Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
At least one person on the forums wants to be able to install only one or the other of the included shader presets, I want to be able to download only the parts of a compressed file that have changed (using DIM); others want other things that may be different yet. DAZ can't please us all, so they choose the route that will make the largest number of users happy.
I get that, as I'm sure folks at DAZ do. The problem is that they have to look at what the best options are when it comes to investing their development resources and make what is most likely to sell enough to cover the investment. We don't always see the picture from their point of view.
There are PAs that actively lose character sales from me just because I want to avoid another copy of a texture.
This should be a thing. Notably, it used to and it worked just fine. A lot of items still have separate DS and Poser installers. People just don't split up their packages anymore for whatever reason (maybe a subset of customers gets confused?)
Frankly? Not my concern. My concern is making fantastic renders from the stuff I buy. If a skin resoure is the same one, spice it up a bit more than a set of eyebrows and a tat and a diffuse job. And if you include anatomical elements for goodness sake, make sure they fit properly.
Look, there are PA's who make fantastic body shape products. Male-M3dia for example makes really high quality characters with everything properly working together and tested. He no longer includes textures, but you don't need those, because his morphs are so good. I've never bought a broken Male-M3dia product because his standards are quite high. He doesn't jump on the bandwagon of pushing out the same-ol-same-ol stuff, his characters and morphs have quality and are unique and different.
It's hard to know what you are getting from behind the scenes when you purchase a character these days. I used to think that using a MR was a bad thing, then discovered that I had two characters I bought from rendo for GF3 from two seperate vendors that both used the same MR, yet the results were very different in a good way and one is my fav texture to use now. I do pay attention to how many character products a vendors releases as I firmly believe in the quality vs quantity scenario.
If a considerable number of folks did this, they might be concerned; if just a few do it, they probably don't notice. And, they (the PAs) really don't know who is buying their products.
I can see this if there is considerable space savings to be had by splitting them up, which is the case with many of the items I own that come in both DS and Poser versions. When the space savings is likely to be less than a megabyte (which is the case with material presets), not so much. And yes, the single file distribution of character amd textures most likely helps avoid confusion as to what needs to be downloaded to have a "full character".
WHAT? You mean the characters we're buying are not new original characters with original textures - but are just ALTERED characters and textures that have already been sold???????
As I have said numerous times here in similar forum threads, I also discovered that so many of my male characters had the same Merchant Resource textures, albeit coloured a different shade. (I'm sure this also applies to female skin textures). There is definitely a shortage of new scanned body texture images, and I can understand why due to the cost of hiring models etc. However, this is why as more characters emerge they all start to look related, unless there are some very strong body and facial morphs.
To my mind some PA's have tried to overcome this skin texture shortage by releasing characters with the same textures as their previous releases, but with either extreme makeup or tattoo options painted on.
I recentry purchased Zev0's skin builder for G3f just to see what this product could achieve, and found the variations of skin texture it produced using the products variables was quite amazing. Not only could they be used on Genesis 3 female but on G8F, G3M and G8M. With a different body and face morph a new character was instantly born. So I can see where the idea for a character creation program like The Sims games had, makes logical sense.
However, it is also interesting to see that a Base character will look virtually the same no matter what skin texture you apply. It's the face and body morphs that make the difference, and I feel in certain PA's characters they are not sufficiently different to stop some of their characters from looking 'related', if not 'almost identical'.
Personally I like the concept of being able to create a completly new character, and feel that beards, body hair, and facial hair, should all be something that, where possible, are options that can be added to a skin texture separately. (Unless of course the MR resource skin was naturally hairy).
I don't know what the ultimate answer is, and I guess PA's, like us, can only work with the materials they have at their disposal, but I still think a character producing program/script for use within Daz Studio is still a great idea.
Hey, that might be why I'm discussing the problem openly!
A lot of them from the same PAs yes have very little more than small color changes.
I have no issues with reusing the same merchant resource skins as such except as said you do not need all the extra space wasted on your harddrive.
I usually buy the characters for the morphs and accessories often one has a facial hair etc too.
I treat it like a video game customisation such as in Skyrim, trying different shapes then skins etc till I get the look I want, I often try several head presets and body presets and add some morphs.
Yes. This is a fairly common practice as far as the skins are concerned. There are only so many skin resources available, and they cost money. Also it isn't uncommon to reuse model shapes. Genesis 8 is basically Genesis 3 with a few details added but the shape is basically the same. Michaels's skin was re-used for Base Male, and Karen I believe was reused for base female.
Thank you for this comment. I really appreciate it. It does take time to put together a unique shape,then make sure it bends well as I'm usually going against the base shape. That process is taking longer due to some family issues and a combination hurricane evacuation/vacation where my home is one place, my stuff another and I'm in Japan for a few weeks... but I'm trying to get a few things submitted soon.
@male-M3dia That sounds cool. It will be neat to see what you come up with and lucky you to be in Japan!
Hope everything works out with your family stuff that has got to be stressfull and looking forward to seeing those morphs!
WOW. I missed that you were doing this until this conversation. Instant buy of all the G3 stuff, greatly hoping for G8 once you get settled.
Absolutely agree.His morphs give me the ability to make beautiful and unique men.
While many people love them, I don't want to use the cookie cutter lips and noses that many PA's pump out.
And I can't wait to see what Male Media comes up with for G8!!
He also morphs all parts of the body which is useful to providing diversity in looks and appearance. I like that he includes anatomical element morphs as well. He is a cut above the rest as most pa's don't bother with elements when providing morph packs.
