Feeling old. :)
JonnyRay
Posts: 1,744
I've been a Daz Studio user since 2006. Some of the questions and complaints people have had lately make me feel old. Like questions about exporting Daz content to use in another rendering engine. "Back in my day, you rendered in Studio or Poser and you were grateful you had them!"
Or complaints about strand hair not showing in the viewport "When I was started this hobby NOTHING in the viewport ever looked like it did in a render, You did a test render, tweaked a setting, and rendered again. Two or three DOZEN test renders wasn't unusual!"
Oh also ... "In 2006 almost nothing was designed for Studio. We had to take Poser content and figure out how to tweak surface settings, etc. to get our renders to look anything close to how the promos looked!"
Hehe. I get that people today coming into this hobby have different expectations. And I can understand why they might be frustrated they can't do what they're trying to do. I just want to sit in my rocker and shake my cane at these whippersnappers who don't know how good they have it.
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Comments
Having been there since 2004 and the first DS public beta, I definitely know the feeling ;)
That long term, slow and steady learning curve helps to develop better artistry, rather than the simple, spoon fed, click one or two buttons, make art sameness. We all learn by doing, and the more steps we take, the better the learning.
You feel old? See my avatar? That's a Laura character.
I've been in this 3D business in some fashion (Vue, Poser, Bryce, DS, modelling) since 1997. Urgh. I was young when I started! LOL
Laurie
....and the whole internet was filled with tons of freebies from everywhere, and loads of free tutorials that ppl just did for the asking. I learned a lot of my C4D stuff from free tutorials. Most of the sites have been gone for years though. New ppl missed out on the good old days. But I have so many DVD's of stuff. Hope someday I can get many things converted to newer figures. I too remember the day of doing area render after area render to check things. Now we have nvidia preview (even if it's a resouce hog for me).
I have a literal cane, so I can shake it too.
Same date here! The only two things I remember about the first DS beta were that you could do pretty fast OpenGL animation, and that you could not move your mouse near the viewpoint whilst rendering or it messed up the image somehow. I stuck with Poser and Vue but kept trying each new version of DS, but couldn't "get" the interface and the content management. Finally, version 4.9 seemed to have it right for me - no idea what changed.
I am old
I've been around since DAZ was part of Zygote.
First Poser software I ever used was Poser 1. No facial features, no hair, no fingers and some sports clothing textures on one of the texture maps.
But you could render on an Intel i486 and a few measly megabytes of RAM.
First 3D software I ever bought was Imagine for the Commodore Amiga. That came without pre-modeled content, save for a cow, and left me very, very confused.
And before that, I just had my pencil. And home computers were used for playing Space Invaders. If you had the patience to type the code in basic. Data storage was on audio cassettes.
Now that's feeling old.......
+1
Embryonic users
i feel ya JohnnyRay, althougth I am just the opposite, I come from the outside 3D world of high end apps like max, Maya, C4D, Modo, Lightwave, etc and renderers such as Vray, Arnold and Maxwell in addition to various game engines. I am constantly amazed at how well all the polygons inside of Daz Studio work together to create the things we use, clothing, hair, figures, morphs, etc. In outside apps, that isn't how it works. you have to manaully move vertices and polys to even come close to how things are in DS.
you have new users that are new to 3D in a sense, they have had access to the highend apps and game engines and want the functionality they see here to carry over to them with exporting. The reality is, Daz Studio is what makes it all work, hence all the how to questions you see in the forums
In a sense, DS has us spoiled, LOL
I got my start with Ray Dream studio in the early ... 1990s? Granted there was probably a good 15 years scattered between now and then where I didn’t do anything, and I only really got serious in past few years.
I've done this before but I guess it's time to whip out the "I'm so old" speech again... I'm so old that when I began 3D stuff on a computer (early '70s), I had to write my own floating point arithmetic subroutines, write my own disk storage driver, hand calculate the coordinates of the end points of straight and curved vectors of my model, to be sent to an oscilloscope type storage display screen in wireframe mode only, photograph the screen, develop the negatives and make a paper print, then hand color the textures. And I used a quarter million dollar NASA computer the size of three refrigerators to do it with. It's a bit easier now.
