I cannot sadly share my opinions and concerns on their forum due to needing Moderation Team preapproval, certainly nothing on third party plugins (such as Virtual World Dynamics from here. ?‍♀️)

I am wondering not only how much they will break, plugins a certainty, scripts it will vary, new builds even break some.

The locking of new innovations and features to DAZ Premier Artists will no doubt continue and impact vendors here,

I can see them selling advanced stuff (like using physics when implemented for example maybe limiting users to more basic capsule colliders while their meshes have full vertex collisions) they did it with the strandbased hair after all.

Anything to lock out competition, importing rigged nonDAZ FBX for that reason will likely never be improved,

It's their software after all and we do have Poser. ( or in my case Carrara sadly owned by them)

I wish Renderosity could buy Carrara. ❣️?????

they probably will prefer to scrap it and Bryce than to sell it though,

You could be right about all of it, but it's really too early to speculate. A pre-beta should not be released to the public. I for one would not touch such a thing with a 10' pole. Waste of time! But then, I don't really want the thing until it's fully tested and stable. I would not participate in the testing unless I were being paid to do so.

Off topic... Wendy, I could swear I have seen your profile in the DAZ Forums for years. Why are you needing preapproval for posts? Or is my memory wrong?

JasonGalterio posted at 10:21PM Thu, 08 July 2021 - #4422776

Off topic... Wendy, I could swear I have seen your profile in the DAZ Forums for years. Why are you needing preapproval for posts? Or is my memory wrong?

I upset the mods so am on a semiban

Got it. There seems to be a lot of that going around... I was threatened with the same thing. So I just stopped participating over there.

JasonGalterio posted at 6:28AM Fri, 09 July 2021 - #4422784

Got it. There seems to be a lot of that going around... I was threatened with the same thing. So I just stopped participating over there.

If I may ask, how did you do to get that response? Seemed to me your posts were pretty good.

I will PM. I don't want to derail the thread or get anyone in trouble.

Sounds good Thanks. :)

It isn't that hard to upset a moderator over there. Anything that isn't Daz Studio is the best EVAH puts you at risk. Like posting a Cost Benefit analysis of the Genesis figures. (The "iconic" figures aren't actually worth it, if you look at it from a TCO perspective.)

Or pointing out that Bryce, Hexagon, and Carrera are dead products (Haven't gotten bug fixes or documentation upgrades since the release of DS 4.0)

Or if you point out past fubars, like designing a sale around the Swine Flu epidemic, when people were dying by the 100's in Asia.

I got a permaban for pointing out that it was easier for Daz to refund money than fix a problem. This was when I couldn't install content due to OS9 installers no longer working in OSX. And the fact that I never got a working copy of Carrera 6 - Support was promising a fix for the OSX version; after 18 months, they rolled the fix into Carrera 7 and told the OSX users to suck it up.

wendyvainity posted at 7:14PM Wed, 21 July 2021 - #4422783

JasonGalterio posted at 10:21PM Thu, 08 July 2021 - #4422776

Off topic... Wendy, I could swear I have seen your profile in the DAZ Forums for years. Why are you needing preapproval for posts? Or is my memory wrong?

I upset the mods so am on a semiban

Then you're not trying hard enough. Go for a full ban like the rest of us. ;)

ssgbryan posted at 2:42PM Mon, 16 August 2021 - #4423201

It isn't that hard to upset a moderator over there. Anything that isn't Daz Studio is the best EVAH puts you at risk. Like posting a Cost Benefit analysis of the Genesis figures. (The "iconic" figures aren't actually worth it, if you look at it from a TCO perspective.)

Or pointing out that Bryce, Hexagon, and Carrera are dead products (Haven't gotten bug fixes or documentation upgrades since the release of DS 4.0)

Or if you point out past fubars, like designing a sale around the Swine Flu epidemic, when people were dying by the 100's in Asia.