Well outside 30 day, they are basically pretty good, my point is DS should be more upfront about what is being sold.
So DAZ3D QA should check the skin textures and insist on unique ones for each character or say it's similar to another one on the sale page? Okay, but how many buyers are going to care as long as they get a "complete" character?
To be honest, I don't know what other people care for regarding this, however to me it is an issue, and I will check more carefully in future.
Oh yes, I agree, FW stuff is made to a good standard.
Agreed, I have at least 15 of his products, all good.
Not everyone sees it that way, and not everyone may agree that selling character morphs without textures is a good businesss practice for the PAs they buy from.
@Patoklos I agree with you. I would prefer more transparency on the skin resource issue. If you buy here long enough though you will come to see which pa's do this more and which pa's alter the resources a lot so they are worth buying again.
The topic of this thread is not who should post what, please keep the discussion on topic rather than on each other.
I think there is a slight disconnect between what different individuals are saying here. Let me see if I can understand the two sides.
Some Vendors seem to be saying:
1. Vendors generally think of morphs and skin textures as a single entity, and market them as such because they are complimentary units. Much effort is invested into ensuring that these skin textures will appear as expected when applied to this particular figure morph. Those same guarantees cannot be made for textures that are applied to morphs which do not match. Texture stretching is to be avoided, absolutely no stretching is the best bet and the only way to ensure quality.
2. High quality and unique photo references of real people are expensive as well as very difficult to come by and manipulate into 3d textures. Hand drawn skin textures created with procedurals and brushes with realistic levels of detail are also very time consuming to create, with only a very few indiviudals who can truly build a texture from a blank page to photoreal standards without resorting to photo references of real people. For this reason it is not hard to imagine that Vendors would focus more on unique morphs than on unique textures, since morphing allows more room for artistic expression and specificity compared to photo reference skins that were made by God, with too much rich detail to replace with artsy tweaks.
3. The time required to provide unique never before seen skin textures with every single new character morph would add incredible amounts of man hours and subsequent retail pricing to the products, making them unfeasible in the long run for both the vendor and the customers.
4. Vendors are artists too, and create the characters they sell as the vendors themselves envision them. For this reason it will not ever be possible to produce content that pleases everyone, since there is no single piece of art that everyone agrees is ideal. If vendors were to depart from their artistic vision approach in favor of a more technical approach focused on enabling freedom for the user beyond the original scope of the vendor, the artistic vision of the vendor could be lost in the process. All vendors content would end up looking the same, completely interchangeable. How much fun would that be? Probably not much.
Some Customers seem to be saying:
1. When I look at new characters in the store I am looking at the morphs and the skin textures as separate items, with their values appraised in isolation of one another. Sometimes the quality of one aspect exceeds the quality of the other.
2. If I see a unique character is sold that includes a skin texture that I already own in some other fashion, then roughly half of the value of this new character has been lost to me. Sorry.
3. If I see a unique character whose morphing looks like something that I could possibly dial myself with the standard tools availble in DS, then roughly half the value of this new character has been lost to me. Sorry again
4. If I see a unique character that includes both a morph that I could easily reproduce on my own as well as a skin texture that I already own in some shape or form, then the total value of this new character has been lost to me. Soooo Sorry. Really!
5. If I see a character morph that I really like, but find that it has a unique UV that is unlikley to be supported beyond this particular figure, then most if not all of the value of this character has been lost to me. Fool me once!
6. Vendors most likely are too concerned with protecting end users from a little "texture stretching" from time to time. Bottom line, skin textures need to be less figure specific and more flexible to be worth the financial expenditure, with careful crafting that allows them to be used with different shapes without distracting levels of stretching occuring too regularly, otherwise skin textures have very little intrinsic value. The only reason why textures stretch as they do today is because vendors dont construct their skins from the start in a manner that voids this unwantd outcome by providing adequate amounts of detail in key areas. The vendors limits are not my limits as the end user. Let me decide how best to use my content.
Okay, so have I done a good job of explaining the two sides of this discussion? If so, then which one of these two viewpoints do we think is the one that will be the deciding factor? On the one hand one might assume the Customers will win, because they are the ones buying the content. But on the other side, customers can only purchase the content that the vendors have decided to sell. Soooo, what do we do from here?
I'm not sure we are exactly hearing from the lions share of vendors or customers. Most are pretty much remaining silent about the issue.
The bottom line and a the end of the day is... I think is what sells. That is really what matter. And certain repeat items, rightly or wrongly do sell, so they continue to be sold.
As a customer I have no illusions that I am buying an original skin a lot of the time. You can see this if you pull up the texture files. Some vendors however do a better job than others of making the character 'their own.' by Substantially altering the skin from the basic resource. Others barely do. It isn't just vendors who do that but the DAZ commisioned characters who also have some repeat texturing Thats the business.
At the end of the day what matters to me is usability. If an item has a texture issue, I won't buy from that vendor. If a vendor repeats himselef or herself a lot, I won't buy from that vendor. It doesn't matter their reasons for why this occurs or that it is their unique vision, because those aren't things I even think of when buying something.
There is a niche for vendors who resell similar skins and morphs. Many don't notice or don't care. Some who don't have large libraries may not have this content yet as well.
I think people are getting more saavy about what they are buying now, so finding out that they are purchasing similar stuff can be a bit... Surprising, and I don't blame them.
Thus I think it probably should be something that should be more transparent about to avoid the shock in people who do care.