What inspired you to start purchasing 3D content?
3Diva
Posts: 11,981
This week is my 3 year anniversary of my first 3D content purchase. I'd been a lurker for a few months and worked with mainly freebies for a while. I kept seeing freebies pop up for this really unique and fun looking figure named "Star!". I was determined that I wasn't going to spend any money at this "3D hobby thing". At the time I was financially strapped and wanted to stick to using freebies and Daz Studio (which, thankfully, is also free - otherwise I never would have gotten into 3D content.).
After seeing a particularly cute render of Star! I knew I just had to get her. So she became my first 3D content purchase. I have since then moved on to having purchased a TON of 3D content - and have also become a PA and enjoy creating 3D content for others. That never would have happened if Daz3D wasn't so generous (and, imo, smart) with releasing their fantastic Daz Studio program for free and then charging for the content. It allows those who otherwise never would have been able to get into 3D art and 3D content purchasing a place to learn, get their feet wet, and then if/when they have the desire to, start purchasing content. Daz3D's fantastic free program and Lady Littlefox's gorgeous figure is what lead me to not only being a customer but now a content creator as well. :)
These days I get a lot more use out of Star 2.0 due to there being more products for her, since 2.0 is built off of Genesis 3 Female, but Star! Original Figure will always be my "first 3D love" and the figure that got me hooked. What product or purchase was your first? What brought you in and made you "take the plunge" to start purchasing 3D content? Do you still use the product that drew you in? What program did you start with? Was it Poser or Daz Studio or something else? I'd love to hear what brought you guys into this awesome and fun world of 3D art! :)
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Physical disability. Couldn't stand at easel, hold paint brushes etc for long enough, not to mention dropping stuff, knocking stuff over and generally making a mess that exhausted me to clean up.
Yeah, I can see why 3D art would be preferable - definitely a lot less messy. lol At least when you spill your runtime the only mess that gets made is when the various generations of Victoria brawl over who's prettier. :P
How long have you been doing 3D art? And what program do you use? If you don't mind me asking. :)
Mostly DS > PSP and/or Rebelle and/or Painter Essentials
I still manage to make a mess, dragging and dropping folders to parts unknown when my hand miss functions.
Edit: Missed the last question. If by 3D art you mean on a computer, then this time round, 4 and a half years about.
Had a play with Poser back in '99 or '00, couldn't get to grips with it.
If you mean working three dimensionality in general, then I've been sculpting, carvng and modelling for... well since close to forever or seems like it anyway.
I started with Poser 3 ages ago and there wasn’t much you could do with it besides pose and morphs, can’t even remember there being skins! I loved creating my own paper dolls as a kid and this was like that but in 3D. I don’t think I even rendered back then, just a lot of posing and morphing, mostly exaggerated skinny models. Then I really got into the Sims and liked creating my own textures for them. Then I got Poser 7 as a gift from a friend and was thrilled but couldn’t afford much at Daz and asked my parents for Millennial Girls for my birthday and back then for that product you had to apply the skin manually with nodes and I was trying to put on a freckle texture and had no idea how. I called Daz and they answered the phone and explained to me step by step how to do it! How times have changed!
Yikes! Yeah, that would make a bit of mess. Hopefully, that doesn't happen very often. Do you use DIM? If you use DIM you shouldn't have to manually drag and drop folders (so less chance of a mishap lol). :)
My design partner in SIMS2 sent me a link for Poser. I had never even heard of it, but since I like to model in 3DSMax, she thought I'd be interested. I started playing with the default Jessie and included content in Poser and was blown away at how cool it was.Didn't take long before I wanted more realistic content and I discovered DAZ (and Rendo) and picked up V3 and a few addons and It has been a money pit ever since, LOL.
Whao! They personally took person to person customer calls? Yeah, they must have had a MUCH smaller customer base back then. I'm sure they'd probably need a TON of people just answering calls all day if they still did that. lol
Mellennial Girls - that's pre-Victoria 4 correct? You've been doing this for quite some time. :) Awesome!
