tafi who? DAZ has a parent company?
Malandar
Posts: 776
in The Commons
Who knew about this? Aparently DAZ has a parent company that has only been around since 2019.... DAZ has been around for 20+... WHA?
Kinda explains why deals have gotten worse and worse over the years though if they are now being driven to make profits for the "parent company" which most peoople have never even heard of.
And no this ain't torches and pitchforks, this is confusion.
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there is a seller on artstation called tafi selling daz products.
im not sure if they are legit or just some reseller.
Parent company? Where does this information come from? The last info I heard (from a Daz newsletter) was that it's a sister company.
As Ati says, sister seems to be the usual label.
From post on DAZ Facebook Page: "Our parent company is hiring! Check out the details in the original post below." And Tafi's post goes after that.
But just in case...
Technically this is "Pitchforks and Torches"... not the other way... and these torches have a pleasant citronella scent that keeps away mosquitoes.
Sorry not a pitchfork, that is a garden fork. Pitchforks have long handles and tines so you can pitch stuff (usually hay).
Yup, that's where i got my information which made me go WTF? First I have heard of it.
I thought the rest of the world wasn't familiar with those handles, as shovels with a handle were sent back from the nuclear plant that Areva has been building for 15 years up here - They required ones without it.
Interesting. Their office addresses are only about 20 miles from each other in Salt Lake City. And if you check the website https://maketafi.com/about-us
they've got a cool animation showing the inside of their offices (not sure if it's a 3D render or actual photos). And the conference room windows have "DAZ" and "Tafi" printed together on them. And the About Us is kinda interesting. Tafi is mentioning the same news that DAZ mentioned recently here abou the mega-grant.
I seem to recall years ago they announced they were teaming with a company that was doing some sort of avatars, but that seemed to die out?
Interesting.
According to the Tafi Fact Sheet, Daz3D is one of Tafi's brands, the other being Tafi. There is no mention of Tafi on the Daz Fact Sheet.
The guy who's been the CEO of Daz for the last ten years (James Thornton) is a Co-Founder of Tafi.
and Tafi is for the NFT stuff only ?
Everyone I know still calls it a pitchfork or a sodbuster.
As I understand it, Tafi as a label is for the game stuff, as well as the NFT and as well as being the parent company. (I think Morph3D turned into Tafi at some point.)
I think, sometime in the vaguely recent past, something got switched up in how the companies relate to each other.
Well, the torches aren't traditional "Storming the castle/Driving out the monster" type either... but the tines on the big salad fork are a lot more substantial, especially if you are interested in poking more serious holes in the subject of your forking energies... also the shovel type grip gives you more control over the handle should whatever you are poking start to leak slippery fluids... and it also allows one to impart a twisting motion to drive downward into the ground the poked object so one can install additional ventilation holes in the object.
Traditional pitchforks are great if you are evicting a hay monster or a giant pile of malevolent spaghetti from your village, but I'd much rather use a more robust tined poking fork for my on-the-fly perforation needs.
Google got rebranded into Alphabet then created a subsidiary company which kept the Google name. As companies grow they also grow in scope. Someone who's used to Daz3D as it was will become confused when the focus changes hence the need to split the original brand. Nobody refers to YouTube as Google, or to Google as Android.
A couple of weeks ago (I think) there was an element of the main banner in the shop that pointed to the Tafi page in the Unity asset store. That page in turn links to maketafi.com, where you'll find press releases that refer to "Tafi, the avatar company and developer of the Daz 3D character system".
Interestingly, Tafi is only described in this way in releases that also mention DAZ or DAZ products. Otherwise, it's usually described as something like "Tafi, the leading creator of custom 3D content for avatar and emoji systems". Sometimes it's "a leading creator" rather than "the leading creator". Descriptions of Tafi on the site itself -- for example on the 'About' page -- mostly don't seem to mention DAZ, as far as I can see.
