Blurymind; you say that DAZ content is distasteful, yet you support the porn industry (which likely has all of that and worse).
I’m afraid you do not have the authority to decide what is distasteful as you do not have a moral standard for content. A DAZ person fulfilling his fantasies using their content may say the same thing.
some daz content is good. I am just saying that there is a flood of bad content made with it- because of how easy the software makes it to create content.
There is nothing wrong with porn. I do not support it (with my wallet or by creating content), I just dont have anything against it.
There is well made porn and badly made porn.
Porn made with daz/poser tends to be badly made. It is all a matter of personal taste as well of course.
I would argue that eroticism/pornography are also a form of art.
Well, I for one will refuse to recognize such as ‘art’ in the meantime as its only purpose is to provoke a lust response from the viewer. I won’t go into debate here as this thread doesn’t call for it.
exactly. It evokes some sort of an emotion.
If you look at the way the model is made - you can judge it aestetically.
A model can be incredibly nice, but if its posed badly- its ruined.
If you look at the way the camera is framing the scene, the materials, the lighting…
It can all be judged, just as you would do with a regular film/still image.
And the bottom line is - a lot of the DAZ content looks bad. Not because of its pornographic nature, but the execution of it.
The problem with photorealistic 3d models is that you get to the uncanny valley. When you try to evoke lust in the viewer, your model needs to either be stylized or very well executed as realistic. Alot of daz stuff is just badly executed realistic- leading to uncanny valley effect.
Stiff breasts, plastic skin, bad lighting, dead eyes and awkward poses. It all makes up a bad piece.
And when they share stock assets from the software- it looks even worse. Makes the software look bad.
very Stylized character+ realistic material = uncanny valley
realistic character + NPR material = uncanny valley
realistic character+ something that “feels” wrong = uncanny valley
There are real time solutions out there that run faster than daz/poset and look better. You can get better looking skin in real time. You can get better framerate in real time. Daz and poser are just ancient. freemium MMORPG game makers, Porn game makers like Illusionsoft and others are already adopting the daz/poser business model- but with better technology. People modding and creating content, buying content.
anyway, I shouldnt bash the software or its community too much. I am sure that it will one day get more respect from the cg world. To me it’s interesting to see where the money go- especially with VR right around the corner. It’s a matter of time for daz and poser to either radically revamp their stuff or become outdated
If possible, let’s steer more towards staying on topic and less towards trying to declare something is or is not art. Not only is that off-topic for the thread, but it’s a classic example of a discussion that endlessly circles around itself… painfully.
I in the past used DAZ a lot but recently switched over to makehuman. I often need figures for scale and proportions when designing products and furniture.
Over time I found the DAZ software to become pretty obese and slow and the interface is faster and easier to use with makeHuman.
Claas
I came to the conclusion that Daz3D can be a very valuable addition in a pipeline. As a 3D artist, it is unreasonable to expect to model EVERYTHING all the time. A program like Daz and Makehuman can be used to get some quick extra populations and non primary characters for environments (as well as primary). That’s just one use I’m exploring. I believe anyone with professional skills in 3D rendering can make good art with this. The only catch I found to DAZ is the fact we have to purchase add-ons to really get creative with the base models. But the prices are reasonable. I would go for the morphing products that are creative shaping tools rather than buying model sets. But that’s just me.
I’ve used DAZ Studio & Poser in the past. Made content for sale for a while back when the pocket money I got for it was worth the time and effort. I’m not talented enough nor have the contacts in DAZ/Renderosity/RDNA/etc to make it worth my while now.
Avoiding the “is it art” debate, I’ve found that the software (in general) is used in one of two ways:
2D Foundation Art: By this I mean the artist sets up and poses the figure, creates a basic scene, sets up basic lighting, etc and then uses a render of that as the foundation on top of which they paint the actual end piece. I know at least one artist that uses this for romance novel covers and another who does it for their comic - neither of which you’d recognise as being “Poser art”.
Quick & Nasty “3D Clipart”: I know one person using Poser in the corporate world where the focus on art is much less motivating than “getting a 3D person rendered yesterday”. I’ve also seen a variety of mobile & desktop games using quick renders of figures/morphs I know for a fact are Poser presets. When your time constraints demand a posed & rendered figure in less time than it takes to make a coffee - DAZ/Poser fills the niche quite well.
Sims-style Colour-by-Numbers Scenes: Whilst not bag of beans, there is a community that like and share art created by mixing and matching prebought elements with tweaks to figures, props, lighting, etc. Some of it can look reasonably good… most of it looks somewhat less so. That said, people do like it and spend quite a bit of time, effort (& money) on the activity. As it harms no-one, who am I to complain about it or tell them it is any less artistic than (say) felters?
