Rottenham posted at 11:08 AM Sat, 12 October 2024 - #4490225

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.

What I expect is happening already is that they'll be offering a deal that's better on the surface to select artists in their storefront to offer content exclusively for the Premium subscription option.

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.

Yeah, I looked and the Convert DAZ Content plugins appear to have been left behind several versions ago, so I already assumed that I might as well leave all my content behind if I go that route.

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.

I actually already use Blender for certain home projects (I own some 3D printers), so it won't be as major a move for me outside of content conversion. It does run on Linux, so when I make the move off Windows completely, it will be there, so I might as well consider it the engine I use going forward.

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.

Yeah, the licensing is all about being able to make art you can call your own. Some might argue that I will require the additional Extended licensing to convert that content to Blender for the purpose of making my art, but those artists making that argument I would delete their content and never buy from them again.

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.

About the only prep I can effectively do for the future, is make sure that I have full unadulterated control over my own hardware that I've paid for, wherever I can do so, and that does mean stepping away from just about all commercial software offerings involving it. There is no such thing as a "perpetual" software license, at best it only effectively lasts as long as you have a computer that can run the software.