Tafi was formerly Morph3D. I forget when M3D started, but that was also a sister company to Daz. M3D sold Daz assets optimized for video games in the Unity store, as well as their own store. These were mostly Genesis 2 based assets, and they actually had some cool deals. I kind of wanted to get some of them and mess around with the game engines, but that never happened. Morph3D started out well, but then went silent. No updates, just silent. They had wrote in their blog that they planned on adding new content every week. But that came to a quick stop.
Funny enough there was a time when Daz sent out some emails advertising Morph3D. The result, there were several threads made in these forums by people who wanted to know if Morph3D was legit or a scam. Hey, just like today! I suggested that Morph3D should have been a part of the Daz store, with a dedicated section. It seems logical to me, because Daz is the known name brand here, nobody, and I mean nobody, knew what Morph3D was...otherwise there would not have been confused customers asking! Hello.
But of course that never happened. And people continued to not have a clue what Morph3D was.
Then one day Morph3D removed all of their content from the stores and went dark for a period of time. It was like a year. When the website finally came back to life it was now branded as Tafi, a VR avatar focused thing. The Morph3D assets were still gone, and I am not really sure what Tafi's vision was beyond VR avatars. It just seems like such a narrow niche to me. At some point Tafi began selling content similar to the old Morph3D content on the Unity store. This time the content is all based on Genesis 8. Oddly enough the former Genesis 2 content has never returned. I suppose Tafi wanted to keep things simple by not having different model types.
So now Tafi appears to have come full circle. They are once again selling content like Morph3D used to do. And they are once again staying separated from Daz, which I feel is a very poor business choice. Guys...it didn't work the first time! What is different now that is going to make it any different?
*Insert your favorite face palm meme here*
The gaming optimized assets need to be sold in the Daz store. They are, after all, Daz Genesis based assets. It seems very silly to me to segregate this content. While it is true that the demographics of the user base are not exactly the same, there can be no doubt that they overlap. And you can still use Daz assets in video games, nothing is stopping, as Daz happily offers the interactive license to do so. They also promote their Unity and Unreal export options. In this regard, Daz actually competes against Tafi, which makes no logical sense to me. Daz Genesis is a known brand, and Tafi even touts using Genesis on its store page. But it still doesn't make sense, because the Tafi brand comes first there so most customer might not notice. Few people know what Tafi is, but they might know what Daz is. Tafi has the exact same problem that Morph3D did, and this thread's existence proves it. People still do not know what this company is! Tafi has existed since 2019 and it still causes confused threads like this.
Of course, knowing Daz, they would find a way to confuse people if they sold the game focused model here. But...they still wound up confusing people with Tafi. At least if Tafi was sold here it would probably sell better, even if Daz did its typical job of confusing people over what Tafi is.
I'm serious. Just for kicks, you guys should try it. As a test run, for one week, sell Tafi content here in its own special section, and see how it performs. Native Unity and Unreal Genesis characters! Perfect for the animators out there.
Here is a cool product cross promotion idea for you: Run a sale where Daz users who own the Daz version of a model can get a nice discount on the Tafi version. This kind of promotion might help get more people into the Tafi system.
And today I just got an email from DAZ with the subject "The Unity Spring Sale". Where does it link to? You guessed it, the Tafi page in the Unity asset store.
It seems reasonable enough for DAZ (or is it Tafi?) to maintain some separation between the two -- they don't want confused customers buying Tafi/Unity assets and finding they don't work in DAZ Studio, or buying DAZ assets and finding they don't work with Unity. I am a little surprised that the copy on the websites often seems to dance around or just ignore the connection between the two companies.
They also want to be where the customers are. And there's a far better chance to sell to game creators at the Unity or Unreal asset stores, where they already have their accounts, than expecting them to come to the DAZ store here.
I see what you are implying... I'm starting to see the link to the Illuminati too...
