powerful actually is "extremely powerful"?

As with everything around us, there probably isn't a definitive answer as everything is relative.

So... In order to put that into a perspective that I can comprehend even without actually owning the 4090 I turned to the Octane Bench benchmark results as that is definitely something that I can relate to as I'm using Octane render a lot for my DAZ Studio work everyone can see in my galleries.

And boy, oh boy! I was in for a surprise... I mean... Based on all the YouTube reviews I watched I knew that the RTX 4090 is a beast of a GPU. However, those reviewers usually focus on gaming performance and that is not really what I mostly use the NVIDIA GPUs, I own, for.

So, when comparing the raw rendering power of the RTX 4090 I realized that a single RTX 4090 GPU is almost 25% faster than all of my GPUs (that I'm using these days for rendering using Octane render and its network rendering feature, where all the GPUs in computers on my home network provide their services to the main workstation that the DAZ Studio runs on which causes a significant increase in performance and in turn, decrease in rendering times) combined!

Yes, one RTX 4090 is 25% faster than 2x GTX TITAN X + 2x GTX 1080 Ti + 1x RTX 2080 Ti (I used to have two of those as well, but one died and due to the GPU shortages in past years the reseller got me a refund instead of a replacement).

As I said, the RTX 4090 is indeed crazy fast. But wait! That is not all! As on top of raw rendering performance with its 24GB of VRAM it also offers more than twice as much of VRAM that would be usable by Octane Render compared to the (roughly) 10GB of VRAM that I can use on my current setup (although the TITANs do have 12GB of VRAM, Octane caps the usable VRAM based on the GPU with the smallest amount of it (both 1080 and 2080 only have 11GB of VRAM and some of it is reserved for the operating system hence the 10GB final limit).

Moving on to power consumption. Well... The RTX 4090 is definitely a very power hungry GPU. So much so, that it can make the new 12VHPWR power connectors the NVIDIA switched to from the older, bigger plugs we are all used to on the previous generation cards, literally melt. However, if we put that issue aside for the moment as the investigation of those issues some users have reported is now still pending, if I put the power consumption of the 4090 into perspective of my current setup, I think that the 4090, once again comes as a clear winner as even with its hunger power it would probably be consuming 50% less power than what I'm burning through when rendering on my setup these days.

So... With all the above said, is it time to switch to the RTX 4090?

Well... Dear Santa, if you are out there and listening, I have milk and cookies ready!

However, since Santa has a policy to ship only to those who have been nice, I'm kind of not sure that I'd qualify.

And with this option off the table, I'm afraid that the answer to the question of switching to RTX 4090 from my current setup, as tempting as it could seem to be, is, for quite a few other reasons, probably still a NO.

So, in the aftermath of realizing how brutal impact can 8K textures have on my rendering setup and after realizing, that the old, perpetual license, Octane Render plugin that is using the old Octane version 4.04 is no longer supported in the latest version of DAZ Studio 4.20, I started to look for possible solutions.

And long story short, they all look pretty ugly...

And usually come with a pretty hefty price-tag attached to them...

The reason why I'm still using the very old and basically no longer supported version of Octane Render and its plugin for DAZ is, that for many years the development of the Octane plugin for DAZ has been in a state of clinical death. There were no developers actively working on it and despite of the fact that the Octane engine itself was receiving constant updates and new features (in few cases DAZ Studio itself as well), none of those features found their way to the Octane Plugin for DAZ and in most cases all the "updates" of this plugin were basically just mere recompiles so it could be used with the actual main Octane libraries at that time or, in case a bug was discovered, instead of fixing the bug, the feature or part of the plugin containing that bug was removed, resulting in actual loss of already limited functionality. That is why I decided to stick with the old "buy to own" version 4 and not switch to the new subscription based licensing model that was introduced following version 4. And after all those years, and seeing how neglected the DAZ plugin was, I pretty much lost all hope that anything will ever change.

The recent events however, made me to take a looksie at where things stand these days and I was kind of surprised that there has been some development. Some features of DAZ Studio have finally been implemented into the plugin, some new features of the Octane Render Engine were made accessible for use from within the plugin... So... Perhaps the upgrade would make sense now...

Upgrade, that would come at a cost. Since I'm using a hybrid setup with a main workstation and 2 additional networked rendering nodes with 2 GPUs in each of those machines I would have to start paying annual subscription fees for the main workstation and those two network nodes.

To make things even more expensive, Adobe has purchased Substance Painter (which I'm using for texturing) and instead of adding it to the Creative Cloud license they decided to milk more money from their customers and created a brand new subscription one has to pay if you want to use Substance Painter.

