Quality - has it dropped or am I just insane?
Beanoutback
Posts: 62
Don't get me wrong - I think it's incredible how people can model stuff and then be kind enough to share it with others and they deserve tobe paid for it. I have tried various 3d modellng programs and have experienced the effort and time it takes to produce 3D models. I have found that it is hard. Plus, I appreciate the effort and creative commitment that goes into any form of art. However, a year ago I would say that the Daz3d site was all quality - it beat other sites for DAz Studio content hands down. Now though I'm not too sure. Prices have risen (especially not good if ones currency is battling the US $) and well, I find myself looking at other well known sites and finding good deals for equivelent (sometimes better?) products. (Especially textures etc).
The Daz3D shop has always been, to me, a mark of quality ... but recently I'm not too sure. I'd like to be reassured that I'm mistaken and maybe the recent products have just not been 'in my zone'. I don't believe that people are moving away from daz studio so that cant be it. Maybe it's just me? But why do I check other sites first now?
(Of course having said that some artists are still gold here - not to mention any names ...ahem - Zev0, Alessandro, Mousso etc)
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Comments
Nothing wrong with buying from other sites, I do it often and that keeps the economy flowing. I don't feel like the quality is lacking, but more like the detail. With dforce, items have to be less detailed in general to work well and many are jumping on this bandwagon and as such, you see lots of less detailed items made to work in dforce and a lot less more detailed conforming items in my experience.
I think quality is still being made, only quality takes time. You don't see a vendor like bluejaunte 'drop' a character every week, it takes time to create. There are also some new vendors from what I can tell who are simply on the learning curve so to speak. In the end it is still in the eye of the beholder and the pockets of people who choose with their wallet of what we shall see more of (and what quality level)
I think there is a drop in quality because some products are being rushed to sale. Not all vendors but some.
I do have quite a substantial library now. So I am not buying new stuff nearly as much, and I’m also looking for content I don’t have as much of, such as bedrooms with beds that have dforceable options. I have several dozen without so no longer need beds with hard molded mattresses and sheets. For example. Now that the tech is available ot make beds look more realistic I expect it to start being used. So quality in that aspect hasn’t dropped but I am starting to only buy stuff that uses newer technology.
yeah not all the products have dropped in quality but over the last year to 18 months I have seen an increase of lower quality stuff in terms of modeling and textures, like it was ten years ago. Some vendors have grown and their quality has increased but some new vendors, well lets say the store seems to be going backwards. With computers getting more powerful and the abilities of software increases we should see a reflection of that right across the store. Yes there is a place for low res mesh and tex products but even some of those look pretty bad for this day and age.
OK this is just my personal opinion and take as you will.
I think there are a lot of vendors. I think some do very high quality work and I keep an eye out for their latest releases. I think some produce a new item every week or so and I pretty much ignore them.
The problem is there are two ways to make a living doing that. produce very high quality models and hope basically everyone sees your few releases and then buys them, at whatever price you charge, or churn out lots of models and charge bargain prices and hope a few people buy some of them.
Just I regret the male content is not the same quality and as much detailled as the female content.
It would be nice if the quantity of male content was a little larger as well. I went looking through the G8M clothing the other day and the options were, let's say, limited.
the powers at be say the female stuff out sells the male hence the lack of male clothing assets. So those of us that want more male related clothing seem to be a niche part of the market I'm afraid.
Personally, I think it's the opposite, but I guess that depends on what you are looking for. The hair, characters, and skin textures are amazing compared to Genesis 2 and before. Weapons, armour, spaceships, monsters etc are way better than they have ever been. You have new guys like Hershel Hoffmeyer creating some of the best creatures we've seen to date. That said, I think some of the other stores have gotten so much better that there isn't the huge gap that you used to see before.
If you want to discuss this fairly, you would have to look at individual vendors rather than the store as a whole.
With the store, there are a large number of new venders that have been having releases. The newer vendors may not have the same skills and experience (I say "may", some are very skilled) as the more seasoned vendors here. So it will take them some time to get up to speed.
As for the older vendors, it is doubtful that the quality has gone down, because most of the ones that I know are always working on ways to make their products better, and what new things they can add to their sets.
Yes, I think this too and it makes me sad :(
Overall tho, while I feel that some vendors (who will remain nameless) shouldn't meet the standards of Daz period (but it ain't up to me, obviously), I don't really think there's been a drop in quality per se, at least not among the established vendors.
Laurie
I don't think so; if the OP though thinks there is then I would raise a ticket, and explain why they thought that; offer what they consider a typical example of Daz's quality, and the piece they feel is inferior. I'm not conviced singleing out individual items would be fair.