Firstly their choice of "TAFI" as the company name... clever because it subtly hints at the connection between the Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute and their experiments in the late 1970s using human Thrombin-Activatable Fibrinolysis Inhibitors injected into the livers of Wombats as part of a program to create an army of hybrid human/wombat super-soldiers... The program was shut down in 1979 after rumors of a horrible accident at the laboratory as well complaints about weird smells coming from the facility's cafeteria.
It is believed the scientist in charge of the program is said to have taken all the research materials as well as several specimens with him and defected to Bolivia, but apparently even the Bolivians drew the line at using Wombats as super-soldiers.
That Scientist was none other than Dr. Joshua Thomas Tanner... or as he was more commonly known to those around him, "Josh Tom Tanner"... It is believed that after having his life's work rejected by the Bolivians, Dr. Tanner fled to the Soviet Union seeking to finish his work, the Soviets who’d entertain any crackpot idea jumped at the chance... but apparently Tanner’s plane crashed on the way to the secret lab in Siberia... according to intelligence reports, Neither Tanner’s body nor his specimens were ever found and supposedly the remains of the other passengers appeared to have been torn to shreds and partially eaten... the Soviets denied Tanner had ever met with them or had been in the country and denied reports about the other passengers, claiming that the other passengers had boarded the plane partially eaten to begin with and nothing unusual had occurred and they died in a routine plane crash.
Despite Soviet denials, and quite mysteriously, right after the crash, a previously unknown scientist going by the name of Dr. John Ottermans appeared on the CIA's radar... Ottermans coincidentally was an expert on both wombats and human liver stuff... as well as being an amateur penguin wrestler which is something he apparently shared with the late Dr. Tanner.
Ottermans even looked suspiciously identical to Tanner, but as the Soviets pointed out, he lacked Tanner's mustache, so he couldn't possibly be the same person.
Presented with such overwhelming evidence, the CIA decided he probably wasn't Tanner, but they still kept an eye on him in case he grew a mustache or something more sinister...
By 1982 Ottermans was operating out of a laboratory next to a nuclear power plant near the northern Ukrainian city of Pripyat.
For the next several years Ottermans remained mustacheless, and apparently not up to anything dangerous, but early in 1986, a photo surfaced of Ottermans at an outdoor cafe, sporting a long handlebar mustache and wringing his hands while laughing manically. Both the CIA and MI6 sprung into action, with the goal to either capture or eliminate him...
By April they had located Ottermans and were moving in to get him, but their plans were thwarted by the meltdown of reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant.
Local inhabitants near the plant reported seeing unusually large glowing half-human/half-wombat figures running through the woods.
The Soviets denied the reports claiming the locals had mistakenly misidentified a species of local bioluminescent deer who under the right lighting, can easily appear as unusually large half-human/half-wombat monsters.
Ottermans was never heard from again, but to this day the forests of the northern Ukraine still yield sightings of unusual “deer”.
And from there Ottermans trail went cold.
Years went by until the late 1990s when a unassuming man by the name of Jean Mothsnort opened up a wombat rehabilitation center in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Despite Utah having a distinct lack of wombats, Mothsnort chose Salt Lake City as the place he’d bring orphaned or abused wombats for rehabilitation. The location he chose was an unassuming brick building near the corner of 200 west and 200 south, which according to an article in a local newspaper, he’d chosen because of its proximity to several good restaurants and nearby Pioneer Park, where he enjoyed Penguin Wrestling on Sunday mornings with his fellow Penguin wrestling club members.
The aforementioned article was about local business people who had chosen to relocate to Salt Lake City and did not include a photo of Mothsnort, but it did mention his interest in human liver enzymes and how he had recently started a Liver Enzyme Bank for a charity he was sponsoring for people who couldn’t afford liver enzymes.
Nothing else is known about Mothsnort or his charity... apparently he closed up his business and disappeared some time in the early 2010s and the space he occupied was eventually taken up by a digital art company that oddly enough started out making 3D medical models for teaching and research in nearby Draper, Utah...
Now, none of this should seem very unusual on the surface, and I don’t know how NFTs and Illuminati wombats would tie into all this...
But...
