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I think this all comes down to discipline and organization. And recognizing what is a genuine reason to skip ("worked a 16 hour day today"), and what is an excuse ("I don't feel like doing anything today"). I think this is why many people fail when it comes to long-term habits like exercising or pursuing one's dream: the genuine reasons are replaced by excuses, and missed days ("broken streak") become demotivator, because they weren't genuine reasons.
When I started writing seriously, I set up a challenge of writing daily. The ideal goal was 1000 words a day, but the focus was on writing daily. So even a 100 words would do. I did this challenge for a year, twice in a row, and it did miracles to my output. It also set up the mindset of having to plan to include that writing time. Sure, life is messy and there are days when things just can't happen, but aiming for them to happen in general helps to build a routine rather than making that thing an afterthought. For example, in the beginning of the year, I started exercising regularly. I set the goal for 7 days a week of activity, even though I knew that realistically I'll miss 2-3 days. But that means I do my exercises 4-5 a week and have 2-3 days buffer (weekends or just feeling bad), and it means that if I've been particularly good (got to my 4-5 days), I can skip "just because" every now and then. So the "not happening" became an exception to the weekly schedule rather than "happening" being an exception and done ad hoc.
Last 12 months have been a bit tumulous for me, but I'm getting back on the writing and dream horse too, and aiming to write daily.
Thank you! And you reminded me to order print versions of the new covers, because yes, on-screen, they look great as wrap arounds. (And I've already seen how awesome a wrap around cover for Memories of Sorcery and Sand is, especially in hardcover.)
I didn't have a real 'dream' when I started with DAZ, just wanted to use it as a reference for painting on occassion. But as I amassed stuff and saw the possibilities, I soon ended up with a whole universe of ideas and dreams to realize little by little. A mad, but fun journey.
I couldn't find better words than background's to describe my dream when I joined Daz. So thank you very much, background.:)
Whatever else we do or don't do, that is definitely a core part of the dream! Imho, background should win the prize for best and most accurate post in this whole thread.
joanna said:
I was soooo giving myself excuses on all fronts today. I'm going take your write-up as the universe holding up a mirror... and do better...
I used to love nanowrimo for the daily writing goals - it did do wonders for output! Invariably it's always the getting back on the bandwagon w.r.t. writing or creating or going to bed on time or exercising or eating healthy (or sshh, shopping a little less wildly at the DAZ store) that's super tricky. Well, gonna put a little more effort into trying today. 
Hi memcneil70,
I'm just popping in to the thread and out again but there is a great free program (with no ads and a small footprint) called FotoSketcher.
You can turn images into watercolours (which you mentioned), oils, pastels, sepia, etc. Each style has loads of slider settings to make adjustments.
Many art programs do the same but I highly recommend this one for speed and ease of use. The free aspect includes using the program for commercial purposes (but be sure to check if that is your intention).
Hope it helps you or others. (Sometimes I turn renders of characters into pencil sketches with the intention of copying them in real pencil...I never do of course..)
Hurrah! That would be my first win since narrowly missing out on the 'Summarise Proust' competition.
As many here have stated for their dreams, mine were to create illustrations for stories I was writing. Also, I needed to create images to help me keep track of relative character sizes and make better description of the scenes.
However, as most of my characters were in the SciFi/Fantasy realm (especially DND field), much of my artwork had to wait for good examples of those types of figures to show up in various markets.
My DAZ dream is alive and well. I spend hours each day with DAZ, composing and rendering scenes for my main "saga" or vignettes that may not have anything to do with the saga. I love to create characters and put them in scenes that tell a story (so yes, I have a lot of G8 and now G9 characters and I continue to add more). DAZ makes this possible. No one will probably read my saga or stories, but I'm having a lot of fun creating them.
I bought Poser back in 99 or 00 because I studied Illustration in college and wanted to use the figures as reference for my comic art portfolio. Poser was installed but my brain couldn't grasp it and it just sat dormant on my Gateway 2000, lol. I got into video games, a couple years later, being in my late 20s, and I got an OG Xbox and Halo, DOA3, etc. Than I bought a PS2 and got a little too hooked. Sparked my interest into concept art and 3d modeling but I still worked traditionally for personal projects. This was early Noughties (00-10). I started using a Mac exclusively for art and design work and I think that's when I found out about Daz seeing some saucey 3D comics on Deviant Art. I downloaded it and again it sat dormant on my computers. Fast forward to 2019, I'm working freelance for my day career but surfing the net I see how much the Daz/Poser platformed improved and I tried it again on my Intel Imac and for some reason it started to click a little. I kept going back to it almost daily and learned a lot about the software, tech, what Ray Tracing was, Nvidia Iray, about the platform as a whole and about almost a year after the Pandemic bought myself a Windows PC for the first time in 20 years and watched videos galore by WP Guru, Parmy, Rauko, GameDeveloper Training on Youtube and many of the content creators part of Daz like Esha, Dreamlight, and Sickleyield. It's been really addictive using this program and spending money on content. I enjoy it and what I can do now... but I feel a little torn by not balancing my time and focusing on my traditional art but that's another conversation for my shrink lol.
Oh, thank you for this! In kitbashing one of the rooms of my girls' flat, they have an oil painting of them and their mentor over the fireplace. I did the render, but couldn't figure out how to turn it into oil (my skills with Photoshop, GIMP, and the like are minimal and generally filled with cuss words) so wound up just putting the render up there and calling it close enough. Free, fast, and easy to use sounds like the perfect combo! Much appreciated!
My problem is when I write I can't stop, Typically I hit 10,000 words a day. It's the editing, the rewriting, the polishing, that I find most time consuming. Have tons of 300 page drafts for Sci-fi and Fantasy . . . just drafts . . . I have so many songs (two albums unreleased), lyrics, melodies mastered, that I am holding back, because I can see the trailers play like a movie reel in my head and I won't settle for anything less than what I imagine. Good luck to me . . . I may be dead by the time I set the songs up with Ascap (will probably choose BMI), Used all original sounds/chord progressions via guitars: electric, bass and acoustic, piano, organ, vocals, etc, just me and hubby, some finalized over 15 years ago ,. . . produced/published fully fledged songs in our studio. I really need to release them so I can do the trailers . . .
....I am like that as well.
I have an uncompleted set of works for piano, along with a symphonic work (influenced by the 20th century composer Olivier Messiaen) the latter which is a recurring "earwig".(when I could still play piano i improvised several of the movements, but never scored them out fully) There are also times when I randomly come up with French classical era (18th century) organ pieces in my head while bored or doing munane tasks.
I wanted to visualize the images in my head. Firts making covers for the stories I had in my mind and later on making a picture story. No animation so far.
Started with Poser and continued with Bryce and Carrara. Then went to Cinema 4D and Vray. The content that I used was always Daz content that I had to transform or just import posed characters for stills.
Finally switched to Blender starting with version V3.x and I was quite happy to see the bridges. Getting the content to Blender/Cycles and improving it is still a challenge, but a great first step.
The story is in my mind, but finally the pictures have to follow.
I wanted to go beyond Poser and DAZ Studio as well.
I got familliar with Cinema4d and Carrara.
C4d just became way to expensive, since they've abandoned their module system and Carrara got stuck and its renders never looked right.
C4d might have been the reason, why I have difficulties getting into Blender.
C4d workflow totally made sense to me, Blender still not at all.
Blender is still to me the most cryptic workflow. I absolutely don't see rhime or reason there.
I have been checking out notorious MAYA and I have zbrush and got some results, but no other software is so difficult to me like Blender.
From C4d to Blender is a way to big leap for me.