I got a permaban for pointing out that it was easier for Daz to refund money than fix a problem. This was when I couldn't install content due to OS9 installers no longer working in OSX. And the fact that I never got a working copy of Carrera 6 - Support was promising a fix for the OSX version; after 18 months, they rolled the fix into Carrera 7 and told the OSX users to suck it up.

I haven't done any of this in a long time but killing or allowing good programs to die because they just don't want to bother makes me angry! I was actually thrilled when they bought Bryce (My first ever 3d Program) . But they only updated it a couple of measly times and threw it to the side. The newest Bryce 7 (which is not new at all) is cheap but only 32bit? If they actually updated it to at least 64bit and added some new content I'd gladly pay 4x or more for it! 7 is less than $20.

we are just in time for the Taliban sale then ?

"A post that you have made on the Daz 3D Forums to the **** thread has been removed as it was discussing political topics which is against the Daz 3D Forum TOS."

well back on topic, DAZ studio 5 could include a cryptomining option to help their CEO add to his blockchain for his NFT's when the graphics card is otherwise idle in exchange for special deals and bonus content ?

I am joking of course being against such wastes of electricity but ...

I agree with you, but I've been told by a few people that one way to pay for new hardware is to use the gc for mining when not rendering. Just... No! Not doing that.

I am just surprised the big MMO's haven't considered it with all those gamers that have to sleep sometimes ?

They would do it for skins, loot boxes and in-game currency and probably untaxed

Maybe there is liability or technical issues? Mining botnets are usually distributed as malware.

I have mixed feelings about DS5. The sudden NFT direction not the least of my concerns.

Quality control has been terrible. Support is mostly non-responsive. Their marketing seems to be off the rails.

I can't imagine what we are going to get.

I certainly hope there is an option to stay at DS4 and hold things in place until the dust settles.

the scary thing is, the mining thing is not implausible

True. And it certainly would be a good way to burn out the last bits of professionalism left there.

There is one relatively recent mod over there, F-something, who is unable to have people disagree with him, in however civil a manner. I disagree mildly and suddenly my post has gone... Makes me wish there was a 'Block' button for his posts, so there is no need to put up with the tripe he asserts as immutable fact. I have been a mod on a very busy fountain pen forum, and had we had a user like him, they'd be on moderation for being a troll.

Sorry, back to the point about DS5. I do look forward to it in a way. It gives the opportunity to improve an already good renderer. DS4 seems stuck in a rut at the moment and DS5 might get it to innovate. I have seen people assert that Poser is fantastic, but I am sorry, looking at the output from most Poser users here, they're 5+ years behind an average DS4 user in the quality of the output. There are one or two images that are truly fantastic coming from Poser users, but the general standard really doesn't look much like a huge improvement on what I was getting out of DS0.7 in 2006. Poser is not pushing DS, so it's got comfortable in a position of assumed dominance. DS users need Poser to improve dramatically.

As for the rest of the arguments about DAZ trying to lock in to PA's etc.. I see that, but in all honesty there is so much good quality free stuff and other non DAZ stuff around that I think it's impossible for DAZ to strangle that part of the market. At the moment there are two things that are DS PA exclusives that I know of, HD morphs and Strand Hair. I shall address these separately:

I really don't feel that loosing HD on any of my HD characters would be a problem - I simply don't render in high enough resolution, and I certainly can't look at anything in high enough resolution for it to be an issue yet. I am sure HD can be reverse engineered too, if people really put their minds to it. Felldude claimed to have done so at one point. So, HD morphs as an exclusive. What problem?

Strand Hair distribution as a DS PA exclusive. An exclusive on something that I have never got to look nice - real hair rarely looks like the ropes that strand hair seem to create. Pfft. Not something that I can feel the slightest bit bothered by. It would be nice to have fur that doesn't kill the machine, LAMH is cumbersome for iRay, and strand hair seems to bring high spec machines to their knees. Not something I'm going to fuss over, though.

Anyway, as to the future.. why worry? Que cera, cera. And there is little we can do to influence it.