I suspect that the introduction of IRAY (and the continued improvement in shaders), and now Dforce have changed peoples perceptions... And their expectations.
An example I notice a lot, is that cloth after dforce looks excellent, with realistic draping, but the perfect straight (and invariablly smooth) edges stand out - expecially when they have no depth. I would also expect different folks to notice different things, quite possibly this will depend on the scene we're working on.
This.. at least most of it.
I'm not here that long and I don't really know which vendors are "established". But from stuff I purchased I must say, that there are quite a few products that I'm not fully satisfied with, due to sometimes small but vital buggerances (like doors that don't open, missing toilets in a bathroom, dForce clothing without even some basic morphs (which make most clothes way more useable) etc.)
Sure, it would be unfair to tell the quality decreased in the whole store. Just some amazing products are not enough "polished" compared to the other products.
The only place I've seen a significant decline in quality is in the creating of the DIM packages. I have seen many, many, many typos in the path names lately ie. "General 8 Female" instead of "Genesis 8 Female" or poses ending up outside the Poses folder and other nonsense.
Yes, I've noticed that too, and I generally don't buy such products.
Razor sharp edges and corners on buildings and props is also a turn off for me, especially if mixed with items with smooth edges in the same set. Or textures with e.g. bricks which don't line up on corners of a building.
This is an excellent observation. I will quibblle with the phrase less detailed, but I agree with the larger point.
I think the definition of quality for an item designed for dForce varies in some dimensions from the definition of quality for items designed for conforming. In particular, I refer to wrinkle morphs and the underlying mesh design appropiate for creating wrinkle morphs. For example, many people will complain (appropriately) about a drop in quality if conforming sleeves and similar items look tubular. However, watch a classic film like "The Longest Day" and pay close attention to the sleeves of the uniforms of the German officers playing cards when first reports of the invasion come in. OMG - their sleeves appear tubular when their arms are extended and wrinkle when they move their arms, but the wrinkle flow depends on the direction of the move. Not all fabrics behave this way, but some will. In the past, the PAs do an amazing job with wrinkle morphs depending on whether the item was a flowing skirt, a more stiff uniorm, etc. Better quality, right?
But...
As a user of dForce and other draping functions, I tend to say "death to baked-in wrinkles!!!!" A person modeling to facilitate wrinkles will often create an underlying mesh that is distorted in ways that a sleeve is not when laid out on a table. (Edge flow). As a result, the cloth will not fold and extend in dForce like the sleeves of the soldiers' in The Longest Day. Instead, the edge loops pesent to facilitate wrinkle morphs (sometimes) controls the direction of folds even when the limb is moving in a different direction. The attempt to achieve realistic wrinkles for conforming items can (sometimes) undermine realism when used for draping. Lesser quality, right?
I do NOT think overall quality has declined. Instead, I think the PAs are doing an amazing job trying to serve both uses. However, sometimes there are tade-offs. Mesh design for conforming and draping sometimes has such trade-offs. A mesh designed to facilitate wrinkle morphs for a bent elbow can undermine draped wrinkles if the elbow is not bent but the shoulder is raised or the arm is twisted.
Now, to be honest, most of the time, this is being way too petty. No one watching the card-playing scene in The Longest Day thinks it doesn't look realistic just because the sleeves are someimes tubular. Yet we will see some critiques of a lack of realism if someone posts a render with tubular sleeves. All depends on context.
Bottom line - I really do want less emphasis on baked in wrinkle morphs. For me, such a change in emphasis would equal higher quality. For others, the same change would equal lower quality. I salute the PAs for doing such a great job trying to serve us all.
PS - agree that items designed for dForce can look too thin after draping, and I salute the PAs developing "post-dforce" cuff and hem morphs and other approaches designed to present thickness.
Soldiers uniforms are much thicker fabric which doesn't wrinkle as much as, say, a little girls summer dress. Problem is, dForce can't work with thick fabric yet. So everything we know from daily life consists if thick fabric, dForce will fail in our percerption.
One new(ish) trend that really annoys me is Daz allowing badly optimized products into the store. These items don't suffer from any lack of quality, but the vram and system ram requirements must make them unusable for many buyers.
I bought a vehicle model recently, that uses what I assume are substance painter textures - they look good, but absolutely zero attempt has been made to optimize the textures. There are lots of seperate surfaces, which is good, but every single surface, even tiny little areas on the model, have eleven different 4096px texture maps loaded into them. A quick, small test render with just the vehicle lit by a studio type hdri, used 9.6gb of vram, and 25gb of system ram.
