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I use and trust online tools at work all day long - AWS, Dynatrace, MS Office 365, PagerDuty, and etc - just to name a few.
BUT, those services are run by established corporations with legally binding Service-Level Agreements, and an outage report from me won't be greeted with "oops - sorry we're offline for a bit and you can't use the thing you paid for anymore, but it'll be back online the moment I can get competent enough to troubleshoot and repair my vibe-coded slop. Should be only a couple of weeks after I get back from Holiday, tops."
As for "AI isn't art!!!11"? LOL... I still remember in the long-ago when the Photoshop nerds were screaming that CG rendering wasn't really art. Argument probably goes back to charcoal purist Og yelling to any Cro-Magnon in earshot that using Ocher for cave paintings didn't really count as art.
The whole Renderotica drama points out something scary, though - we're all getting real damned old. I can't believe I hung around doing this stuff for way over a quarter-century, and every time I think ab out that, I wonder WTF - how much longer will I be around to do it? It is still fun after all these years, though. Can't imagine what other guys my age are thinking when they look on their lives of wasting time in vidya or watching pro-sportsball; at least I have a huge digital collection of my efforts to go back to and admire from time to time.
The scariest part is that the Elders of this hobby are dropping like flies (I mean, I remember back when Diane and Jack ran r'otica, back when Doc Legume was modding its forums and scaring normies over at Renderosity. Diane is dead now, and I almost bet that Jack is probably pushing daisies as well.)
Web-based anything is visible to the owners, full-stop. I mean, some things you have to trust - Proton VPN (they don't keep logs and the paid version is real fast), your Internet provider, things like that. Anything else and it's VPN + separate browser + pseudonyms for, and I'm very picky about what I do w/ that browser.
Think of it this way - at work, I use a wide variety of SaaS products (which is what that first thing is), and most of them have the ability for their support people to impersonate you for troubleshooting purposes - they can see what you see, and do what you do on that service. However, those pro-level products are bound by NDAs and SLAs, and their very existence as a company depends on discretion and confidentiality. By contrast, that fly-by-night 3d artist tool thing is under no such restriction, and they likely even have a user agreement that says they can see and do whatever they want with any data you upload to it. For all we know it's an LLM feeder.
The other one, meh. It's like Poser's online-checking all over again - irritating, and it could break at any time.
LOL - I stopped dealing with tape *at work* over 15 years ago...
I won't lie, tape has its advantages:
- longevity (w/ proper storage)
- capacity
- reliability (a good tape reader/writer is indestructible)
- it's surprisingly universal w/ open-source tools to read/write to it.
- the underlying tech is nearly as old as digital computing itself.OTOH, it's got three disadvantages:
- The good gear and tapes are quite expensive
- It's slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow (everything is written sequentially.)It is doable, but I would strongly suggest an extra tape drive, a backed-up copy of the software to use it, and a backup/testing schedule that you stick to religiously (doesn't have to be every day, but it should be at least quarterly, with sample retrievals at least once a year.)
I dunno... I'm not paying(*cough*) for the mesh production method. I am (*cough*)paying(*cough*cough*) for the idea, the design, and colors, and the usefulness of the finished product.
If it's low-grade AI slop or less useful than a similar fully-rigged item, then that will become obvious quickly and the vendor will quickly suffer.
Now that's a figure name I haven't seen in a very long time...
Nothing from my POV, but could you kitbash it, perhaps from the one for G8M (e.g. bring in two copies of it into a scene, make the left foot of one and the right foot of the other invisible, hack out body parts from each and then parent appropriately, or perhaps split it into two foot props in Blender, etc?)
Oh, hey, drag yourself through here as well: https://poserdazfreebies.miraheze.org/wiki/Victoria_1-2
(and use the search function to find stuff for Mike as well.)
You guys too, then?
Dude was all up in my DMs asking me about @supreme-leech , my own past, etc etc. I politely answered a couple of times w/o lifting the kimono, then I just ignored him after he started getting pushy.
Some people cannot get the point that asking anyone in a piracy forum to dox themselves is... galaxy-level dumb.
The software that offers a modern rendering engine capable of photorealism will win.
(Laughs in toon)
Sure, photorealistic output is fine and all (and the toughest to achieve), but AI is going to own that space soon enough - best DAZ (or anyone) can do is to latch onto Comfy Desktop or similar as a plugin render engine. But, my point is to keep in mind it's also the artistic styles (toon, stylized, comic, anime/manga, etc) that a very substantial userbase works and plays in.
I do agree that Iray has about had its run, but I gotta tell you - if it's taking you an hour to render a scene, you might want to fix your settings, get a newer (compatible/RTX!) card, or stop rendering 40 G9's in a scene! Most likely though, it sounds like you're using fallback CPU rendering, so either get a recent nVidia GPU or get your settings working.
Also they will need an angle with its functionality to make folk move away from DS, which in its recent iterations despite lots of shortcomings is a pretty slick, robust program in what it does well. Especially at it's price point. 😉
This is precisely what killed Poser.
Killing DS will be harder to do at that price point as well - and if you're going to shoot the king, you'd best not miss.
That's awesome!
It brings back the spirit of the old days, when someone couldn't find what they wanted, so they just built it.
The irony is kind of hilarious, truth be told.
Gather 'round the campfire children, grab a s'more, and I'll explain:
DAZ Studio was started by DAZ in response to licensing fee demands from Curious Labs (Poser's owner in 2002-2003) so that the Vicky (and Michael) 2 and 3 figures could use the Hair and Face Rooms in the upcoming Poser 5. DAZ instead went out and built their own Poser, just this time with blackjack and hookers, releasing it in 2005. Yes, it took that many years - they built it first as a what-if as negotiations swung back and forth, then they went full guns after Poser 5 failed as a release, Curious Labs collapsed, and Poser got sold to some outfit called EGISys as its future became uncertain. By the time Studio did come out, Poser was on its 2nd-3rd owner, and DAZ Studio went from being the anti-Poser, to being a lifeboat for DAZ' business model.
We all know what happened from there. Vicky 4 came out in 2005, but it was the last DAZ model Poser could fully use (and is still the most-used model in Poser today... among the few who still use it these days.)
As for Pose Studio? alea iacta est - let's see what it can do. I think Renderhub adopted it because it knows DAZ owns DAZ Studio, Renderosity owns Poser (for what that's worth), and Renderhub wants to be one of the big boys. This strategy also (partly) explains why they purged vendors and content so hard a few months ago - can't market an ecosystem if the customers think you're out there permitting DMCA violations and home-grown CSAM.
You should - I checked my ancient pile of CDs, and discovered that I didn't have it (also, two of my 2004-era CDs are apparently dead and unrecoverable. Yikes.)
I still have a lot of old Poser Alexa (versions 1 and 2) items, but not the install packages. If I remember right, they came out in 2002-2003 or so? The big difference between the first two versions were the hands and feet - the vendor copied the DAZ-made Posette/P4 Female body parts, which is a no-no, so he went back and re-made those parts (and a few other things, but I cannot remember what).
I still have some ancient Poser packages on CD - I'll rummage through them today if time allows, and see what I can find.
