dbwalton opened this issue on Oct 23, 2020 ยท 238 posts
Rottenham posted Sat, 12 October 2024 at 11:08 AM
So now I'm to the point that I have to decide between:
When DAZ finally wheedles enough income out of their rentware, the "free" option will disappear, except for maybe a "free trial." It's a matter of when.
If that happened tomorrow, I would go with iClone. It has two shortcomings. It's ability to import characters from DAZ is limited. For lack of a custom import filter, iClone can't do even a marginal job of importing DAZ's talking animals, which no other source offers. That would be a loss. You can turn them into a talking entity, but all the poses and animations would need to be recreated. Ugh. Other than that, getting an iClone file out as an Iray image (or animation), while not impossible, is needlessly complex. I do wonder what Nvidia has up their sleeve for the next level GPU release, the 4090 being ~2K these days.
Blender is a last resort, because of its UI. Nothing is self-evident, everything must be memorized. However, I do believe it runs in Linux, which might come in handy.
As for the whole issue of licensing, I'm no lawyer. I'm under the impression that it mainly involves selling the model itself. I believe I (we) have permission to display an image, still or animated. I believe I could probably print it on, say, a coffee cup without licensing issues. I could be wrong about that. It is already nearly illegal to listen to a song on somebody else's radio.
We are seeing an exponential rate of tech-related societal change today. I'm not sure it's possible to prepare for the future. In some cases, like with DAZ, we don't even know what the present is. My lease expires in the year 0000.