March Madness Vendor-Buyer Etiquette
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Its really hard to keep track of everything we use in a promo. It's not a problem with me cause most of the time my pack are large and I only use what's included in the pack. There is also a problem with it cause some PA pay promo artist to do their promos and we have no clue what is in it. We are also not allowed to list products from other stores. It's also complicated because we may not remember which store a product came from.
I liken this to the phrase, "Part of a complete breakfast." It's understood you're only getting the cereal in the box, and not the milk, fresh fruit, bowl, spoon, and table mat!
As long as the description is clear what IS included, all is fair.
itsy bitsy, don't remember so itsy ...
Click on the image of what item interests you, and the product or PA page will open.
but dunno know if want to click on it, cuz i can't read the name. well, i can read the cute3d okay, think is cute3d, is plain grey underneathe. needed sandals a few weeks ago.
I think if people are really concerned about the March Madness newbies, the right solution is to open a thread, possibly in the New User forum, and start posting tips. Maybe one a day, so it stays near the top. You can post things like, "The prose describing the product is often useless stock verbiage; the juicy info is in the What's Included section below. Be alert for number of morphs (or whatever)," and "The Readme of the product can be seen before purchase at this link," and "Unless you're buying a bundle, you're getting a bald, naked character," (although the last is clear and obvious if you work through the tutorials offered by Daz at startup) and "there are two rendering engines. If you're here to make cartoons, switch your rendering engine to 3DL".
Like someone else said, I avoid using items that require credit in my renders like the plague as well. Sometimes its almost impossible to even know what the heck I used, as I've gone through 12 outfits and picked out bits and pieces and looked at 20 different necklaces before deciding and tried on 6 different hairstyles, and did I use eyes from this product or from one of my other characters? I'm not a PA but I can certainly sympathize. And if I didn't have my content organized into my own categories most of the stuff i wouldn't know what it is anyway because the thumbnails and folders are completely unclear. I couldn't give credit if I wanted to. And, when I am creating, having to write down or remember every last bit, would totally kill my creativity.
So, while I appreciate the PA's doing it, I certainly don't have a problem with them if they don't. And, if I really need to know and just can't live without something, and no one on the forums knows, I can always contact the PA myself and ask. Most of the PA's I've run into are some of the nicest people out there.
the part i don't understand, is using stuff in promos that isn't in the daz store.
a specific hard to find prop could understand,
but hair and outfits, there hundreds hairs in daz store, why use 1 from rmp?
When I first started using DAZ a couple of years ago, I thought that giving credit to any additional products used was a great idea. Now I am not so sure, having seen how products can be discontinued with no notice, sites go out of business or be gobbled up (ala RDNA), etc. All those hyperlinks to other products are going to require site maintenence regularly to weed out the dead links that will inevitably accumulate and I don't know if the amount of extra work would be offset by people making DAZ store purchases based on those links. Plus, there are always vendors who have used freebies as props in their promos - do we really need a link to one of those when the vendor has likely customized textures that do not exist in the original freebie?
Maybe in a couple years from now, my thinking will change yet again. But it's definitely not a black-and-white-issue. The only time I still get irked is when a new Pro Bundle comes out and the character is shown wearing an outfit/hair that is not contained within the bundle. But that's not the PA's problem, it is something out of their control.
Because these are artists. The art takes you where it takes you.
Sure, it might be nice for the big bad corporate overlords in DAZ Tower to never allow anyone shopping here to even be aware of the larger 3D universe, but the reality is most of us are aware. And if we're not, we should be - as artists and creators. I recently bought a character, in part because of a hair object. That hair I later find out is not on this site, but offered on another site (gasp!). So I got it there, and discovered another vendor to expand my pallet. Did DAZ lose sales because of that? No - I bought the character, and I may not have bought it if it wasn't for the promo with that hair style.
Overall I think this an odd complaint and too much energy is going into defending something that isn't an issue.
Greetings,
i really believe this is doable...
The key trick is creating a corpus of file names of all the existing products. I think that's doable using the DIM and/or Connect API, but even in the absence of that it could be mostly extricated from the public README's.
-- Morgan
How does that work when using morphs and shaders and stuff?
Greetings,
Most shaders have texture map files that would be unique, or MDL files referenced. Morphs typically require the morph reference file, which is why it won't look the same if you load it in a library that doesn't have that morph.