Do you still use mainly Poser, or are you a Daz woman now? lol Or do you use both?
I was browsing the web and saw an image by Guitta Bertaud about 1996 or 97 that was done in Vue d'Esprit. I knew I had to have it. So, I bought Vue 2 and knew I wanted to add people and animals to my scenes, so I bought Poser 4. Somewhere along the line, Poser took over and I used it for many, many years. About 4 years ago I switched over to DS out of sheer frustration with the company that owns Poser and here we are :).
My first purchase was..oh geeze....way too long ago. My first DAZ purchase that sticks in my mind was Millennium Woman, otherwise known as Victoria 1
Laurie
• What product or purchase was your first? First product was the "Anime Star Fighter" Bundle that was offered as a freebie at the time. First purchased product was the Genesis Evolution: Morph Bundle
• What brought you in and made you "take the plunge" to start purchasing 3D content? I wanted the basic shapes for drawing references. The Basic Male, Basic Female, and the freebie morphs I found weren't enough. I use DS and products for it to make quick illustrations, whether they he references or actual artistic renders.
• Do you still use the product that drew you in? Not that much anymore. I moved on from Genesis 1 to G8. :'(
• What program did you start with? Was it Poser or Daz Studio or something else? DAZ Studio 4.5, I think.
I resemble that remark. I finally gave up on different folders for continue many years ago. Apparently, it is not within my sphere of comprehension.
I found Poser 2 as a freebie on disk with a magazine for 3D art late last century, and sort of played around with it occasionally - I was doing so called "real" art then, and my mother was a landscape painter whose art is hanging in many countries. I did not really start in 3D until Studio was reasonably robust in the late '90s. Earlier I saw that Studio (version 1 Beta) was in need of beta testers, but dismissed it as a Poser wannabe, which is a little ironic, given the current state of DS and Poser.
DS became my programme of choice, combined with PaintshopPro for postwork, until I bought Poser 6 from Daz3D in '06 (see thumbnail) as physical disks. Later I got Poser 7 as a download from Content Paradise, but Poser's interface never really gelled with me.
Ten or twelve years ago, life got in the way, and I dropped out of rendering, until two years ago, when I settled down in a retirement village, and had lots of time to fill. Disability and failing eyesight make using a PC more practical for me than pencils and paint.
Edit: Oh, and I dabbled in Bryce, then Carrera, too.
(Frank)
Being a computer science major, I came to Studio from the raytracing route the hard way. That is, I used to write my own computing routines then found POV-Ray then Poser then Studio, since it was free (and when it briefly wasn't, I bought the Pro version). It didn't take long for my curiosity to get bigger than the free content, so I had to buy some. I'm fairly certain that was in the V3 days since her reign was quite long. I've been around here long enough to remember the old forums and the page bug. Though I trim it from time to time, I still have over 400 items on my wishlist and would need to win the lottery to buy them all.
What product or purchase was your first?
V4.2 Starter bundle.
What brought you in and made you "take the plunge" to start purchasing 3D content?
I learned about DAZ in 2006 and was intrigued with the idea of expressing my imagination in a virtual environment, so I gave Studio a whirl.
Do you still use the product that drew you in?
I abandoned her shortly after Genesis was released and haven't used her since.
What program did you start with?
DS 3.1 Advanced.
V4 had just started but I didn’t understand the difference between generations. I thought the Millenial girls were cute and I think the only kids at the time. I started using DS (well trying out at first!) during March Madness 2016 when they gave out V7 for free, which I still think is the most beautiful DO model, but way too recognizable unfortunately. Since then I’ve been still learning DS and doubt I will ever know its full capabilities! I love IRay but then end up doing a lot of postwork to make things look more arty and less realistic, but sometimes like to do realism too. I haven’t used Poser in a while since it doesn’t support newer figures. But I still like V4 for her face and may still use it for that because it’s so much easier and more intuitive. But I do like DS now too although I fought it a long time because it drove me crazy and still does at times lol!
