Rottenham posted at 5:16 AM Tue, 22 October 2024 - #4490646

ronaldknights posted at 9:46 PM Mon, 21 October 2024 - #4490635

My experience with DAZ software is extremely disappointing. It started when I decided to pay the price to buy DAZ Studio 3 advanced. Of course, eventually DAZ Studio became free. Add to the list Carrara, Bryce, Hexagon, and other titles I've forgotten.

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You're right. I hadn't thought about that. DAZ has been alternately acquiring good things then discarding them for longer than I was remembering. Each time they finish, DAZ is smaller.

Very very very few software companies can get bigger by buying another company's software to make their own; Adobe is literally one of the few that's managed to make that work by being able to afford to pay what it takes to retain talent through an acquisition, and even they've faltered (Adobe Flash anyone?).

I used to use Hexagon as my modeler, it was decent, but had some serious and practically unavoidable bugs in the types of modeling I do, and no indication they'd ever do even maintenance development. I switched to Blender a few years ago, and I don't ever intend to pay for modeling software again.

I get some indication that, despite raising new content prices and rolling out new figures to encourage purchases (don't give me that "woke" garbage, G9 was meant to try to get wallets open by encouraging adoption by artists and hobbyists needing new content would have to move up anyway, and objectively certain cosmetic things are much worse on G9), that revenues are still faltering, hence testing the idea of rentware. Many software companies have seen much greater profits after their moves to rentware (Adobe makes more money these days as a result of Creative Cloud), and they hope to cash in on the idea. They might have enough lockin to manage to stabilize revenues; I'm not sure in the long term whether the rest of the lockin they would need is there.

darken666 posted at 4:03 PM Fri, 18 October 2024 - #4490477

At this point I wouldn't put it past them to have a timebomb coded in 4.23 if not earlier versions so if you don't update each time there's a new release your program starts falling apart and when it eventually becomes subscription only, anyone who doesn't keep really old versions of Studio on hand will end up either subscribing or not being able to use their content anymore.

I have DAZStudio blocked at the firewall, I have ever since I heard about the AI garbage. I canNOT trust AI to be used for good when it comes to artists.

They tried moving to subscription content when they released the Connect DRM, but the backlash was too much then. Now they're trying again.

Yeah, I kinda missed that (I either wasn't paying attention, or I was using Poser).

I've run into similar biases in my career, where it's clear that A) a vendor doesn't really want to support a piece of software and B) it's clear that their latest hardware product and it's supporting server on-site are designed around not necessarily using that piece of software, although it will still allow you to with an added cost of making a lot of inputs, and that it's always felt like they only supported specific business "types" in that industry that had a very specific kind of workflow. Granted, those same customers that they probably surveyed tended to buy several of the machines at once instead of just one, but it still amounts to selecting for a given result, which I can see happening with DAZ on the idea that Premier was going to be a good thing for those specific customers.

darken666 posted at 10:09 PM Thu, 17 October 2024 - #4490445

But who knows what else they've put the paywall on. They're being pretty evasive about it.

Which is usually a bad sign, and not terribly surprising in all honesty.

darken666 posted at 8:34 PM Thu, 17 October 2024 - #4490440

It keeps getting worse. The subscription is integrated in the base Studio program such that at least one QOL feature is subscription only even if you don't load any of the Premier plugins or content. And with all plugins needing to be redone for version 5, odds are they'll claim the software is so different that anything more than starting it will be subscription only. Looks like the free stuff they're tossing around is just to distract people and placate them so they won't tell DAZ where they can stick the subscription for Daz 5.0. Best make backups of your 4.22 installer. I wouldn't trust any version past that to come without something that kills older versions remotely when the next version is released so you're forced to update.

"We see there is a new update to Daz Studio, update now to continue using the program."

I'm morbidly curious... what's the Quality of Life feature now locked behind the subscription wall?

You know what? We'll see in five years or ten, if I even revisit the hobby, whether or not DAZ has moved to doing that sort of stuff that you say they aren't doing right now.

