Thoughts on older and abandoned products
deepred6502
Posts: 390
I've been using RSSY's V4 Hair and Clothing Converters and Zev0's XTransfer of late, and it got me wondering about so many older products I've purchased that have faded into digital oblivion, or otherwise don't have a remake for newer figures. Some other products have been incorporated as DAZ Originals, but not all.
There was previous discussion about Rarestone's products suddenly being withdrawn without notice, and I have a number of old RDNA products that didn't make the jump to DAZ3D after the latter acquired the former. May Hair for V4 must have been a big seller in the day, but it hasn't been available for some time despite its creator still being an active PA. I still have a number of characters by Countess & Silver/Jessaii, who together made some of the best goth characters I've bought.
As mentioned by RAMWolff in the aft-mentioned Rarestone thread, "Not to be a Dallas downer but folks do get old and either retire or pass away. When I first started all this CG stuff I was in my early 40's. I'm now 62 with health issues so there's that to consider! We have been loosing wonderful contributers in recent years. There is also the possibility that these folks found better paying gigs!"
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Comments
well I still use it if I have it
its often fun tarting up old stuff with iray shaders
old outfits can be dforced too, some need welding, but much doesn't as suited Poser which has had cloth dynamics forever
Well. It's not just the clothes & hair that have been left behind. Generations of characters have too.
However, with a bit of work, they can be updated. V3 for instance. My first published image from 2005:
And a relatively recent one of the same character, but this time converted to TriAx from Parametric, with autofit and autofollow clothes, wearing a G8F Kaftan:
Time & effort is needed. But facets are facets whether 20 years old or 1 week old, so can render the same with the same shaders. It's just the additional bits like autofit, autofollow and joint quality that are things that need upgrading.
Regards,
Richard
There's a goldmine of stuff from the V4 era that I wish would see re-release or updates. PAs do move on, get older, or simply decide that it's not profitable to reissue some of their older products, and I totally get that.
But you can still use a lot of your older content as is with some minor tweaks though. V4 era clothing and hair works great if you use it on background characters. Consider using something like MattyManx's resource saver shaders, a lot of it is 1-click, and you've got great usable background characters in iray.
And, with a bit more work, you can of course get old Victoria 4 herself looking great in Iray, or Victoria 3, as richardandtracy demonstrates above. Great work on V3 Richard.
Be aware that DS 2025 will not work with .pp2, .cr2, .hr2, pz2, mc6, or 3DL so if you haven't converted your favorite older characters, sets, props, hairs, and poses, you may want to start now.
I agree there are some wonderful items that go way back to the early days and I use them still and need to convert them myself. Still haven't found how to convert older animals like the ButterflyFish who is a Daz Animal but not updated from .cr2 to .duf by Daz. Or the ancient Dragons.
Will DS2025 still open a DS 4.23 file that already has Poser content in it, or will those still have to be converted too?
well that decides it for me, uninstalling until they eventually have a complete release build but even then only if legacy content supportted
I have no use for this
I've saved some Poser (& older Daz formats) animals & props as .duf by using Save As options for character, prop, etc. It's very tedious (even though I often like tasks others find boring) so I don't do it until I rediscover a golden oldie, use it, & think "wow, I will use this again!"
Come to think of it, Code 66 might offer a batch converter. I should look into that.
I don't know how to save old outfit textures, mat poses, etc. in the modern Daz formats, which I really want to do - if that's even possible. I like to use them (converted to Iray/Filatoon) but they are so hard to find in the Poser Format files since they aren't in a product subfolder but could be in Textures, Materials, Poses, or who-knows-where. (Improperly packaged products is a very old problem.) I've thought about moving a model's material/texture folder (when I find finally find it) into the folder for that converted clothing item - but again, tedious. And the formats won't work with DS 2025, it sounds like.
What? The new DAZ Studio doesn't work with older content? Is that the case? If it is then it's game over for me. I won't be buying another product from DAZ3D.
I don't know where you got that idea but DS2025 still does load poser-format content.
What they removed is support for old DS formats like .daz scenes and .ds scripts.
Code66 does indeed has a converter for legacy sets: https://www.daz3d.com/legacy-set-converter
You could apply them to the model then save a material preset.
Where are you getting the infromation on Poser files from?
Fine. Daz can keep ds2025. Like Wendy, I got no use for it.