Regards,

Richard

yeah the strandbased hair was a letdown, I use Carrara dynamic hair all the time in animations, DAZ studio hair is useless to me for most purposes if not dynamic and I don't use stuff out of the box, that said I made a breakthrough today in Unreal and Blender and am kind of stoked! ?not a DAZ hair in sight but my PC a bit laggy styling hair in Blender

I could go on for hours with my issues, but I won't. I am just going to hit the high points, since I am not allowed to talk about them over in the DS forums.

...I had the typical sales malfunction and did everything I would normally do. Proceeded with the purchase, taking screen shots all along the way. Finished the purchase and opened a ticket to get the difference credited back. The response I received from Sales Support was "No, sorry. The correct price will always be the price shown in your cart. Errors are always an issue with the catalog being wrong. The cart is always right. This is the new policy."

...At which point I am stuck. I'm not allowed to talk about it in the Forum and there is no way to escalate the situation. So I am stuck arguing with one person.

...I go out on a limb and post a cryptic forum message saying "be careful about relying on old assumptions." I am questioned about it by one of the mods (probably as a preamble to being reprimanded). Privately I send a message explaining what happened. I get a response back that "He will investigate and get back to me." I should add that he requested that I give him more detail so that he could straighten it out. I didn't solicit him for help.

...While I am typing the above to the mod, I get a message back from Sales support. He's going to do me a favor a process the difference this time. But he makes it a point to say that he doesn't have to. And that I shouldn't expect the same result in the future.

...I never receive a follow up response from the mod I took the time to explain the situation to. Not even when I inquire. So I have no idea whether that "new sales policy" was a thing or if the Sales rep was just making things up. This is particularly galling as he was the one that volunteered to look into it. And he is the one that requested I provide him with the ticket, the text, and the screen shots. Big waste of time.

End result. I don't buy much there anymore.

...I have 50+ products that have errors in their archive files. The corrupted archives are present regardless of whether I download the files through DIM or manually through the website. I've had a ticket open for months now where support is "going to investigate" but hasn't done a thing.

...I have 12+ products that I can't download through DIM at all. They just won't appear. I can manually download them, so they are active in my account. Again, I have a ticket open for months where support is "investigating but can't figure out."

...I have 6+ G8F products that can't be used at the same time because they have the same filenames on their geometry files, resulting in cross talk dials and / or auto dialed in features when these products are installed. I opened a ticket listing which products had issues. Support was looking into these. Never resolved them. Then closed the ticket with no notification / resolution.

Those are just the issues I have that are affecting other customers too. I haven't even talked about not receiving the emails for the Season Pass events I paid for, overzealous mods that banned me then had to apologize for being wrong (which I found a way to escalate the issue), etc. etc.

What has me worried about the DS5 update is...

So far all I have heard (and granted I haven't been paying that much attention to all of the noise) is the update is to upgrade things behind the scenes. That DS4 was using old, out of date frameworks, etc. And to get the software working on Macs.

I haven't heard anything about any new features. I have heard how all of the plug ins will need to be updated, etc. etc.

Anytime software gets to the point where the mantra is "we update or we kill the software, we have no choice" I get worried. I've been on the inside as well as the outside of that situation. In my experience it happens because no investment has been made in keeping the resource current and / or the expertise to do this work was lost.

This seems to be reinforced by the number of "innovations" that have been incorporated into DS vs. the number of add ons that come from vendors. The last two native innovations I can think of were Iray and cloth simulation. Those were years ago and since then, not much has changed.

It doesn't help that a lot of the plugs I use are abandoned. Either because the PA has moved on or the PA has really moved in, like off of this mortal coil.

DAZ doesn't seem to care about old purchases, just what need purchases they can get. So I don't have much hope that any mind will be given to things that are broken.

Jason, those problems sound like sufficient reason to never buy from DAZ again. It's obvious the embedded systems have failed you. There are two recourses, walk away, or the law. Being a paying customer ever again is irrational based on what you say has happened to you.

Maybe my tiny budget has saved me from getting enough to run into problems. Looking at my content list, 90%+ are freebies. The paid-for items really have to work well for me to consider them. There are people on the DAZ forum talking about buying the latest bundle today, at prices more than I have spent this year. Nope, not for me.