Do note that I have a friend who used DAZ Studio that did attempt to make their comments on the rapid downhill slide towards mining the userbase for additional profit streams (advertising), and they got their comments deleted for effectively being critical of DAZ staff and management... and couldn't even comment on that they had comments deleted for it without getting those deleted for "questioning moderator decisions". Or, as they put it to me, they were expected to be so milquetoast in their comments because of the way the TOS was being applied on the forum, that there was no way to provide good constructive criticism about the direction of the company they had been giving money to.

No support for products bought with real money that don't work right... and no complaining about it.

RHaseltine posted at 5:28 PM Sun, 13 October 2024 - #4490293

SydneyInPeril posted at 9:33 AM Sun, 13 October 2024 - #4490272

RHaseltine posted at 7:41 PM Sat, 12 October 2024 - #4490240

SydneyInPeril posted at 8:54 PM Fri, 11 October 2024 - #4490212

Ugh, I deal with the Rent-Ware thing as part of my day job, and it frustrates me there at what they do to attempt to make us be online to them all the time. I shudder to think of what a much smaller company will do to attempt to force someone to be online all the time to let their activity with the product be viewed, especially with their dalliance with generative engines.

You are not required to be online all the time, only (at intervals) briefly to verify the membership for the plug-ins and exclusive content included. Daz Studio gets information from the daz servers, it does not send info (except for anonymised data if you opted in to the product Improvement Program, in Edit>Preferences)\

Adobe does all sorts of Passive Aggressive crap that makes it harder every year to effectively keep a machine offline while using it. I would not assume that DAZ won't do the same sorts of things.

Other options are looking so much more viable by the day.

Note that I deliberately killed DAZStudio's ability to phone home on my system when I found out about the generative image engine thing.

The Daz Gebrative AI is trained solely on Daz-owned images - nothing from the PAs or gallery, let alone scraped from the running application.

For now. There's two ways it will go; either they will find it not generating the revenue they need and stop, or they'll attempt to amend their TOS to feed submitted Gallery art into the engine unless artists Opt Out and hope people don't notice. I'm too cynical to assume the status quo will stay.

Those are not the only two possibilities - you may well be being unduly cynical.

They might not be... but we've all watched DAZ sinking slowly in terms of consistently reducing what people get for the old baseline subscription, the lack of support, that support tickets continue to remain open or are closed randomly with no indication they're being looked at, stuff like the temporary dalliance with advertising on the forum and gallery without announcing it being as such... given the pattern, I am willing to be overly cynical so I can be pleasantly surprised when they pull back from overly wrong decisions, rather than be horribly disappointed when people double down on the overly wrong decisions. Plus, such a high percentage of Generative Image Engines are deliberately fed with unethically sourced images (read: scraped from everywhere that has images posted regardless of the intended licensing of the post) that all of us have to assume that at some point the place DAZ is subcontracting it to (I find it really hard to conceive that DAZ has staff on hand that can create a Generative Engine) is going to demand more for the engine that can't be provided without changing the TOS and pulling our renders before we even post them to galleries.

You're a forum moderator and possibly paid Public Relations Staff over there, which also means that we have to automatically assume you're trying to make things look good. Be aware that things really do not look good from out here, so you have an uphill battle, compounded by your connections to them.

RHaseltine posted at 7:41 PM Sat, 12 October 2024 - #4490240

SydneyInPeril posted at 8:54 PM Fri, 11 October 2024 - #4490212

Ugh, I deal with the Rent-Ware thing as part of my day job, and it frustrates me there at what they do to attempt to make us be online to them all the time. I shudder to think of what a much smaller company will do to attempt to force someone to be online all the time to let their activity with the product be viewed, especially with their dalliance with generative engines.

You are not required to be online all the time, only (at intervals) briefly to verify the membership for the plug-ins and exclusive content included. Daz Studio gets information from the daz servers, it does not send info (except for anonymised data if you opted in to the product Improvement Program, in Edit>Preferences)\

Adobe does all sorts of Passive Aggressive crap that makes it harder every year to effectively keep a machine offline while using it. I would not assume that DAZ won't do the same sorts of things.

Other options are looking so much more viable by the day.

Note that I deliberately killed DAZStudio's ability to phone home on my system when I found out about the generative image engine thing.

