Ok, catch me up here...
The_Amazing_Rob
Posts: 6
Hi all
I used to be into this scene years ago - probably a little too much. I ran a little site we'll just call RM for short. I've decided to try again and use some restraint this time. For now anyway. LOL
However, things are a little different now so can someone catch me up here? When I bailed it was Victoria 4, Stephanie, Aiko and The Girl and I think I was using Poser 6. Now I see Genesis X, Daz Studio, no PC library of 1000's of free Daz goodies. I can probably resurrect my old archives from my official Daz back up product discs but will any of that older stuff work with today's DS? Also, is Poser still a thing or is DS the cat's meow?
Thanks in advance for any abbreviated history I can get out of this.
The artist formerly known as Grandpoobah.
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Greetings,
This could be fun. :)
So...DAZ used to make figures for Poser. They came out with their own application which was, fundamentally, Poser compatible, DAZ Studio. Eventually they wanted to do MORE than what Poser could do with the figures (because the DAZ company was fundamentally driven by the folks who made the main figures) so they came out with 'Genesis', as the follow-on to V4/M4...some 5+ years after V4 debuted. Anyway, Genesis was amazing, a single figure that could be made male or female, handled subdivision nicely, and had a ton of other useful features. It was amazing and everybody was angry. Oh, and they made DAZ Studio Pro free. Which was amazing. And everybody was angry. Partly because Poser couldn't use it. Smith Micro just wasn't pushing the technology, because they didn't have the modelers to think about HOW to push the technology to make better people. There's lots of arguments about who's right and who's left. Don't care.
Then Victoria 5 and Michael 5 were based on Genesis technology, and they were pretty cool. Then DAZ decided that their old store was breaking REALLY badly, like losing stuff and failing miserably, and so they changed to a new store software. And it was amazing, and everybody was angry. (In fairness it had a lot of bugs early on, and it still is lacking certain nice features, but it's using modern technology, so folks have been able to build software to smooth over some of those lacks.) . Oh, and it had its own forum, and the old forums were lost in the transition. They hung in there in archive form for a while, but eventually they just went away. The 'art zone' was more quick to go.
Eventually DAZ added a gallery area, and it was pretty darn cool, but everybody was angry. (It still would be nice if they supported content warning tags, so folks could post less family friendly items, but that raises other issues. Don't care.)
Anyway, so Genesis was a single body that morphed into a male and female, and after a while, folks LOVED it, because you could mix and match morphs across everybody in various ways, and it made KILLER monsters. It also included Autofit, which over time got really good at taking Gen4 items and fitting them to Genesis, and there were ways to apply the textures easily to Genesis. Also Genesis Generation X allowed folks to migrate Gen4 morphs into Genesis, and it was cool.
So two years later, Genesis 2 came out and they split the base into Female and Male again (G2M and G2F) because it turns out that modeling clothes for a single base causes significant problems especially with breast bridging. Victoria 6 came out first, and six-ish months later Michael 6.
And Genesis 2 had other cool features, and it was amazing, and everybody was angry. If I recall correctly this was when HD morphs came in, which allowed you to pose in low resolution and render in VERY high definition, allowing for skin, knee, knuckle, and more, details. Genesis Generation X2 came out to move morphs around, and G2F used V5's UV, so a lot of the characters moved over. (I'm really over simplifying this, sorry...) It was really nice, and folks made some good things for it, and a lot of people still use it as their base character.
Anyway, it did okay... So two years later Genesis 3 came out and they...gods, you know, I forget. They made a bunch of changes, and frankly it's one of my favorite models. Anyway, they did some things that made G3F amazing, and everybody was angry. They came out with Victoria 7, and a few months later Michael 7. This is also when they introduced Iray, a new rendering technology which kicks such amazing major ass that everybody's angry about it. (Mostly that they can't get the best video cards with GPUs to make that rendering technology blazingly fast, because those same video cards are the main fuel of the cryptocurrency frenzy.)
I really am not going to go into it, too much, but we lost a few good forum members and PA's to the inevitable march of time, including the one who did Genesis Generation X. So invariably DAZ came out with Genesis 8 (?!) after two years. So Genesis 8 was named because we really, really don't want the confusion of 'Genesis 4' being the latest thing and 'Generation 4 (V4/M4/etc.)'. Since Victoria was using these incremental numberings, they just moved Genesis forward to Genesis 8, and pushed out a Victoria 8 and Michael 8, so everything's in sync. So now it's harder to move morphs to Genesis 8, but Genesis 8 also finally changed the fundamental UV mapping used, so you REALLY can't move V4 character textures to G8 either, without a lot of work. So...that happened, and they made AMAZINGLY realistic characters with it.
And everybody was angry.
And DAZ added 'dForce' which allowed them to do dynamic+conforming clothing built into DAZ, and it works really nicely (although it explodes sometimes, it's getting better), and shockingly not as many people were angry about that.