DAZ Studio (& Poser) works relatively well for those three niches. If you want something more than that, I would suggest you’ll come across the limitations of the software (dictated in significantly by the content) like many others.
Speaking about the whole ecosystem around DAZ Studio / Pose, DAZ3D is playing in a lucrative, yet quite narrow niche and it knows it. The premium they charge on their figures is exorbitant for people that can make & rig their own figures. The biggest drawcard they have is the vast amount of free/low-cost content for their previous &, through tweaked morphing software, existing figures. They are very defensive of any technology that allows people to utilise this without buying their stuff first (I have had many a discussion with their legal team about this in relation to software I’ve developed). Once someone with the money to stand up to the legal shenanigans releases software that breaks the connection between their over-priced figures/morphs - that niche is going to go belly up.
You can start for free getting DieTrying’s 182 free morphs for G2F (ShareCG link, registration required to download, don’t worry, they do not pester you); additionally, you can use weight mapped D-Formers to customize any mesh.
I have made a rough count and with about 150$ you get everything you need for G2F, G2M and back compatibility with V4 and M4. I know that 150$ are a horrific sum for the I-want-everything-for-free Blender crowd but if you get out of the basement and have a look at Turbosquid prices, they are almost peanuts.
As for the detractors… Blender professionals shooting down a product which might harm their business… so much different from 3DStudio/Maya/zBrush professionals shooting down Blender because it might harm their business… right?
Here is the award winning short film. It was done in DAZ and Blender
http://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-236983.html
adding to the list of blendshape mixer programs , check out facegen
http://facegen.com/
Blurymind- A very inspiring video. I wonder how much of that was Blender or Daz.
jpb06- Thanks a million for that link. Just the kind of thing I was looking for. I found some other cool items on that site as well. 
Just giving an update-
After further experimentation, I find DAZ studio to be very helpful in learning character creation and even some anatomy. It’s good training wheels for beginners. When using all the morph options, there is a lot of creativity. So I don’t see it as a quick instant load a model and go kind of thing. It helps to learn how to customize with your own textures and learn how to make your own model elements from scratch like clothing so you’re not subject to what is available in the shop if that those kinds of things put you off.
Bryce 2.0 was my entrée into 3D modeling. That was back in the late 1990s. At that time Blender was still in the future. Bryce was, like DAZ Studio, a program that enabled the user to “make something that looked like something” without a steep learning curve. Some people will decide to move on to Blender or other software after starting with DAZ Studio, others won’t. Many won’t have the time, the talent, or the patience to move on and that’s fine. To me, doing something creative even if it’s arranging ready made assets in a new composition is still better than doing nothing at all.
chuckle I believe you’ve hit it exactly. It’s akin to grownups playing with dolls. I used to be a serious gamer (I wasted an entire lifetime in the Half-Life 2 universe) but got bored with it and moved into the ‘Poserverse’. The seamier side of said 'verse can be pretty messed up.
Blender was used to supplement but the animation and rendering was done through DAZ - it uses 3Delight as the render engine which is a Renderman clone.
@khalibloo: is it true that I can get G2F/M as a posable mesh in Blender? I ask because the only thing I miss in Studio from Poser is dynamic clothing and, if G2 is posable in Blender, I could use Blender cloth engine to do the posing.
I have the feeling that those who flame DAZ here are simply hobby users.
As a professional I do not care what others use DAZ for, if the tool is useful I use it. period.
I totally agree, for some people its very useful, however other find that they can do better without. If your a hobbyist, DAZ is a great option, but I think most of us professionals (not all, but most) will find that it is not all that use full, I personally don’t use it, I have in the past, I found the topology a bit messy and to saturated for my workflow, other prefer it like this but I don’t, so the best thing I’d suggest is, give it a good try…
Cheers,
Jim Morren
@bobb,
hahahaha fruit juice is more my style though
@jpb06,
sure! the khalibloo panel works fine with G2 figures as well. you could easily generate a rigify rig for your G2 character with just 2 clicks. read the first post in the khalibloo panel thread to get a deeper understanding of how it works.
@cekuhnen,
it’s what i thought too. it’s sad that a lot of people think it’s cheating to use DS or makehuman. by that logic, one could argue that blender’s default cube is cheating. after all, it was pre-made.
fact is, DAZ genesis is one of the best human models around. i owe a lot of my knowledge of human models to genesis. its weight paints are really impressive and quite simple. if i had listened to those “ethics” speeches, i wouldn’t have come this far.
This is really based on what you really need. My clients would not pay me each time making a new model. But I am also not in the business of motion picture where the need might probably be different. I think it is really based on what you need and for certain areas DAZ or makehuman are quite sufficient.