The Daz Gebrative AI is trained solely on Daz-owned images - nothing from the PAs or gallery, let alone scraped from the running application.

For now. There's two ways it will go; either they will find it not generating the revenue they need and stop, or they'll attempt to amend their TOS to feed submitted Gallery art into the engine unless artists Opt Out and hope people don't notice. I'm too cynical to assume the status quo will stay.

There's a good reason that there's people out there saying that the only good thing for a person to do if they want to have a presence on the internet is to open their own website, and by extension, use various social media presence to advertise that site instead of hosting their content on social media where it gets sublicensed out of one's own control.

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.

DexterF posted at 10:44 AM Sat, 12 October 2024 - #4490223

How do you people prevent Daz from phoning home? Windows Firewall or other measures? Do you still use DIM or do you install manually?

I use Windows Firewall to block it right now. I also install stuff manually anymore; I haven't bought anything at DAZ in many months, all my recent purchases are here, but I'm looking hard as to whether or not it's worth it to keep buying licenses for any DAZ/Poser content if I'm going to be forced into moving to Blender or using my drawing tablet.

As a note, if I'd been forced to throw out the four computers I moved to Linux, I would have basically committed to removing their functions in the house entirely - most of them are used for media, gaming, or craft hobby purposes, and I can't justify spending money to maintain those features in separate machines in the house right now, not when that money should go to other things.

Rottenham posted at 5:00 AM Sat, 12 October 2024 - #4490218

SydneyInPeril posted at 8:54 PM Fri, 11 October 2024 - #4490212

Note that I deliberately killed DAZStudio's ability to phone home on my system when I found out about the generative image engine thing.

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Remote servers have been acknowledged to be a security risk from the start. That's the reason they were renamed to "the Cloud." Personally, I avoid them. As for "AI," it is a term generally used to mean "way cool."

Yeah, the generative image engine thing is especially annoying; I really won't even use one as a tool in a workflow as pretty much all of them have been developed with questionable ethics, even if they've been switching over to "We've licensed the content, albeit from art sites that switched their user terms to opt-out sublicensing agreements that allowed them to feed us that data". Plus, given the speed it can be effectively automated for posting that generated content, it rapidly becomes Ouroboros, eating it's own content, and a resulting rapid example of the dangers of inbreeding.

So now I'm to the point that I have to decide between:
1) Keep using my slowly outdating DAZStudio install. I'm actually finding this not terribly appealing in the long term, in part because I'm determined to leave the closed source OS ecosystem in the next five years.
2) Buy a new version of Poser and basically abandon all the Genesis content I've purchased licenses to. I've switched back and forth a few times, but I've been doing DAZ exclusively since the one credit card payment processor breach here at Renderosity over 10 years ago. Plus, I'd like to leave the closed source OS ecosystem in the next five years.
3) Buy iClone and completely abandon the content I've purchased licenses to. This is really an unappealing option to me on a lot of levels. Plus, I'd like to leave the closed source OS ecosystem in the next five years.
4) Move to Blender full time, convert what I can to it as I need it, and just force myself to make it work. This works the most with the way I've been moving; I really want to be off the closed source OS ecosystems in the next five years, I already have it installed, and I can if I'm motivated enough convert pretty much everything I might use over the next few years.
5) Go back to "pen and paper", albeit using the sketch pad screen I happen to already have and haven't used as much as I should.

Either way? Odds are pretty good that I'm pretty much done buying licenses for 3D content at all (unless it comes specifically for an open source software), especially if I'm making a choice to abandon content I've purchased licenses for, which is unfortunate for everybody involved. I haven't even downloaded the added free content DAZ put on my account, because I just can't even give them any indication that I'm using their product anymore.

Ugh, I deal with the Rent-Ware thing as part of my day job, and it frustrates me there at what they do to attempt to make us be online to them all the time. I shudder to think of what a much smaller company will do to attempt to force someone to be online all the time to let their activity with the product be viewed, especially with their dalliance with generative engines.

Other options are looking so much more viable by the day.

Note that I deliberately killed DAZStudio's ability to phone home on my system when I found out about the generative image engine thing.