But it sure beat scratching on cave walls.
yeah..me too. this "computer art" stuff is enough to make anybody old.
my thing was terrains ... Vista Pro is where I started, then Bryce 2.0 for PC.
Poser was next, I think...Poser 1 actually. So I'm real old.
I still have no clue what I'm doing
Anybody who'd rendered their first pics with a slipstick ?
Real old timey renders were called an abacusgraph.
Yay, Raydream Studio 5.5. I found a copy for the ridiculously low price of $100 shortly after they sold out to Eovia(?) who later "improved" it and remarketed it as Carrara. I kept getting each new version of Carrara but I did most of my model making in my old RayDream5.5. By the time Eovia finally fixed the god awful bugs in their "improvement" I'd lost interest in model making and Carrara and by then DAZ Studio had entered my world.
"Back in my day, you rendered in Studio or Poser and you were grateful you had them!"
Back in my day I prepared stuff in Poser and moved it over to Bryce to render in my Bryce scenes. I got told that I shouldn't post my renders in the Poser Gallery as they may have been prepped in Poser but they were rendered in Bryce. Since then all my renders have been posted as Bryce renders and I tell people I use poser as a plug-in for Bryce.
It's good if you feel old at some thing as long as you also know how the new stuff works. ;-)
I can kitbash the hell out of anything now and make it look pretty after years of practice, but it's hard to get into this thing and find the time to learn and I'm still learning to this day. So I do what I can to use that experience to make it a little bit easier for the starters whenever I can
Slightly OT, but...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAdlkunflRs
I still have both halves of what became Carrara... Infini-D and Ray Dream... they reside on my old G3 Mac... I got them from work, but we never ended up using them for much... I think Ray Dream was the only one I ever really used on my own... I bought a book for it too.
I’m very tempted to dig that computer out to see how dated those programs seem now...
I also have InfiniD on a G3
. IIRC it had a couple of features that DS lacks, like built in particle emitters with collision and gravity, dynamic lense flares and motion blur. Also both a mesh editor and a spline patch modelling app built in
Remember when Posette and Dork were the elite figures and Dr. Geep was our guide?
I dabbled with Truespace, then really didn't get into 3D art again until 2010. The biggest thing about being around for a while is you tend to have better knowledge of what's going on behind the scenes, when the "make-art" button doesn't work you have a better idea of how to tackle the problem. But yeah, we came a long way.
...yeah I remember that. Used Pen plotters and when our lab got one of those newfangled Tektronix wireframe monitors (very expensive I may add), it was like heaven. I then moved on to the first colour Macs working in a freehand 2D programme called PixelPaint™. As 3D CG was evolving (even the film industry was experimenting with it I took another stab at it for a while, but left as I still felt so "disconnected" having to write and compile pages and pages of code compared to picking up a pencil or a paintbrush. Back then, I dreamed about programmes that approached the process more from an artist's rather than programmer's POV...like the ones we have today.
In just the 11 years I've been working with Daz, I've seen a lot of change and a lot of 'growth" in the software,. Indeed it has come quite a distance from those 32 bit days when GI had to be "faked" (Light Dome Pro) and much of the content still used Poser materials that needed to be adjusted to look good.
Back in the day all we had was a line printer ;) And you could actually do some pretty good pictures on them.
If I really want to go back, I started graphics more seriously when I was in college in the early 80s. Wrote my own scan line rendering engine and created a simulation that could generate random trees based off a Siggraph paper I read.
I think I still have some printouts of "art" I did on a TRS-80 printed on a dot matrix printer, but that's more advanced than some of the amazing stuff I saw done with ascii characters on line printers using the density of the ink for different characters for shading.
My H.S. computer teacher made me move out of the class and do self-study when I was coding an animation of a truck driving back and forth across my screen on the first day as he was telling the rest of the students what a keyboard and monitor were. And 5 1/4" diskette drives that held an amazing 720 KB of data!