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Kindest answer: You could write Daz a letter requesting an amendment (either for you as an individual or for anyone in the world) to a longstanding and rather industry-typical End User License Agreement, allowing for you to transfer your licenses to a third party (or multiple parties) for your monetary gain. This doesn't violate any law of physics that I'm aware of, so if Daz/Tafi agrees, you're good to go!
Best answer: Apesh*t? Probably depends on whether the good folks at Daz/Tafi are in a good or bad mood, whether they've had a lot of coffee or energy drinks, and how often they get requests to completely disregard the terms of the EULA to their financial disadvantage. They may get enough such requests that they are a routine matter and nothing to get excited about. They may find the request hilarious--You'll be giving them a moment of genuine levity in an otherwise stressful or boring day. I think those outcomes are more likely than an enraged reaction. Their response might be a polite but terse variation on "NO", or a non-profane reminder of the legally binding EULA you agreed to, which clearly states that your licenses are non-transferable, and a promise to pursue legal remedies should you attempt to transfer licensed content to third parties.
I can't imagine Daz seriously considering a refund for anything not covered by a rather generous 30-day refund policy, much less giving you the go-ahead on selling your licenses.
I genuinely sympathize with those who have spent a lot of money and time on stuff or ventures which didn't work out. If it were possible to remedy every poor or unlucky decision I've made in my professional life, I'm going to have to go through multiple sizable volumes of error or misfortune. But, rather than indulge in fantasy, it's probably better to chalk it up to experience and move on as best we can.
..indeed. over the 16+ years I've been at this I've accumulated a total of (retail value) 1.145 million USD in content software (also have Carrara Hexagon and Bryce), plugins, & such.. Current Value is a little over 61,000 USD (enough for a down payment on a nice house). A large portion is old pre-Genesis content so it likely is worth even less.today.
Daz company has very good marketing and sale strategy adaptable to different situations and times.
I have also spent a lot of here and need to live with that.
...as to myself, I'm retired. Hence II tend to do this more for relaxation and enjoyment. I do a bit of commission work here and there primarily for some extra spending money, but that is about it. I used to work in traditional are media but a chronic disability put an end to that. 3D is my one creative outlet left (I also had to give up music as well)
Even though I've been at this for over a decade and a half I find I'm still leaning new things and techniques, particularly after Iray hit the scene, so I'm content t with it.
There are groups like you mention, but for the most part they are geared towards users of the "top shelf" stuff. who often model their scenes from scratch rather than use pre-modelled assets. Years ago here used to be a group somewhat like that here called the Art Zone, but interest in it waned.
I've taken a break from spending on DAZ assets. I realized it became more about the shopping for me than creating art. Also, my main render machine gave up the ghost after 6 years, and I don't have the money to replace it. I've found that making little pictures on my laptop is soothing, and for some reason when I did a completely new install of DAZ on my laptop, which is a newer machine, DAZ Install Manager works great for me, which it never did on my desktop. I'm not tech savvy, so I have no idea why. I am on a fixed income, and DAZ has always been a hobby. Not spending so much and having a rather small SSD on my laptop has forced me to choose which content I really want to work with, and which to uninstall to save hard drive space. I was stunned when I looked at the amount I had spent on DAZ assets. And I had kind of a sad feeling too, like is what I've spent really worth what I am getting out of it? So yes, I am taking a break from spending for now. I did try going without DAZ completely for a couple months and I missed making my princess and fairy pictures so much that I put DAZ on my laptop. We'll see. I enjoy this thread because it shows me how others are dealing with their "buyer's remorse." Oh, I also stopped my subscription to DAZ DEALS because while it is incredibly useful, even necessary, for shopping on the DAZ website, it was only encouraging my shopping habit. I wish the OP the best of luck, and hope you can find emotional peace and still enjoy a wonderful art form while staying within budget.
DAZ is an obsessive hobby, but a highly frustrating obsesssive hobby recently, since the release of Genesis 9, because all of the progessive items like dforce strand based hairs are for Genesis 9 only.
This DAZ-Train is running without me.
I don't see a way right now for migrating to Blender either, for it is a way to steep learning curve. I've invested years to add custom blend shapes and expressions to my custom character and have to rely on geografts and and geo shells. Yup, so good luck bringing THOSE into Blender.
I feel trapped in DAZ Studio and DAZ Studio is letting me down by almost exclusivly supporting Genesis 9 with all the new good stuff.
For the first time since I am using DAZ Studio, my wishlist is empty here and in other 3d market places.
