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Maybe 'hate' is too strong? When they first brought out Studio I hailed them for giving us a program that was everything that Poser wasn't. It was intuitive with a sensible GUI. It was fast and rock-solid stable and it was free.
Unfortunately they've gone downhill and being bought by Tafi has accelerated the slide. They'd announced work on Studio 5 then Whammo!, the Tafi Borg swooped in and it's all gone to shit.
I have no respect for the staff at Daz-Tafi and see this as the perfect example of enshittification.@ethiopia spake upon the masses:
I'll bet we see an uptick of people looking for older version of Studio. We should put that on the front page.
100%. Sitemods - if you take up this advice, grab these copies when you do: https://f95zone.to/threads/daz-studio-repository.215178/
It seems a lot of people are already taking on the same idea and putting it to use. I have a few versions I've been backup up recently, from v4.12.1.118 to now (all Win64 versions). I bet we could crowdsource enough Win64 + Mac versions and stuff them into a repo somewhere.
Also...
Tafi will finally dump Daz, leaving it a shell of it's former self. We will become the repository of content and older versions of Studio. Some creators will continue making items and sell them on private sites and the hobby will limp along
Fun trivia for the audience: That's how Poser got saved. Poser was abandonware in MetaCreations' stable shortly after Poser 3 was made in 1998. Hobbyists got together online and kept banging away at content for Poser 3(!), until a year later, one (or more, can't recall) of the Poser devs got together with a German software company and revived it under a new company called Curious Labs. It took off rapidly from there. If Poser 5 wasn't such a turd (and if they hadn't done a money-grab at DAZ to demand that DAZ license things like the Face Room), history would likely be different, and DS most likely wouldn't even exist.
I can see the hobbyists going back to keeping things alive on their own again for awhile, though. At least until someone else build a thing to import or directly use the assets.
@kelsie332 sez:Is this community the anti-fan of DAZ? Because if so, let me know now, so I can save my breath over some of the things I read.
It's a mixed bag. Some folks hate DAZ to the core of their souls, some folks love DAZ, most fall in-between. Me, I'm apathetic towards DAZ the company, but the scene products they put up in their store (characters, clothing, hair, props, scenes, etc) are generally of decent quality and have a wide variety.
Companies, corporations, LLCs, GmBHs, Ltds, SpAs... they're just collections of souls in a container that itself has no soul. Life's too short to assign any real emotion to them IMHO.
@eelgoo proclaimed:If DS5 ever does arrive & it requires online, subscription, and existing plug ins won't work, just watch the tumbleweed at the launch.
Exactly. I once downloaded each new version of DS eagerly, like a kid on Christmas morning, violating my own 'N-1' rule for software versions. Now? It's N-1 for DAZ Studio as well - or at least wait long enough to see if there's any show-stopping bugs and dumb anti-consumer tactics that get deployed before installing anything.
I also agree that Poser needs to be euthanized. It had its run, but all that's left is a bloated package patched all over, with older Adobe AIR-based versions that won't even run (because of massive security holes - bad enough that Windows and MacOS will simply throw an exception and kill them.) Worse yet, the Poser user community is mostly a dwindling group of hyperfocused fanatics who will brook no dissent on their forums. I took a peek at their official Poser forum, and saw it nearly dead. The "New Girl in Town" (Dawn 2) is full of renders that could be 100% replicated by 2004's Victoria 3, in both aesthetic and technical quality.
I hope we don't ever get that bad here.
I spoke with Hunter already and he's gonna do just that. It'll be fun to see new folks coming here who would have never thought of coming to a pirate site.
But wait, there's more!
(Groan and boo me later.)
@gelstat : I don't hate DAZ at all either. What extra stuff did they add, by the way?As for Tafi itself, I finally got off my butt and did a little research (likely nothing new, but still).
They're not venture capitalists themselves, but they are funded and kept alive by VC money.
Here's their vital info:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tafi
https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/303130-81This is their mission statement:
Tafi is an avatar company. We shape the way people express themselves in the digital world. Our approach to digital identity gives you tools to create, manage, distribute and monetize avatars, unlocking exciting ways for people to express themselves and connect with others. Our mission is to make fun, expressive and useful avatars for everyone.
So, I don't quite see them as being some sort of vulture company that scavenges assets for shekels. BUT... their VC financiers (Benchmark Capital, Columbia Capital, and Ponte Partners) may have other plans, just saying.
I spoke with Hunter already and he's gonna do just that. It'll be fun to see new folks coming here who would have never thought of coming to a pirate site.
Let me know if I can donate a few install copies to the cause. 🙂
@gelstat
thanks Larry !"I'll bet we see an uptick of people looking for older version of Studio."
Which would you consider the "best" version? The last one I used was 4.15 when I stopped using DS.
Wouldn't the latest general release (4.22) be the (only) one that anyone would want.I never kept track of which versions worked best. It seems that each release fixed one thing but either introduced a new problem or made old ones worse. I read that the latest few where faster at rendering but with everyone's computers being different animals it's impossible to get a proper comparison.
True. Some of the newer ones were apparently (or arguably) slower or faster, and quite a few versions broke plug-ins. My interest is only academic as I don't have a dog in the fight any longer.
I don't have a dog in the fight any longer.
I'm starting to lean the same way. I see folks using Studio to quickly bang together a scene, take a screenshot, then use this as a base for making a model or an AI render. The one guy (girl?) who does pretty nice ones won't cough up his/her workflow. A disappointing aspect of AI is that the flood of amateurs doing it are possessive about what they've learned, and figure people will pay money to see their pictures which are almost exactly the same as everybody else's pictures. I'm sure it'll abate as the flood grows and viewers get sick of it.
There's also my old friend Blender.There's a new article that details using Daz characters in SD. It's not the way I would do it but it's an interesting method.
[https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/704766/chuck-s-ai-bumping-thread]
That's interesting thanks. I missed that in their forums even though I browse them every day. Got it saved.
Thats probably what I'll eventually do or I may just take a break for a little while and come back fresh.
I like the control daz gives me and the reality AI adds to it. Mixing them seems to be the best of both worlds.
The flood of AI art online has really screwed over my motivation. Any google image search now is mostly AI carbon copy crap. Cant even get pictures of real people as a reference without wading through AI images. Some are very cool but most are crap.
Looking at the official threads, a sizeable chunk of the customer base seems interested. Much of their concerns are regarding activating the new subscription or redeeming their existing Daz+ subscriptions. Of all things Daz has been throwing at the wall lately, this might actually stick. At the least it is seeing more acceptance than the earlier season pass model.
There seems to be quite a few buyers regularly spending more that $20-30 per month including buying at least one character bundle per month. This subscription is targeted for them since anything purchased above that initial $20 gets discounted further. May be it will also attract a few more buyers into that spending bracket.
The issue is not just the pricing, but Daz remaining committed to the benefits they are offering to the Premier subscribers. From past precedence of the PC+ subscription, the validity of the monthly $6 PA coupons kept shrinking. I left the PC+ wagon, while those coupons stopped being valid on the fast grab items. Good thing they didn't introduce any annual plans for the premier, guessing they themselves are not confident if this initiative would be sustainable that long.
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