Like Leana and Richard both said above, she's wrong. DS2025 can read Poser files just fine.
I'm still gonna drag my feet on it. Lmk when the release candidate is ready
You can keep DAZ Studio 4.X & DAZ Studio 2025 installed concurrently. No need to drop one or the other, like a package of twinkies you can eat both.
and the Public Build of DS 4 - so potentially three versisons of any given bit architecture.
...so they ditched 3DL shaders?
Sad.
The version of 3Delight in DS 4 is really old (in software terms) - it was the last version that suported Renderman shading language (RSL), anything newer would have had the same material conversion issues as Iray. It is quite possible that there isn't any way to integrate that into DS 2025, just as it was not possible to integrate the new Iray into DS 4.
...thanks. So lookw like I will need to keep 4.x. around.
BTW is there a way to save the installer for 4.24 that is in the DIM until I can finally upgrade my system to Win 11? I cannot install it now as it would overwrite the current version I am on (4.21.0.5) which is the last version built on an Nvidia driver that supports Win 7. Not about to go back to glacial CPU rendering when I have 12 GB of VRAM.
just pointing out, they may add Poser formats to the final release (if there is an issue), this is just an alpha to address hardware incompatibilities after all
there may even be 3Delight and other missing features, or other third party developers could add them
I see this as I had actually myself suggested before they released it, as a render engine to load saved duf scenes from D|S4 for those using 5xxx cards and Mac Filament users
You can just download the zip or bitrock installer from the Product Library. No idea how long they'll be updating the 4.x branch, but in another thread, it was said that the Studio 4.X download will stay active even after 2005 final version goes live. Remember to download the default resources and other files there, as well.
...cool., Thanks,.
It seems to me that a lot of this is still speculation, but it does feel rather unrealistic to me that there won't eventually be some way to convert most older DS and Poser products to work inside DS2025... I mean, in the end DAZ makes money off of the assets in it's store, not off DS itself, and to make everything everything that was made available prior to the introduction of iray would mean DAZ dumping nearly half of all the products that are currently in the store (a percentage that became exponentially bigger when one considers how many of the "new" vendors who recently transfered over into the DAZ store from Renderosity have product listings are are dominated by older texture-set only products.) Not to mention, how would the DAZ marketing department even be able to function if they didn't have that huge pile of older products to fall back on for super-discount incentive sales and giveaways? That said, my concern ever since the notion of DS5 started to become a possible reality has been that, just as happened when DS transition from DS3 to DS4, that so many of the scripts and utilities that I lean on will cease to operate, that I will essentially be dramatically crippling my workflow, while the cost of replacing assets on a like for like basis becomes completely untenable given the huge price jump we've seen on items in the store over the past few years. So, if it did eventually come down to that, I really don't see a great deal of logic in starting to reinvest in a new DS archtecture when I could just as easily pop over to some other program that CAN use Poser and the older 3DL products. But again, that's all just speculation until DAZ makes an official statement.
Outside of 3Delight, which is not supported anymore by DS2025 (but surfaces using it will be converted on the fly to Iray as they were with the previous version), I don't get why so many of you are angry about the end of support of Poser files: testing with the current version of DS2025, I was able to load .pp2, .cr2, .hr2, pz2 and .mc6 files just fine.
Yes, as several people have mentioned above DS 2025 DOES support the Poser files.
Maybe someone noticed the lack of 3DL and conflated it with Poser file formats?
I still don't understand why DAZ doesn't have a repository with the older versions.
That was my thought, yes.
Older major versions, certainly 3 and in due course 4, do remain available from their respective Product Library pages (and through DIM< at least for 4).
or just coipy the fiels from the Downloads folder, they will be named IM########-## something, where the first number block is the SKU padded with leading zeroes. However, the then current versions of DS 4.x.x.x will le for download just as the last version of 3.x.x.x does.
Or panicked about the dropping of the .daz format. The loss of .daz is not going to lead to much revenue loss, as there are only a handful of really old assets that use this format alone (for example all the optitex dynamic stuff, but that plug-in does not work with 2025 anyway). If anyone does need the assets in a .daz file, you can always load DS 4.x, convert them to duf, then use them in DS 2025.
There are a lot more assets using the Poser formats, and DAZ sensibly decided to retain support for them.