I spend quite a lot of my available spending money at Daz and Rendo. It is one of my most enjoyable hobbies, so I don't regret it but I am always shocked when I tot up how much I have spent. I also occasionally render artwork and I enjoy that almost as much. I've not yet tried to make any money from my renders because that's not why I got into it.
If I had started out with earning in mind I'd probably be very disappointed by now, so I sympathise with the OP but for me Daz continues to have huge value. As for AI, it's not for me, not least because it removes the shopping experience.
I really get you. I have a huge library of content starting with V4 over G3 and G8. In the past, I tried to get the content to Cinema 4D with self written scripts, but then Cinema 4D changed to a regular payment system and the development of features somehow went into the wrong direction for me. Since Blender V3.0 I really started to like it. My goal is to get the Daz content to Blender, improve it and make it native. I will not be able to use everything, but it will be a great base for pictorials that I'm working on combined with native Blender content. I also love to add Bryce, Carrara and Vue generated HDRI for backgrounds of the scenes.
Buildings and Props with good geometry (quads) and UV mapping are still interesting. Jumping on Genesis 9 makes no sense for me though. Complicated poses and expressions, I still can do in Daz and then just export the OBJ to Blender and adjust the materials. Daz content has a certain value for me. Daz Studio unfortunately not really.
Of course it's useful! Lots of people use it to express themselves in a variety of ways. $40k in content should be more than enough to do something. I think there are 3 issues. First, one must get in there and actually do the work - Define the goals, overcome the technical issues, make the art, put it in front of people. Without that, nothing happens. Second, one must make the business end go, if that's the goal. Third, one needs the little bit of luck we all need to stick the landing - find audience/buyers, have satisfaction/income from it, all that. Not everyone is going to make it all the way to the end - True of everything. There are folks who spend far more than $40k for content and there are folks who do everything exclusively with freebies. One can do good work with freebies and one can do nothing with a fortune in content. The use of something like DS is not in the product itself. It's in the people using it.
This is how I make money using DAZ. On the left is the book cover I made. On the right is the full scene–I do them wide to be be able to use it as wraparound print cover, and for banners. The sky with the mountains, the guy's cape, and the woman's head are stock photos. Everything else is DAZ. I used to use stock photos only when I started in this business, and it was pretty limiting. You find a model that your client likes but he/she isn't wearing the right clothes, holding the right props, etc. Environments can be challenging too for various reasons.
DAZ allows me create scenes I couldn't before. All I need is a few figures, a bunch of different environments, clothing, props, and poses. I definitely buy too much, but they are tax deductible.
wohoo, chapeau
@lou_harper: That is so beautiful, i love it! I guess it was a lot of postwork...
...in a similar boat here regarding a fixed pension and hardware, This is what makes it difficult to adopt a whole new generation of characters so I stopped at G8. Oh I have a few G9 characters, all of which creatures and monsters, as that is where it really shines. For humans (and elves, dwarfs, etc) G3/G8 are more than sufficient as between the two there is 7 years worth of content which often gets deeply discounted these days (even ending up in Lightning Deals at ridiculously low prices). So yes, my purchasing of new items has dropped measurably, save for props, vehicles, and architecture as I have all the character development content I need (a good portion of which is merchant resource and utility based)..
I am still working on a system I built13 years ago (yeah real old school as it still uses DDR3 memory) which has reached the limit of how far it can be updated. It is so old that the RTX 3060 I picked up a couple years ago isn't compatible with the MB's ancient BIOS. It is also still on Win 7 so am stuck at Daz release 4.21.0.5 as it is the last version which uses an Nvidia driver that supports the old OS for rendering. I have an upgrade planned to make it Win 11 and RTX 3060 compatible but basically need a small "windfall" to do it (and some components for that are already heading towards "legacy" status).
Even with these limitations I manage, it may not be as fast as the newest tech but it does get the job done (though sometimes dForce crashes the display driver). I do hold my breath every morning when I start it up and breathe a sigh of relief when I see the Windows start up screen appear.
Indeed this not a hobby for the financially limited unless one is resourceful and patient.
Yes, DS is useful.
Not VERY useful, but of occasional use, nonetheless.
I use it as a creative outlet, as I did Poser when I got P4 many years ago (2004? maybe). However these days I also use it a little for work. The company I work for makes boxes - complicated ones. The sort where it's necessary to have handbooks to show how to use them. DS means I can get exactly the handbook image I need to illustrate the handbook paragraph with a complex action without showing how bad my photography skills are, and also without having to do hours of photo editing to get rid of a horrible workshop environment.
