Product Reviews
Greyson Furrington
Posts: 4
Can Daz impliment product reviews on all their products? It would be beneficial to read what buyers think and experience before you clunk down a load of money on something that might be worthless or absolutely fantastic. I just picked up something that crashed my system 4 times in a row. I don't want a refund. I'm going to pull the product a part remove the components that my system hates and use what it likes. Had I read a review that might have saved me my money or it might have given me insight on what to expect.
Reviews are important.
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Comments
It's been asked for before, but is always shot down. Your best bet is to use the Daz Deals Browser Add-on, that will usually show you any forum threads about different products, that may or may not have issues. There's a thread for the add-on as well if you have any issues or questions for the creators: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/454726/announcing-daz-deals-browser-add-on-ii#latest
Converting .tif files to .png might help.
Before you do any edits to the product, if you feel concerned about ruining the quality of the product, you can manually unzip the product to its own folder and add that as a content library in Daz Studio and then make a second copy with changes and compare the two.
I always check the textures folder for maps that are all black, white or a shade of grey and batch resize them all to 1x1 as they are not needed.
Also make sure all greyscale maps are 8 bit instead of 24 or 16bit. Any map with color in it shouldn't need to be more than 24bit either. But you can do test renders to compare
Converting 8K and 4K maps down to 2048 can help if you have an older video card.
It defenitely needs a review section on the store pages, because the product quality on the Daz store is all over the place and not all creators have the same transparency when it comes to showing their product quality. I see a whole bunch of hair styles for example that has store page images of the hair with a lot of added depth so that you can't see the fine details of the hair. It often looks decent on the store page, but then after buying it and looking at it in DS it's really old school hair that looks fake. Also a lot of models that have some bad skin details and genmaps that are not seamless. Last week I bought the akoulina model, face and body shape are fine, but the skin is totally messed up with weird dark dots all over the body making the skin completely useless. Stuff like that...
And if they really don't want to add a reviews system then at least add a star system so that you can rate the products. And generally it also helps if all products have release/creation dates on the store page. I expect less from old products than from new products.
This is one of the reasons why they probably won't ever add a product review system. It will end up being more of a bunch of customers stating opinion rather than actual product issues. iSourceTextures, the PA who made that character, deliberately makes his/her characters with skin blemishes like that in order to add a touch of realism. Granted, I agree with you up to the point that they go just a little bit overboard with skin blemishes, but its really not a reason to down-vote or give a negative review. If you're looking for flawless blemish-free skin, Aiko 8, Salem, etc., but you might have to swap out the speculars on Salem because I do know that seams will show where the arms & torso textures meet.
Some things that I would mention in a review:
Mismatched/Seams in textures. This can be caused by bad normals, speculars, bumps, etc., and there are a number of PAs that miss this in some of their products, particularly with specular maps.
Odd Skin. I call it "odd skin" because it just looks strange when arms look lighter than the torso, or the legs have a different color tone compared to the torso & arms.(For an example of this, Friday21 over on Renderosity makes characters like this. I don't know why, but it could be due to color blindness or their monitor's color calibration is off). I've also noticed this with some characters in the Daz store where the skin on the legs is much darker than the rest of the body when it is rendered, regardless of how one positions/adjusts the lighting.
I think they don't do reviews because they can be all over the place. Here in the forums we might know how to write eloquent and accurate reviews, but if you go on some review sites it just says "this sucks" , with no explanation or anything. People are also prone to review when something is bad, but not when something is good, skewing the optics on a product.
And if you go on some utility product threads in this forum you might think the tool is very bad, while it's just a few who post because they have problems. Apart from a few exceptions, you see less people write "this product is working perfectly." , again skewing the perception.
There are ways to counter it, for instance give store points to earn store credit or discounts , so positive reviews are left more often.
Another thing to consider, there are often forum posts about how bad a product is when in fact they user is not using it correctly, strand based hair products comes to mind. Would suck for product reviews to show this and have potential buyers stear away because the reveiwer was incompetent.
There are simple things they can add to the review system that counters bogus reviews such as making it mandatory to fill in a description of the experience/issue and an option for the creator to report/comment a review if it seems unfair and bogus. And of course general moderation applies to reviews as well. I personally very often leave positive reviews behind if the website lets me (or I leave a rating), but also negative ones (in a constructive way) for both the creator/seller as the other potential buyers.