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Okay, lets do this. I go by ShadowDemonLord these days (used to use DemonLord in the 80's but it became to hard to get as a nick so added the Shadow (I follow an aussie rules team called the Melbourne Demons which is the origin of the nick). My real name is David though.
That is also a hint as to where I live (Aussie born and bred - yet to travel overseas). I am on the far side of 50 and have worked in IT since the 80's.
Like most of us dabbled in various 3d programs over the years but never really connected with any until I rediscovered Daz mid last year. Was a low point in my life as I was off work for nearly 3 months with a chronic back issue.
Rendering and learning the in and outs as best I could took my mind off my troubles. I have gone from totally clueless to slightly less than clueless with a possibility of some talent in this field. How much remains yet to be seen.
Flown under the Jolly Roger for years but like some here, buy what I can when I can of the stuff I use a lot.
SDL.
@eelgoo Ehhhh... Rendo's sales are a lot more convoluted than you think. They often sound good on the surface, but when you read the fine print -and I mean the fine print-, it's super limiting.
Like, the vast majority of them are not good to use on Prime Products, Clearance, or any item currently on sale. And a lot of the big name CCs/PAs are almost always on sale or some vendors don't allow coupons to be used at all, period. So you're pretty much limited to a pool of super low-to-middling quality items that may or may not work in your program of choice.
And they have weird, arbitrary percentages off that really aren't good value-wise, since the majority of items are often below the lowest possible price for any given coupon.
Say what you will about Daz, but at least their PC+ coupons are pretty straightforward and are what they appear to be. Their sales, though... that's for another time, hah.
On a semi-related note, I'm still bummed about RDNA merging with Daz. Mostly because in general, competition is good for businesses to innovate. Sure, there's Rendo, but what good is competition there when both sites sell about the same kinds of products (i.e. pretty white Barbie glam dolls and faint variations on skimpwear from the same 5-10 artists)?
There needs to be another site to fill the creatively unique void that RDNA has left, IMHO. Something that encourages people to think outside of the glam doll softcore porn box, but ehhhh... I'm dreaming too much.
I had Plex, but I keep everything on External HDs that I can hook up to my TV or PC, so I don't need to rely on the internet, or keep my PC on all the time.
If it wasn’t for college football, I’d completely cut the cord. I love Plex. I have a Gigabyte Brix dedicated to running the backend Plex server and s Roku in every room running the Plex front end app. It’s ability to keep track of what you watch is invaluable to me.
Well, I did say they were far from perfect 😉
Some coupons cover sales items & some do not.
Clearance items are never discounted further, which I do find odd & frustrating.I haven't been in the PC club for years, so I wouldn't know about those coupons.
There is no appeal to Prime or PC club for me, as both seem to require regular
purchases to make them worthwhile, so I suppose they might work for more regular buyers.
It would be much simpler just to discount for all customers.
Cash is king, surely?Yeah, that Daz-RDNA thing really sucked.
About 6 months before it happened there was a self-congratulatory big email from RDNA saying how proud they were to be the biggest independent storefront specifically for Poser.
I thought it a little odd at the time.
When they suddenly sold out to Daz it became clear that that was probably a sales ploy to bump the price up!
I don't want to get a full on rant about that here.
It probably deserves a thread of its own.There is a little variety of output at 'Rosity but what there is of it is swamped under the tidal wave of skimp wear & texture sets.
You have to be quick to spot them before they go under again.:0/
I find renerosity store even worse than DAZ store, and that's saying something because the DAZ store is awful. I also generally find renderosity product isn't as good, even the best stuff isn't as good as most of the DAZ stuff, the bar is just lower. That only really applies to characters and clothing, DAZ has some pretty rubbish content too especially in environment.
Even in my totally-legal*cough* collection I get very little that isn't from DAZ just on quality. Caveat to that is that I am fairly good at creating my own content so I'm not relying on other creators if I need a particular thing and can't find a good one.
I generally treat DAZ's sales as the actual price of those products, since they have stuff on sale _all the time_. I tend only to buy things I can't make, or are too tedious to make (so tools, or things like morph packs) that will make my own content creation easier.
I tend to pick DAZ over Renderosity, but mostly because I’m spoiled by the ease of Smart Content.
I don't even have the smart content tab in my interface anymore 😀
The DAZ software _really_ needs a way to manage content though. It needs a lot of things 😀
@Rob
You can add things you manually install into Smart Content with Daz. it's a bit of a process, but if it helps make things easier it's worth it.Or
wow.. OK, thats a LOT of work and valuable time wasted for entering metadata just to use the smart content tab.
I had to check it out because you posted it, 3Danimenut.
Even my Daz stuff isn't in there so I still won't be using that tab. LOL
I'm pretty good at remembering names and if not, there's the search function. 🙂I'm convinced all of the 3D asset stores are designed to be confusing so that people keep browsing their store. It's the digital version of Ikea.
@evilmonkey If only they were as easily hackable as IKEA but I suppose that will have to be my goal for this year, figure out how to create my own content.
@nemain, if you're interested in making your own content or even modding existing products, look at Sickleyields DA and youtube. She puts out some really helpful information when a lot of other authors just keep all that information behind closed doors.
@Dragon
Yes it can be a pain, i've only ever done a few times, had a few environment sets that where so broken up into Lighting Presets, Props, etc. etc. that adding it to the Metadata made finding everything easier.I gather that that content creators do actually share, but they do it with each other, not the wider community, which is elitist, but makes sense.
I find sickleyields video content dense at best, and I come from a decent hobbyist 3d content creation background 😀 Good on her for making it though. There is a fair bit of DAZ info out there, but it's a whole lot of parsing forum posts and youtube videos for information that is both accurate, and current... not something easy to do if you don't already have a pretty decent understanding of what's going on.
I've watched a fair bit of the pirated DAZ tutorial stuff out there (like the DAZ/substance one that's just cropped up) and most of that is pretty rubbish too... it's mostly out of date but still being sold, and often by people who don't actually know what they're doing either; which is really another mark again DAZ for:
a) not QA checking these videos before allowing them for sale
and b) not working with the content creators to make sure they understand the software better)---
@evilmonkey - you may be right about the stores, but I think it's just incompetence 😀 I kinda understand renderosity because it's obviously just a clone of DAZ store but done worse... and renderotica... good lord... it's like someone from the second life days used their early 2000s web coding skills to make a storefront 😀 So glad I have little interest in the content they sell.---
I think we may start seeing the death of DAZ soonish, I mean it'll be years before it vanishes... but other software is moving into the marketplace that does the same thing better and is under regular development (albeit commercially)... to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if DAZ studio ends up going away and DAZ ends up just being a content marketplace. The only thing that makes me thing this might _not_ be true is that there's no bridge between iClone and DAZ yet... the minute that happens I call the apocalypse 😀
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