Oh, and somewhere in there they added a whole thing where you could download encrypted products to prevent piracy, and everybody was SUPER angry, and one brave user suggested that the items should 'unlock' after a year, and DAZ agreed, and there was much rejoicing, and then DAZ released maybe 100 items out of the THOUSANDS they release per year since then that were actually encrypted. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So...
Here we are, on a new forum, new store, new platform (DAZ Studio) with a new rendering technology (Iray), dynamics technology (dForce), character technology (Genesis 8, with a ton of other 'little' technologies included like dual quaternion skinning, HD morphs and more), and...well...pretty much the same old sales, and everybody's pretty much copacetic right now.
But something will change in the next few months, and everybody will be angry for a little while, and then they'll make it work. Because that's what we do. Because ultimately it's more fun to make it work than to stay angry. Some folks will find their hill to die on, and decide not to move forward, but everybody else will find new ways of working, and new amazing things that they can do. Because the entire community is about creation, not about being angry. And that's [profanity removed] awesome.
So yeah. That's the abbreviated history. And oh my god, I made so many mistakes above, but it was fun to write. :)
-- Morgan
its basically a whole new world
a few neanderthals like yours truely fight to survive using software other than DAZ studio but we are a dying breed
OMG Morgan.
That must have taken forever to type - I sooo appreciate you taking the time and effort to do that. I totally feel almost up to date now and it would have taken forever to glean that info going post to post. So it looks like all the drama is still alive and well, that's good to know. I visited the rendo gallery last night and it appears nobody there is taking advantage of the high end rendering features available in DS yet? LOL I also visited a couple of the more "mature" 3d sites, they definitely aren't using iRay or dForce in those renders.
So much has changed...and so much has stayed the same.
It looks like I need to just suck it up and just buy new content if I want to take advantage of all the cool bells and whistles availble in todays DS as far as the figure and texture rendering goes. I presume all the cool old school scene contents (DM's scenes, freebie props, non-figure related items) will still work in DS. I'll download the new studio this evening and start downloading my content, I think I'll just install to a removable drive this time around as previous experience showed that this hobby quickly fills up a hard drive.
I already have a monster video card in a stout desktop, can't wait to kill the system grinding out NVIATWAS x 100. Now, who's having a good contest....
:D
Thanks again Morgan, I really appreciate you!
Happy Monday!
Rob
....and users are still angry, LOL
Yeah, not sure what they're angry about, but they are ;)
Laurie
As a fairly new user, that was informative and filled in a few gaps from what I've gathered peripherally.
Also written in an amusing way. :) So thank you, CypherFOX.
yeah, you are right, I am actually managing to bank half my income now for retirement so should not be angry,
this was until they broke stuff for Carrara an expensive hobby for me indeed
am actually not angry at all just a bit sad like losing a nice pot plant
Actually most of the old content you have is still usable, at least the prop items. All the Poser stuff that used to work in DAZ still does. You may want to retexture some of it, textures have gotten a lot more detailed over the years. The early stand alone characters are still usable also, but look dated outside of toons.
Things have really gotten quite a bit better. Er, you're not still using a 486 processor with 16 mb of RAM are you? :P
I think DAZ's biggest missteps in recent years were the 'DRM' (which wasn't DRM) and 'Cloud' (which wasn't a cloud) features. The encryption stuff, mercifully, never really took hold, and they rebranded the 'cloud' pretty quickly ad 'DAZ Connect'.
Cypher, that was an amazing take on the last ten years of Daz history. It would make a great video with someone time-lapse sketching illustrations to support your narrative.
Wow, that would be a lot of angry faces, there....
I second this. It would also need "Angry Mob Sounds." And villagers. With pitchforks.
The cloud they refered too is not Daz Connect but the server with your account download info which you can download from at any time manually, with DIM or Connect. The term cloud was just not the correct one to use.
The cloud is the dense thick fog that hovers over each new release, fueled by the users hyperventilating over changes that often break what was.
And if you prefer Poser, you can use Genesis and G2 with companion files and Rendo has a link to a way to use G3 in Poser, not sure about G8. The Genesises are a bit clunky in Poser though, And you can still use your V4's et al in DS and IRay them! V4 still looks great in my opinion, you just can't do a lot of the new cool mixing and matching with her unless you move all your morphs individually to Genesis or G2 with Gen X & Gen X 2. I think you can even get them onto G3s and there are tutorials on how to get G3 on to G8. So if you really like certain V4 characters, you can still use them on the whole Genesis line (with a lot of work and PA add-ons)
Use of "the cloud" was/is in reference to how files are deployed/acquired; i.e. to/from a distributed Content Delivery Network (CDN); see cloud computing deployment models (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Deployment_models). This hasn't changed, and the term is just as appropriate today as it was before the "Daz Connect" brand for the associated web service provided by Daz was coined. Reasons this deployment model was chosen include (but are not limited to) distributing the load/bandwidth across multiple servers around the globe, and by doing so increase the speed at which customers are able to acquire purchased assets.