I just spent the past month+ putting together my two masterpieces for the Holiday contest. I live in a car, so I can only use my computer for 1.5 hour a day (non-rendering) or 20 minutes a day (rendering) before the power is drained. I then either take my Ryobi battery packs to work to charge them (5 days a week only), or I have to find an outdoor plug or coffee shop (spending $$$) somewhere and spend 2+ hours for each of the two battery packs so I can get another 1.5hours/20 minutes on my computer. Otherwise I spend my entire time watching my windshield freeze, and my ankles swelling.

Which is what I did for nearly 36 hours over the Christmas holiday. Sit in my car and do absolutely nothing. No place was open to charge my batteries, and work was closed, It was raining, cold and miserable, and I just sat in my car and stared from midnight to midnight on Christmas day, except for when I would break down and cry and wish I was just finally dead. That is how I spent my 32nd Christmas in a row without a family. The only person who visited me on Christmas was a police officer, who told me I can't be there and had to go somewhere else. Yet he also could not tell me where I could legally go. He never said Merry Christmas.

I had spent $150 on two power inverters to run my laptop computer from my car battery. One disintegrated 3 hours after I began using it, and the other one destroyed my car battery, forcing me to buy another car battery. So that was $300 to get back to where I started.

This is how I put together those contest entries. When it came time to render I rendered for 20 minutes, then canceled the render and closed my laptop so it went to sleep. Hours later after charging my battery paks I could render again and I hit Resume for another 20 minutes. Some renders take a dozen or more hours to complete this way.

And some renders get lost midway when Windows decides to shut down my computer and update.

So the effort involved in creating these contest entries was comparable to the Manhattan Project. And then, to upload them, I had to stand outside in a Minnesota winter holding my laptop in one hand while trying to work that little trackpad with my other frozen hand.

And for all of that effort, both entries were rejected, because they contained "copyrighted material". Only my third entry (a closeup from one of the two,which is awkwardly out of context) was accepted.

The copyrighted material were cigarette packs, like the ones sold at Renderosity ("Marlbaro", "Cowboy Killer", etc). I had put a big bow in front of the names on the cig cartons, so their full names were not visible. Yet they were rejected. For the second one I then removed all cig packs altogether (leaving stupid looking hand poses on every character), and that left me 4 minutes to render my very fuzzy final entry after weeks of work. That was rejected because it displayed a soda can without modification, exactly as I had purchased that content from... Renderosity.

So for all the work I put into those under third world conditions that none of you will ever comprehend, nobody will ever even see them.

Which begs a fair question, I think. If you are not allowed to use Daz Studio to represent the reality of the world we actually live in, then what is anyone using this software for? Most photographs I take have branded products or recognizable shapes and figures somewhere in them. Yet the photo shop prints them for me. They have recognizable real world people in them. Everything I see on TV and the news shows the reality of the world we live in - cereal boxes, blue jeans with logos, automobiles - nearly everything in our environment is a "copyrighted" or trademarked thing. Yet the only place I'm not allowed to represent that reality of the world I live in is with my Daz creations.

Has anyone out there ever actually used Daz and the hundreds or thousands of dollars of content you've purchased to produce... well, ANYTHING that you can actually use for any purpose in the real world? The money I spent on all this was supposed to be one of my tickets out of homelessness. It was to compensate for my utter lack of drawing ability, where I need that to dress up creative projects I'm good at and can sell.. But if I can't even display my renders at the very place where I bought the content, then what in the world do I actually DO with any of this stuff?

I would post this to the Prime forum. But Renderosity doubled the price of Prime, and I can no longer afford it. I had to buy a new car battery instead.