Hello good people,

A bit of a story here. Recently I visited Renderosity after a long time of being absent. There was the pandemic, during which my trusty PC gave the ghost after 9 years of faithful service. I decided to pause my computer activities for a while and watch YouTube instead. About six months ago I got myself a new spicy laptop and continued where I stopped. Wow SSDs really make a difference! When I checked my profile I was amazed when I saw the date I joined this site: January 4th 2000! I can remember using Poser (version 3 I believe it was) and Bryce (what happened to this software?). I was thrilled by the possibilities this combo offered and spent many hours using it, mostly waiting for renders to finish. At a certain point I had enough. The results weren't what I wanted to be and stopped buying the next version of Poser. I switched to DAZ Studio, but I spent way too much money on it. After I got my new laptop I found out that my hard drive with decades of Poser goodies was broken. Trauma; always make more than one backup, kids! The DAZ stuff was on an other drive, thank goodness. So now I'm getting to know DAZ Studio again, this in combination with Blender. Excellent! Being a veteran computer graphics enthusiast (since Vue3D on the ZX Spectrum) it is great to see this site is still going strong after more than a quarter of a century. I'll be dropping by every now and then to see the great art on display.

Have a great 2026!

brite

Welcome back.  Bryce is still around, gasping for breath on the Daz3d site.  You might also be interested to know that Vue (formerly Vue d'Esprit) is now freeware, so it's a possible substitute for Bryce.  (much better than Bryce, IMO). Download e-on Software Products for Free | Bentley Systems.  

Welcome back! I'm in the same boat as  yourself and coming back after a long time. One of the things I've noticed is that many of the sites I remember have now gone. Everything is quiet in all the forums I've checked. You'll see my posts all over the place I'm seeing what sort of response there is but it's like a ghost town in some respects with just a few people hanging on.

Congrats on the new laptop. I've had similar problems with hard drives dying and have a secondary back up. Sometimes wonder if it should actually be a triple reduncancy I hate losing things.

cheers

Pen

Thank you Pen & Jeff! I've been setting up a new install of Blender. Wonderful piece of software! Also busy downloading models from all over the place; I found a text file with a list of everything I lost. Some things seem to be gone forever. Indeed data loss is a nightmare. It would be great to store things in the cloud, but uploading everything would take ages to begin with. I already found Vue recently. Thanks for the tip anyway. Huge install, not yet checked out. Again, thanks for the kind words. See you around!

Well, congrats brite!

You'll find that there are many changes with DAZ Studio, but I'm sure you'll pick up on them quickly. 

One of the Major changes, for me anyway, are with the Auto-Fit scripts. I bought them awhile back, but they might be part of the current version by now; I don't know, but well worth the purchase in any case, on sale of course. ;)

With them, Gen9 clothing easily adapts to just about any figure, and even M4 and V4 it turns out. I put Cyclops in a Zoot suit for example. So it opens up all sort of options.

I've been re-visiting my older, mostly only used once assets, and as I told someone on another site, that it's like finding a hidden drawer in the toy chest. That, and some of the freebies here are pretty amazing so explore those.

I export all of my assets to Lightwave, (I need to put a gub to my head & learn Blender), but other than Strand-Based hair, but I'm making progress even with that, it's a pretty straight forward process exporting via FBX. The exporter for Blender is much better.

That's one of the things I love about DS. It's so easy to fit clothes between figures as long as you have clones and good templates for either autofit or the transfer utility.

I often do it the other way around as I'm often converting V4 clothing to newer figures.

You're a bit more ambitious than me. ;) Although I do a fair amount after-the-fact once I export.

The other thing regarding DS is that several of the key tools, primarily the Simulation & dForce stuff, frankly runs circle around what Lightwave has. They incorporated Bullet, which is great for some things, but it's not really suited for complex clothing work. I've done it, but... 

In fact, I just suggested to a Lightwave user that he should try out using Daz for that. He could import & re-export the geometry as OBJ.