I had a laugh at the Poser 6 boasting of "Photorealistic Rendering". lol 13 years later I don't think we're still quite "there" yet, but I think we're getting close. :) And wow, a $280 price tag 13 years ago is pretty steep, imo. Of course, today, it's like $350 - so quite expensive still. IMO that might be one of the main factors why Poser isn't doing as well compared to Daz Studio. I think if they had gone the way of "free program, paid content" maybe more people would use Poser and it would be a bit more competitive with Daz Studio. ...Maybe? But then again I could be way off. Most of this stuff is still pretty new to me. :)
I'm very much enjoying hearing how you guys got started in 3D content! You're making my weekend much more enjoyable (and giving me something to read while my renders bake lol). :) Keep 'em coming!
OMG, I just went to look and it looks like my first product here was Victoria 1 Reduced Resolution, and Victoria Sample Maps in 2002. LOL.
I came from a demo version of Bryce 2, followed by Poser 4. I was a vendor for a while, but dropped out of 3d around Poser 9. Recently I wanted to get back into it, but I have a limited budget. Rather than buy the latest Poser, I went with free. So now I'm learning DS.
My first "purchases" were the Michael 3 and Vicky 3 base late in 2005; as I recall, they were free.
I've read science fiction most of my life and have always imagined these wonderful scenes from the stories. However my artistic talents include not being able to draw a straight line with a ruler, the capability to connect the dots in order resulting in a realistic ball of string, and paint by numbers resulting in abstract impressionism. I got a flyer for Poser V 1 (1999?) and like "Oh, big woop! I can pose an electronic version of the artist's wooden manikin - for only $99!".
Then, in 2005, I ran into some decent images on a dystopian web site. The discussion board revealed they had been done in Poser(!), Amazon had Poser 4 on sale for around $30, Poser 6 was available, updates from Poser 4 were cheap enough that the two prices were less than Poser 6 list, and DAZ had just dropped the price of V3 and M3 to free, I bit. And then spent a frustrating time trying to figure out the Poser UI.
And then DAZ released Studio version 0.92 IIRC. And the rest is financial ruin - er history.
I had a computer graphics course my last semester before I graduated in college. I tried right after graduation to get a computer science job specifically involved in computer graphics and even managed to snag an interview where the company paid to have me fly to interview them in my 1st plane ride ever. However, I didn't get the job but already computer graphics had gotten me the excitement of my 1st plane ride and such. Well, real life made me get a job programming general ledgers for a corporation with thousands of stores so it was nerve racking but not computer graphics in the least. It was still a good job & I'd always kept & sat on the ideal of combining computer graphics and programming skills to make a game in the mean time. Anyway, rambling on, I saw Poser 4 for sale at Orelli Füssli (in 1999 or 2000 and I was lucky I did because it was on the top shelf and I was not a book reader) and well I bought it because of my interest in computer graphics. Of course nowadays I and everybody need next to no programming skills or computer graphics skills to do any of those things I wanted to do when I was younger with computer graphics but I still collect the resources I need to make it easy to do such things but like my DIY work on my house & yard my plans slowly change to be totally different. I'm not as interested in completing anything as just doing a hobby. From shells to baseball cards to playing sports to coins to computer graphics...whatever. I've recently started taming wild adult parrots that had been passed from one pet owner to the next who knows how many times. It's sounds daft but to tame these birds that are so scared of people is a full time job and stressing. Did I say stressing? You wouldn't believe how they act when they are really scared. Poor things. My DIY for my house & garden are improved so I hope my gamr plans are improved and better than originally planned and I can't say where they are going but that's good enough as I'm rather glad some of my earlier plans weren't worked on as they were not ready technically. It would of been a waste of time to spend as much time as needed on those things then but all the money I spent didn't loose it's value because they are digital goods, in fact it saved me lots of money because prices have went up.
I've been working on a visual novel/fangame since 2015-ish, and I was having trouble nailing down a solution for the art that I was happy with. In fact, I was having trouble with art in general--I knew I liked making pictures, but the closest I got to really having fun with it anymore was taking screenshots of MMO characters. I started messing around with Sketchup and a few mobile apps that let you pose 3D models for reference, and I think I stumbled across DAZ from there.