Now, DS is absolutely awful at interfacing with proper engineering software. I have, as yet, found no common formats and have written my own translator to bridge the gap. This is pretty much expected - DS is NOT engineering software & I'm using it for a non-standard purpose, but it works. So, DS is useful for real work. In my situation, it's not VERY useful, but 'Of occasional use'. It's a toy, of slightly more utility than MS Paint and marginally more fun than MS Minesweeper. A minor tool in a toolbox. And, given the specialist nature of the needs I have from it, the library of items I have put together from DAZ & Rendo is almost entirely worthless. But I enjoy playing with it out of hours.
Regards,
Richard
No matter what the tool, no matter how bad/inadequate/whatever some people think it might be, there is someone somewhere doing something amazing with it. At least, that's my observation.
Yes and no. Yes AI is a big threat, but at the same time there is a lot hostility towards it and not just from designers but authors too. Some state that they would not pick up a book with AI cover. So there you go. No idea how it'll play out on the long run.
Also, pretty much all books are didgital books too these days, and my clients usually have print covers too, even if on demand. And big publishers are known to use AI too.
Thank you! I have a process that creates that cartoony look, but it's been made into a Photoshop action. I spent far more time with the DAZ parts. For start I had to turn Stonemason's Paris into a small town street. And the whole scene was 5 separate renders, iirc.
Like Lou, I came to DAZ Studios for book cover design reasons. There are a lot of freelance cover designers (primarily in self publishing) who work with DAZ. If you look at Amazon ebook bestsellers in genres like urban fantasy, you may even be able to spot DAZ assets you recognize.
Unlike Lou, I tend not to create entire scenes inside DAZ. I'll mostly use it for characters, sometimes even just pieces of body parts that I blend together with photos or other renders. I've used DAZ on a few historical romance covers, just where I needed a hand or arm that wasn't present in the original stock photo.
More recently, I've stopped taking on new cover clients, although I'm still continuing series I've already started. I have two other main uses for DAZ at the moment. The first is for when I make various visual assets virtual tabletop gaming. I'll do characters, but I've also sometimes done battle maps, where most of the furniture I use is created using DAZ.
Lastly, I'll use DAZ as a reference for illustrations. I'm currently working on a card deck project that will eventually be a Kickstarter. For a lot of my pieces, I don't bother sticking clothes on the DAZ figures since I draw something completely different and just want the basic pose/anatomy. Especially with the long flowing fabrics, I prefer to just draw it myself by feel rather than messing around in DAZ. The one below is probably the card that most closely resembles it's DAZ reference, since I also used the crow's nest and costuming. In my current card, I'm mostly using a photo reference but am changing a character's arm position to hold a flashlight, so I've got a DAZ guy holding an item with his arm at the angle I need so I can make sure the perspective is correct.
....not just hostility, but generative AI still has an issue with accuracy. I still see quite a few "polydactyl" hands and feet, objects intersecting other objects (or people), items not lining up properly with what they are suppose to be attached to, and bad proportions.
I've played around with it for a wile found it great for goofing around with, but when I have a specific idea in mind and set up the best most detailed prompt I can. it still often misses the mark
Seems it still has a bit of a way to go.
Great artwork and usage of Daz Studio, @lou
All the best for you and wish you many more creations.
Such lovely artwork on the book covers and maps and card decks you guys, thanks for posting these!
The outstanding feature of DS for me is its extreme accessibility and many all-around features, you don't need anything else to make decent renders. I went away from 3d graphics around 2003 and didn't return until 2019, got reeled back in again, saw that DS had a good render engine now, installed it and was able to start creating pics the very same day, after a couple hours. And that without any manual, just some forum posts. From there, I really think you can go anywhere, because DS incorporates so many aspects of 3d graphics works, and lets you get into it so quickly (lacking in modelling sadly). Granted, you'll probably move on to more sophisticated software from there, but IMO, it's absolutely unbeatable as a starting point and also one-for-all solution for those of us who don't intend to go into the industry itself.
Personally, I use it for my day job as a uni teacher (law, of all things), to visualize stuff for presentations, and I will be using it for covers and illus for my books as well (am just switching from tradpub to selfpub, so didn't have the need before). Am also visualizing story characters and settings with it, oftentimes with half-cooked renders, cause I don't need perfect pictures for those.
Yeah, I spend way too much money on assets like so many others, but they're often really inspiring for me, sparking story ideas, or just being beautiful to look at and fun to play with, so this is totally justifiable for me. I only wish the render engine were quicker and we had basic modelling tools, wouldn't need anything else really. Oops, sorry, went a bit OT, but you get the gist I guess.