Regards,

Richard.

Agreed.

I think I've spent less than $20 there in the past six months. Compared to $10k+ last year.

I've been learning more in Blender and working towards using the assets there. So I probably won't need to purchase much at DAZ ever again. I just get weak when I see certain props that I know I can use.

But don't forget the rules... "Don't imply / infer / insinuate / hint at wrong doing!" and "Don't repeat anything that support has told you!"

the quality assurance department seems understaffed (or incompetent) I reckon Alberto has had every serial number for his plugins omitted by them on release to date for example, other vendors have some of their files omitted, a few try and fix that on the forum but if customers don't visit it that's likely a product returned. Interesting the excuses made for not allowing customer feedback on stuff. I am sick of sets that relocate everything to 0,0,0 along the timeline too! One vendor does it with nearly every set.

OK that's my DAZ product rant over ?

I read the feedback here BTW and vendors obviously would too and get stuff sorted.

Studio 5 itself might be awesome or not, will wait and see but I bet my hardware will be inadequate, I am using DS4.11 as it is with my GTX 980ti as nothing fits on DS4.15 animated as it uses an extra GB of VRAM

I don't consider them rants... I consider these cautionary tales so maybe one person doesn't fall into the same trap that I did. I am also hoping that someone at DAZ, official or not, actually reads this. And doesn't just brush it off with a pffft.

One of my biggest issues is how I am treated over there. I'm not expecting them to bow down and kiss my feet. I'm not expecting special treatment. I would like my intelligence to not be insulted on a regular basis.

I've spent an ungodly amount of money over there. I've used DS since one the very first betas came out. I don't claim to know everything and I don't claim to produce anything of any value...

However, please don't say things to me like "did you try turning it on and off?" and "are you sure you bought that?"

One thing I thought I would share. It's something that one of my supervisors told me when I first worked support decades ago...

"Things are going to be broken. That's okay. What's important is what we do when we find out that they're broken."

at least they are fixing Mac compatibility but fixing assets seems less of a priority

I wonder what would happen to DS 4.x support when a half-baked 5.0 hits the store? Nobody like to be unpaid beta testers and I am not sure how many permanent staff they have in their QA payroll, so they might be forcing that down our orifice for identifying issues. For all I saw, customer support there is already refusing to provide versions of plugins (GoZ, measure metrics) even for DS 4.14 which is just the previous version and not even too old. Some wise man advised never to attribute malice to that which can be explained by incompetence. But in their case, I believe they hide their malice under their incompetence.

Do bear in mind that they were able to get a DS 4.15.0.x build working on Big Sur, so there is now no need for (and no sign of) a pre-beta DS 5 release.

As it is, DAZ is first and foremost a clearing house for props, models, surfaces, scripts, etc. The software itself has languished over the years, but is still usable. I just read about DAZ 5 today, and I can see there's a certain amount of trepidation among users. This probably wouldn't be so if a roadmap had been provided. If there is one, I couldn't find it. All this said, I like DAZ.

Today, the term "UI" mostly means appearance, so I would be surprised to see any substantial functional changes. Limited QA will make the change seem harder than it needs to be, as will the absence of professional documentation. I'll handle it. It will still beat the devil out of rentware. Or of learning Blender.

Why there would be any point to making this software available on a MAC is beyond me. DAZ will have two programs to maintain when they can hardly maintain one. But, I doubt the users will feel this pain.

Bring it!

Torquinox posted at 1:01PM Mon, 30 August 2021 - #4425515

I agree with you, but I've been told by a few people that one way to pay for new hardware is to use the gc for mining when not rendering. Just... No! Not doing that.