I was sold on it when I saw Emma and Jordi's Daisy and Malmorda; I just thought they were so cool and I remember gushing about them on my old Twitter account, talking about how I wanted a video game with those characters as the protagonists. I didn't end up getting them until later, though! My first purchases were toward building the main characters for my VN, and while a few of them have been redone Joker was the first one I finished and has been pretty much unchanged.
I've always loved ball-jointed dolls and art dolls, and when I was younger I'd browse options for hours while daydreaming. They were way out of my price range, though, and I don't think I'd personally feel comfortable owning something that expensive and delicate. DAZ hooked me by being closer to art doll collecting and customization than to any of the other 3D applications I'd seen--all of which I just kind of assumed I wouldn't be able to use (I'm slowly working up to it now). I love that people get really attached to their characters and buy them things in the same way a lot of MMO players "spoil" their in-game avatars. It's really fun.
I basically never shut up about DAZ because so few people I've met in fandom-centric spaces even know it's an option even though some folks are really skilled at creating wild stuff in programs like Miku Miku Dance and Source Filmmaker.
My start in 3d was Poser 4 complete with "Dork and Posette". It was reccomended by my life drawing teacher while I was at community college back in 1999 as a drawing aid.
My first actual content purchase was from back in 2004... "The Dress for Victoria 3.0"
The thing that inspired me to purchase content was more just that it was a fun toy to play with.
More recently with Daz Studio, now with GPU based Iray rendering I create full scenes and render a bunch (and spend way too much on content)
Good topic Diva!
My first 3D purchase was a set of snowflake object files for use in Bryce in November 2007. I was a part of an MSN sig tag group that had Bryce artist Darren Hills as a member and mentor and he got us into making our own art in addition to buying licenses for other people's art for our tags. Render found here. https://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/more-snowflakes/1573804/?p
I'm not sure when my interest in Daz Studio came about, except I had to register my free copy of Bryce 5.5 through them and create an account. I trolled Daz for the freebies and it looks like the first thing I spent money on was $3 for a dinosaur bundle in 2008. I know that was a special deal you got to pick one of about 6 bundles for practically free when you registered a copy of Daz Studio. Looks like my first purchase here was for some high heeled boots for V4.https://www.daz3d.com/overknee-stretch-boots-for-v4 although I remember having a great time with this dollie as a freebie item. https://www.daz3d.com/rag-doll
Quite a question there Divamakeup.
In my case, I literally had to wait for technology to catch up with what I knew for some time that it was capable of doing, as in since the mid 70's. Ok, ya. I'm ancient. I just retired from 30 years in the motion picture industry in SoCal, so actually saw the evolution first hand & I guess part of it. Envious for years, I've finally been able to afford the proper tools & system that doesn't balk at what I wanting to achieve. Can finally do dForce sims now, so that's huge.
From Poser, I think my first real Daz purchase was "Streets of Old London" and from there several other of Stonemasons works (I was in set lighting after all). Somewhere along the line, I kept noticing I had all of these LAMH and Catalyzer items & hadn't a clue what those were until I did a bit of research. I probably have nearly 70% of AM's menagerie, uh, catalog now.
I should mention though, Daz is mostly just a conduit as I'm then taking the various sets & characters into yet another app via FBX where I have better knowledge & control over the surfacing & lighting. I'm sure it's all doable in Daz, but frankly the UI is just too ... <I'ze already been censored so let's leave it at that> ;)
Meanwhile, stills will always be a large part of my work, but I'm really looking beyond that to animation as well. Recently had a breakthrough on getting everything including the rigging exported out of Daz.
Since I've the horsepower now to see what the various Daz artists intended, it's a great starting reference point. I start from scratch on the lighing anyway; generally I want to do 3 different looks not just the one. I also now have the tools to indirectly create PBR materials if the Daz product had full Iray maps to start with, and pretty much they all do these days. Huge difference, as in viatl, to have the proper lighting AND surfacing to take advantage of the present day higher end renderering systems. Even for Anime and non realistic styles.
