DAZ Studio 4.10 is out. The eye-catching bits, in terms of what’s new…
* a new cloth physics engine called dForce, which does realistic dynamic cloth draping. The FAQ talks of… “dForce compliant clothing items, that customers will be able to purchase from the DAZ store, will be both rigged and dynamic at the same time”. Presumably those browsing the store in the near future will start to see clothing packs with “dForce enabled” swooshes on them.
* An NVIDIA iRay upgrade, which… “Increases hardware requirement to Fermi class or newer generation GPUs; recent driver recommended”.
* Better BVH animation import.
* Better FBX export.
* A YouTube 360 fix: “The stereo 360 horizontal shift has been fixed. Iray stereo 360 output now directly conforms to the YouTube 360 stereo format.”
I haven’t heard that any especially vital plugins need 4.10 to run, as was the case when Scene Optimizer required a version higher than 4.9.3.29 to run.
If you’re a first-time DAZ Studio user and don’t have a fast videogamer’s graphics-card in your PC, then you need the absolutely vital Scene Optimizer, and you might as well also pick up the vital Eye Clock add-on at the same time. Scene Optimizer actually makes DAZ Studio + iRay usable on a normal PC. It’s amazing. Not only usable, but “you can do other things on your PC, while DAZ renders” useful.