No way! If I'm gonna kill my GC I'm gonna do it rendering. LOL I hate all that NFT bull****

There's a sale on iClone Character Creator. I bought it, just to goof around. Might have to be a fallback since I don't really wanna go back to Poser (can't do the figures) and Daz has really been pissing me off lately with the NFT's and especially with going back to almost completely female-centric again after they had made so much progress toward more male stuff. Not to mention that I loathe the new art director's taste in stuff. Some of the stuff released there recently I wouldn't take for a freebie, honestly. Some of it is barf-making. Quality AND quality control is in the toilet. It's not unlike venture capitalists to squeeze all the money they can from a company before running it into the ground. It's happened many, many times. I suspect it will with Daz if things stay as they are. Shame :(

The NFTs are loathesome, but I've done all I can on that. Anything I post about that now just gets deleted, so whatever. I'm not interested in anything 8.1, but there are still a lot of wonderful back-catalog items that I mean to gather up and use. So, Daz has done some things I don't love, but they've done some things I can appreciate - Clearance sales, for example. And I don't have the brainspace for another program, another ecosystem. I have Daz Studio, Blender, an old copy of Poser 7, and paint programs.That's all quite enough for me! I've got a handle on 3DL conversion of Iray stuff, so I can even do my renders in a reasonable amount of time without needing a fortune in new hardware. I apologize sincerely to my Carrara friends; but for me and my work, Blender won. And I'd rather focus on making new art than engaging in any sort of online bloodsport.

LaurieA posted at 5:13PM Mon, 30 August 2021 - #4426303

Torquinox posted at 1:01PM Mon, 30 August 2021 - #4425515

I agree with you, but I've been told by a few people that one way to pay for new hardware is to use the gc for mining when not rendering. Just... No! Not doing that.

No way! If I'm gonna kill my GC I'm gonna do it rendering. LOL I hate all that NFT bull****

I know you do, and I;m with you all the way on that :)

richardandtracy posted at 8:37PM Fri, 03 September 2021 - #4425651

Jason, those problems sound like sufficient reason to never buy from DAZ again. It's obvious the embedded systems have failed you. There are two recourses, walk away, or the law. Being a paying customer ever again is irrational based on what you say has happened to you.

Maybe my tiny budget has saved me from getting enough to run into problems. Looking at my content list, 90%+ are freebies. The paid-for items really have to work well for me to consider them. There are people on the DAZ forum talking about buying the latest bundle today, at prices more than I have spent this year. Nope, not for me.

Regards,

Richard.

Its their forums and they're going to do whatever they want to do, regardless of whether its right or wrong. Just don't try to challenge it, because they will beat you every time with moderation. The key is to do what you want, just not on their playground. If they're becoming so draconian in their forums, eventually it will affect their business and the PAs that sell products there. Some of their "moderating" practices I find ridiculous, but there's not much I can do about it and they're obviously not going to change it no matter how many of us kick & scream about it. I just refrain from posting there much unless to answer a question or give some pointers.

BleuPrintz posted at 9:38PM Fri, 03 September 2021 - #4426604

richardandtracy posted at 8:37PM Fri, 03 September 2021 - #4425651

Jason, those problems sound like sufficient reason to never buy from DAZ again. It's obvious the embedded systems have failed you. There are two recourses, walk away, or the law. Being a paying customer ever again is irrational based on what you say has happened to you.

Maybe my tiny budget has saved me from getting enough to run into problems. Looking at my content list, 90%+ are freebies. The paid-for items really have to work well for me to consider them. There are people on the DAZ forum talking about buying the latest bundle today, at prices more than I have spent this year. Nope, not for me.

Regards,

Richard.

Its their forums and they're going to do whatever they want to do, regardless of whether its right or wrong. Just don't try to challenge it, because they will beat you every time with moderation. The key is to do what you want, just not on their playground. If they're becoming so draconian in their forums, eventually it will affect their business and the PAs that sell products there. Some of their "moderating" practices I find ridiculous, but there's not much I can do about it and they're obviously not going to change it no matter how many of us kick & scream about it. I just refrain from posting there much unless to answer a question or give some pointers.

Agreed.I have mostly stopped posting there as well... It seems like there is an uneven measuring bar. Some people are judged more harshly AND some judges are more harsh.

That doesn't really surprise me since everything done over there is vague and open to interpretation.