Gosh, my first DAZ studio was Version 2 with 1 included. The V3 and M3 models were just available. The free outfit was a fairy top and bottom of leaves and a messy updo. I had started in 3d with the then free Terragen, and soon found a cd at the now defunct CompUsa for Bryce. Fell in love with Bryce, and learned a lot about 3d space and materials. I came to DAZ when I found my beloved Bryce in the latest version was available there. With the DAZ3, I imported V4 into Bryce, because I didn't understand how to make a landscape in DAZ studio. I had no clothing to use in Bryce. I made "shells" or duplicates of limbs, etc to make sleeves etc. So it was very gratifying to get some clothes on a figure that were easily imported to Bryce. My first purchased outfit was "Shadow Warrior" for V4. It came with a shirt, pants and nice short hiking shoes that worked for my purposes. My first hair was "Glamour". Posing was a problem for me with my low power computer. A couple of years ago, I finally got a powerful enough system to do posing. However the file sizes of models and add-ons are becoming alarmingly large, so I'm starting to worry about managing memory and storage space, not really ready to get a spendy super computer. It's a hobby, and there is always something to learn.
What product or purchase was your first?
Carrara 5 Pro upgrade and the V4.2 Starter bundle (2004)
What brought you in and made you "take the plunge" to start purchasing 3D content?
I got V3 and A3 for free, after signing up for the free Daz Studio Beta (yep, before DS1). I got PC to reduce the price of the Carrara upgrade and have just gradually bought stuff to make "purtty pictures" since then (and kept up with the Platinum Club)
Do you still use the product that drew you in?
Haven't really used V3, A3, or V4 in 2-3 years (but still use their cloths, etc.). I still use Carrara occasionally, though I'm doing more with Blender now. I do still use DS a lot.
What program did you start with?
Poser 3 and Carrara 2 (exported the models from Poser and rendered in Carrara) ..... actually, I started with Rhino (I think Version 2) first, but it didn't "render" (model creation), then Cinema 4D V6, then Carrara Studio 2, then added World Construction Set which I upgraded to Visual Nature Studio. C4D got too expensive, and I could get better renders out of Carrara, so I stayed with Carrara. Got Poser 3 to add 3D humans to my renders (and have fun). Carrara ended up replacing Visual Nature Studio for many projects (it has a plugin to import Digital Elevation Models (DEM)). DS 3.1 Advanced pretty much took the place of Poser (though I kept up with Poser through Poser Pro 2014). Now, Blender is slowly replacing Carrara, but I haven't done much with DAZ figures in Blender yet. My work with Blender so far has been limited to 3D reconstructions of Archeological Sites. Blender now has the tools to import LiDAR surface data (Digital Surface Models), and easily modify (sculpt) the large terrains to match what the terrain would have looked like 1000+ years ago to fit the reconstructed architecture. Blender can also import GIS data, which is what I use for base model creation to get the proper placement/footprint for buildings and other features.
I use DS and the content for my creative outlet. The other 3D stuff I do is creative too, but it also involves a lot more strain on the brain. Oh, I do use DS figures for "scale" in my site reconstructions.
Sorry for the looong explanation, got carried away down memory lane.
My oldest purchase at DAZ is the Victoria 1 clothing pack, which means I got Vicky 1 while this site was still Zygote. I purchased a CD as I recall with the buck and bass and a few other things on it. Before that I was buying products for Posette and The Dork (they were the best thing going at the time). Sometimes I forget just how long I've been doing this. I was a young woman when I started wtih this stuff ;).
Laurie
I actually started way back in the IRC chat rooms doing ASCII art , there was a whole group of us that hung out in the chat rooms via pIRCh creating this fancy art that we could play in the chat room. I turned alot of my poetry and songs into this form of art, I don't think I even remember how anymore . In those chat rooms I met a group using Paintshop Pro to create vector art,calling cards, and backgrounds etc for web pages. I learned to create my own buttons and bars for web sets, hoping to become a web designer.