With all that combined it would mean that my expenses just for licenses would annually increase to roughly 1800 EUR. And that does not include the prices of electricity, that in my area skyrocketed in the last year and increased by several hundreds of percent.

And this price of course does not include the expenses for new content that I purchase from various sites like Renderosity or DAZ3D.

So, once again, I have reached a point where I started thinking whether this hobby of mine is still worth keeping...

And that is just licensing stuff. The newly discovered red-flag related to the 8K textures that I recently discovered that are a brutal killer in combination with Octane render that is using GPU RAM for all the rendering.

The newly announced Genesis 9 figure from DAZ is supposed to be using 8K textures by default for all materials. Sure it adds another level of detail and realism to the renders, but in combination with Octane (at least the version that I'm using at the moment) it would also mean, that just 1 Genesis 9 figure, with its new, highly detailed, 8K maps applied to all its material zones, would consume pretty much all RAM on my GPUs, leaving nothing left for anything else...

Solution to that would be either start aggressively optimizing and downsizing the textures or replace all my GPUs by at least RTX 3090 series of cards that have 24GB or VRAM instead of 11GB that is my current limit. In that case I could fit 2 Genesis 9 figures into the scene... Yay! For a price of... a LOT!

So... Yeah... Winter is coming... I'm depressed...

So... 2 days ago I checked my notifications here on dA and I noticed a message from the "DeviantArt Protect" system that it discovered someone else uploading a work that the algorithm detected to be very similar to one of my older, original works that I posted here, in my gallery, couple of years ago.

I checked the notification to find more detail and sure enough the other "artist" really used my image for a "face swap", added two big ugly grey bands on top and bottom of the original image, reduced the resolution, ramped up the JPEG compression and uploaded it to DeviantArt under a very creative title of "Untitled".

To be honest, in general, I don't really mind if people use my works as inspiration for works of their own. I don't remember a single case in the past that if another author contacted me and asked me for a permission to use one of my works to either modify it or use it in a work of their own that I would not allow it. I usually don't mind if people do that even without permission as long as they don't molest the original image or as long as they at least mention or link back to the original work they used as inspiration or part of their own work.

However, none of the above applied to this case. That is why I commented under the image the other "artist" posted with a message simply reminding them that if they intend to use someone else's work without permission, perhaps they should at lest include a link to the original work itself and I posted the link to the original in this comment myself.

The next day I received a reply to my comment from the "artist" that I didn't fully understand as, apparently, English is not their primary (neither it is mine). What I did understand though is, that the other "artist" thinks that if they modify and molest the original artwork enough then everything is OK and they don't need to ask for a permission of any kind to use the original image and that using it is then considered a "fair use". The next thing I found out is that the "artist" blocked me from being able to view their "art" and dA profile and disabled further comments under the image. Well... So much for a discussion, right?

Now, I'm not a lawyer however, as the following article states:

https://www.copylaw.com/new_articles/copy_myths.html

This may not actually be the case of "fair use".

I'm probably not going to take steps to initiate a request for the take-down of the other image. I just find it funny and sad at the same time that there are "artists" out there who are ignorant to others and lack the basic courtesy to do the bare minimum and at least mention or link the original author or work they used to create one of their own.

This also isn't the first case of another DeviantArt artist banning/blocking me from viewing their works. I remember a case when another artist blocked me after I commented under one of their works and tried to offer a well meant advice of what, and most importantly how, they should focus on in order to improve their works in the future as I thought that since I found all that stuff myself through painstakingly long process of trial and error during the past couple of decades I was creating and sharing similar works of my own, I could just share some of the tricks in order to help the artist improve their works faster and without having to make literally hundreds of works in the process. Well... Here's where good intentions get you...

I just wonder:

- Am I the bad guy here?

- Did it happen to any of you, fellow artists, in past as well?

- Am I asking or expecting too much from the others?

Also please note that any typos in this message are result of me failing to spot them and they are all a result of one of my attention-seeking cats taking repeated strolls over the keyboard that were combined with repeated attempts to devour my Apple Watch directly from my wrist (including pars of the wrist as well) while I was writing this message.

A new year has just started and we received a new update to the already abysmal Eclipse user interface of the dA!

This time, the designers and developers aimed their focus at a perfectly fine working part of the site - the notification center and, as it pretty much became standard, after dA was taken over by Wix, they turned it into a totally unusable, chaotic, hard to navigate abomination that aside from looking all "pretty" and "next generation" kind of fails to serve its primary purpose - to provide the artist/user with a clear panel view containing notifications about what is happening.

Well done, Wix! You managed to butcher this site even more! I just wonder which part of it, that is still at least slightly usable is going to become the target of this "innovation" process next, rendering the entire site even more useless and a failure as a whole?