The real issue is poses; poses just change numbers on the angles, and leave no trace otherwise. That's hard to manage. I could probably do it if I had 100% of the poses... At least I could say that a given pose was X% similar to any given pose. But I'm not going to do that. :-)
Everything else leaves fingerprints in the .DUF file.
-- Morgan
I'm not sure even that is needed, for Daz items at least - clearly the sceen file has enough information for DS to figure out which products are needed, owned, and not isntalled in order for it to offer to isntall them on loading a saved scene so prsumably it would be possible, if the right stuff is exposed to scripting, to get the information (of course it would not account for alterations to settings, and might well not cover poses at least).
I love it when PAs list items in their promos, but I can understand if they don't have the time. What drives me crazy is when Daz Originals don't list them. It's their market, why on earth wouldn't they take the time to list the other products to drive sales there???
The most like option is that the content used in the promo image isn't out yet. Either it is being released the same day or in the day or so following release.
That is a valid excuse when they are using outside vendors. However I have seen vendor images that have a disclaimer statement identifying excluded props without identifying the outside source.
Well put ... but I am busy too. I have had to use the "guess this item" thread and was grateful when I got an answer, surprisingly from an unrelated busy vendor not too busy to help. By that I mean a helpful vendor with multiple items, a PC+ artist. That helpful artist is now on my A-list and lucky for me lists additional props.
Maybe making a buyer hunt down information that may be readily available isn't inconsiderate. It's like going to an ATM that doesn't work. Maybe it's a malfunction.
I agree. But when it comes to character hair, or an outfit, you would think when DAZ products are used as additional items Daz would have an algorithm that could identify them via meta data. I mean if I used someone's hair or outfit and tried to resell it they would know in a heartbeat! Here's an example: I support FeralFey. She doesn't always list additional products but when she can she does.
I boycott the ones that typically never list it. Maybe you can explain this one. Pheonix by Fred Winkler Art (a great artist in my opinion). The Lani hair (a newer 2016 item) is available at DAZ but I had to hunt it down and my time is as valuable as his. For the record I have supported products from him in the past especially where attribution ocurred but I'm too busy to continue to scavenger hunt DAZ.
Ditto.
An "I bet you might also be interested in these excluded items" or whatever, with thumbnails, would overall increase sales and be a win win for most parties. Typically I google the item and sometimes find it elsewhere. Just a FYI when one hits another site it's easy to meander around their shop and everyone does have a budget.
Except they have the numbers already to demonstrate that it's not an increase in overall sales. It's a courtesy that costs them time without recompense that they often perform anyhow.
It takes literally 20 seconds to post a thread asking the community if they can identify an item. It sounds like NOTHING anyone has said here, despite almost everyone disagreeing with you, has even begun to chip away at your unreasonable expectations of the PAs. You're entitled to your opinion, and I'm entitled to mine. I think the community has gone above and beyond with all the responses explaining why it's hardly ever financially worth while for the PAs to do so - given that time is money and the little return that is seen for their efforts when it comes to tracking down and listing all the items in their promos. If you honestly, even after all these responses explaining to you why you're pretty much over reacting and expecting too much, are sticking with your "OMG I have to BOYCOTT anyone who doesn't list all the things in their promos" then that's your prerogative. We tried.
So boycott DAZ then, because they are possibly the "worst offenders". And if you won't (and, of course, you won't) then why bother talking about boycotts and such at all?
"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."
- Groucho
Please keep the discussion on the topic, not the particpants.
WOW! This thread showed up with 7 new posts so I clicked on it and found my draft still here. I was going to type this and then felt it was just more noise.
The boycott is a passive threat to either fix this or I won't $upport you. I have no problem with it.
The counter arguments as to why it did not happen or does not happen range from logical reasons to excuses to sheer difficulty.
OKAY. We all have reasons why we buy items and reasons why we skip over them. Why some vendors - we buy almost everything they make and some others that we'll use free stuff instead of buying anything from them.
This has ceased to be productive and a mod.....
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Funny that one has showed up....
gimmie what I want or I will go to ground and kick my legs
oooh that feels better
For props I don't mind if there are additional items/animals/characters placed in the promo renders as long as they include 1 or 2 non-textured renders showing just what is included in the product. For characters I think everybody soon learns what you get included usually doesn't include the clothes/hair in the promos.