I purchased tons of computer magazines that came with disks and Poser was on one of them along with Vue, both of these prgrams caught my attention but I found them hard to learn and I lost interest plus working 2 full time jobs ( 15 hour days, seven days a week) I just didn't have time. I did dabble some with Poser off and on for a while, then while searching for help came across a link for Daz Studio , I think maybe version 3.1, and I was hooked. It was right around March Madness and back then they gave away alot, I got a huge bundle that included V3 so I played around with the free stuff I got and my first actual purchase was party time dresses in Jan 28, 2004 and 15 years later my library has expanded to over 6000 items just from DAZ alone.
Just took a look at my prduct library. The earliest date I found was August 9, 2009. I suspect that might not be altogether right, but I do know that I stumbled across the DAZ site in July of that year.
There was a fair number of items purchased on that date, mainly the MilKids with some of their morphs and other add-ons, and Noggins's Owl and its species morphs. That there was a whole cluster of products purchased makes me suspect that we were at the tag end of the DollarDAZ sale that DAZ used to run in July.
I did know about some of the programs that DAZ sold (I didn't know about Hexagon and had never heard of Studio) because I used to very closely follow MetaCreations product line. Indeed, I remember one of my early MacWorld Expos wher there were a couple of youngsters with a tiny booth in the back of the hall demonstrating a sort of software toy landscape generator which was at sort of v0.9 beta. They called it Bryce.
I have a website. It's a hobby site. The primary hobby is designing books. I take fanfics (with the author's permission) and put them into a .pdf file that looks like a book. I had a project. Actually, I had a couple of projects. One was a Harry Potter fanfic, and the other was an apocryphal Oz book.
Up to that point, most of my publication projects had been illustrated with modified commercial clip art or digital paintings. But there was no way that I was going to find commercial clip art to illustrate these. I thought maybe working in 3D might be doable.
About a year and a half ago, three actors had dropped out of a film I was doing after we had already shot about 30% of it. The one guy just up and moved to New York, another guy knew he was going to move back to China but failed to mention it, and the third guy started seeing someone who wanted him to only do family films which what I was doing was an action film. I had spent close to 10K on it and they were all vital roles so reshooting their stuff would have meant reshooting the entire thing. I was demoralized and really depressed because it had taken me fifteen years to get things together to make this, this film has been my dream. I was sitting at a pizza place trying to figure out what to do next and I thought to myself how much happier I'd be if I didn't have to deal with actors anymore because stuff like this always happens, and I took out my phone and started researching 3D animation. I came across Daz 3D and thought I'd give it a try just to see how complicated it would be and I found it was way easier to animate than I had thought it would be. So I spent about nine months teaching myself everything I could about Daz and 3D animation and decided to just do the project as an animated series. Now I have the first episode completed and online, I'm working on the sound for episode 2, and began animating episode 3 last night! I've been making films since 2003 and never thought I'd do animation, but now I'm seriously considering shifting all of my focus onto animation because I can do anything I want to do, and I don't have to rely on anyone except getting actors together for a few hours in one day to record their audio which is way easier to coordinate than an actual shoot.
The thing I love about Iray is setting up lights is exactly like lighting a set on a film shoot. I didn't have to figure anything out except which kind of lighst I like best to use (I find spotlights look better on the skin than the linear point lights for my aesthetic taste at least). And I'd been doing keyframe for titles for years, so it took all of ten minutes to putz around and get the hang of keyframing characters, what took a bit of time was figuring out how the body actually moves, and which joint would best be used to get the movement I wanted.
The first character I started to use was Emi for Gen 3 as the character I was using to learn the ropes of Daz, and then when Hann Mei came out I knew she was the one that had to be the character, plus I love working with Gen 8 characters because Power Pose works so much better and more intuitive than for Gen 3.
I love using Daz 3D. I haven't felt this inspired to create and make films in awhile.
this once a year march madness event basically forced me to get everything i wanted now.
I bought about 60 items retailing $1000+ for only $150.
Otherwise, i've always been fascinated by rendered art on deviantart. So excited that I can easily create something using such a simple and free program, although all the good assets cost money