I've got no problem with big, complicated sets, using lots of resources, but when items are submitted to the store that have such a blatant lack of optimization, they really should be getting sent back to the vendor, asking them to reduce the texture requirements before resubmitting the product. I mean, a tiny little cable, barely noticable on the underside of a vehicle doesn't need eleven 4096px diffuse, bump, normal, metalicity, roughness, etc, etc, maps.
/end rant.
Well I think quality has gone up but prices have too; some of the prices quite a bit actually. I typically don't buy characters except toon characters but for instance when a character like Maxx HD for the Brute 8 gets offered and it has all these features included that I've complained should be a part of the G8F/G8M bases but well then it is nothing but a lot of hard work and quality put into Maxx HD on the part of HellBoy. It is a character that has oily options, wet options, lots of skin color options, fibre mesh hair options, HD options, eye color options, SSS options ... so all those little details that let a character in a render be given a little context.
Maxx HD isn't the only awesome character - Virtual_Worlds has made sets of oriental Asian characters that look absolutely awsome. Then there is Dolby character and many more with Genesis 8. The DAZ Originals used to make the Pro Bundles are better than ever and more original too.
@ thepenguin99 I also like the Euro Style Apartment. With a little kitbashing (like removing the breaker box, the Bidet in the loo, and using wall light switches/outlets from the Create A Room set), it could also pass fo an older apartment in a stateside building. I wish there were more older "lived in" sets like this. Too many ultra modern modern flats (some without a loo).
@ Odd_Platypus I hear you on that. I have an older system, 24 GB system memory and a single GPU card. Having to go in and re-adjust all those maps can be an exercise in diminishing returns. I can understand high res maps for major portions of a vehicle, but on items that are barely or not even seen it makes no sense.
According to Daz, it can actually work with thick fabric.
I tend to agree with the OP's observations. I've said it before, since Daz purchased RDNA, QA has gone downhill. At first, I attributed it to the massive undertaking of getting the RDNA products into the store. But the return to the pre-RDNA standards I was used to and expecting didn't happen. Little things get past QA, leaving it up to the customer to file a ticket or return the product. Once in a while is one thing, but imo, it happens far more frequently than it use to.
I'm not talking about Daz accepting products that are substandard. I don't believe they do. I'm not even complaining the PAs make a mistake here and there. (We all make mistakes, typos, etc.) I'm talking about QA not testing a product thoroughly enough to find the mistakes before the product is released. One product that comes to mind is Kagiso, where some presets had different material settings than the rest. Daz finally got it fixed but as far as I know, his nails still load looking green—even though during the trouble ticket process i pointed out changing one color from green to gray fixed the problem!
In my runtime folder, I have a a subfolder named "texture" as opposed to "textures" where all the other product textures are located. And it's been more than two months since Tech Support verified the CS6 version of a photoshop brushes product I purchased fails installation via DIM, and they still haven't fixed it. That's on Daz, not the PA.
Also on Daz are the meta data issues for Smart Content. For example, I have all three of Jepe's Art Deco Statuette products, and Daz didn't even make the meta data consistent between the three products! And don't even get @barbult started on issues with Daz Connect!
Another issue I found was one PA who had two separate products that installed the textures directly in the textures folder. Once I was able to determine which products they were, I filed a trouble ticket. Daz fixed them. But the new file didn't remove the misplaced textures, (via DIM,) I had to do that manually.
I don't think the quality of the products have dropped, it's more a different choice of products that previously wouldn't have been accepted into the store plus less choices, so they do the best they can with what is offered to them.
I'lll spare you today.
Well..I've been using V3, V4, M4 "photoreal" skin textures since I began. Only the past two weeks have I started to look at G2 and G3 skins. I must say, other than the monique textures, I am quite surprised that I don't like any of the new textures. Not one. Granted, I'm a generation behind. I really havent starting using G8, but what I'm seeing from G3 textures I'd be a little upset if I didn't like the morphs so much.That's just me, and I know I'm in the absolute minority on this.
Clothes and props, environments are definitely getting better.
Poses, meh, about the same.
The morphs however, wow, I really love the diversity of new characters daz is releasing, really top notch work in my humble opinion..
that Euro apartment also is identical to the style of my house!
not sure about DAZ studio as I use Carrara and iClone but it loads nicely in both of those (the latter as usual has to be in sections due to 3Dexchange's limitations but fortunately it comes in sections that nicely load in place assembled afterwards )
I think the quality has gone up.
Maybe a wider quality range?
Hi
There is a free texture reduction script that cuts all textures on a select Item by half
each time you run the script.
I use it all of the time because I export to C4D for rendering and have
no use for all of those Ridiculous 4K textures slowing down my animation render times.
In fact none of us actually **need** 4K textures