DAZ’s CEO is one “James Thornton”...
And if you rearrange the letters of his name you get... Josh Tom Tanner, John Ottermans... and Jean Mothsnort... You also get Jan Hot Monster, Hons Rottenjam, Mans Hornet Jot and Roman Test Jon, but that’s neither here nor there...
Still, you can’t ignore the fact that the same location as Mothsnort’s wombat rehabilitation center is now DAZ’s headquarters and that West 200 used to be known as Illuminati Boulevard and that DAZ moved from Draper to Salt Lake City after locals complained about the odors coming from their lunchroom... not to mention several employees being mauled by large glowing “deer”... and most disconcerting... Thornton doesn’t have a mustache.
I leave you all to judge this for yourselfs... why all the smoke and mirrors, why all the newsletters trying to get us to buy NFTs and donate liver enzymes?
I don't know what any of it means... but if you see a large glowing deer in your yard or on the elevator late at night... don't pet it or try and make conversation with it... just run... run as fast as you can.
Well... that's all.
Bye.
Oh yeah, and trust no one, the truth is out there, yada, yada, yada, etc...
Tafi has been reaching into every third party marketplace lately — a bit haphazardly it seems.
I don't see how any of it makes any sense, or how it helps promote DAZ 3D, or even Tafi for that matter. Taking a DAZ 3D product, labeling it as a Tafi product, and selling it on a third party marketplace with no connection back to DAZ 3D or even Tafi — it just further complicates the licensing model for DAZ 3D content, and is super confusing...
DAZ 3D Product:
https://www.daz3d.com/elven-warrior-poses-and-prop-for-genesis-8-female-and-mika-8
Tafi derivative products in Third Party Marketplaces...
maketafi on artstation
https://www.artstation.com/maketafi/store
https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/oj98D/elven-warrior-poses-and-prop-for-genesis-8-female-and-mika-8
Maketafi on cgtrader
https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models?author=maketafi&sort_by=newest
https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/character/fantasy/elven-warrior-poses-and-prop-for-genesis-8-female-and-mika-8
Tafi on unity asset store
https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/51491
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/humanoids/humans/mika-female-from-tafi-190120
Tafi Avatars — MCS Female on unity asset store (now deprecated: Morph 3D Character system)
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/humanoids/mcs-female-45807
Tafi Expands Galaxy AR Emojis with Big Brands
https://www.licenseglobal.com/industry-news/tafi-expands-galaxy-ar-emojis-big-brands
My Singing Monsters Outfits Come to Samsung's Galaxy AR Emoji
https://www.licenseglobal.com/entertainment/my-singing-monsters-outfits-come-samsungs-galaxy-ar-emoji
Samsung and Tafi have partnered to bring a robust lineup of clothing and accessories to the Galaxy AR Emoji store
https://www.maketafi.com/samsung
Except...it didn't work the first time. While nobody will ever say for sure, lets just say I have doubts that Morph3D shut down their entire store for a year to transistion to VR purely out of desire to change direction. That is a pretty extreme thing to do if you are successful. So if Tafi is here and doing the exact same thing, why should we expect a different outcome? I'd also argue that the name Tafi is a real problem. At least the name "Morph3D" sounds more grounded. Tafi is too silly of a name to take seriously.
And why can't Tafi content be sold here? Daz sells content for other software here. You can find FBX and OBJ content here, as well as products that have native Unity and Unreal made downloads. Ironically Daz offers a lot more Unreal content than Unity. They currently show 1348 items as having Unreal file types for download, compared to 48 for Unity. Still, you have over 1300 products marketed as having game engine downloads.
Meanwhile I counted a total of 293 Unity products offered on Tafi's Unity store page. So Daz offers over 1,000 more gaming products than the gaming focused sister website does. Think about that. It is true some of these items are pretty old, but many were released within the time window of Tafi's return. Also consider this; Daz had to go in and create new Unreal compatible downloads for all those older items because of course they didn't have the Unreal format when they were released. The fact that somebody had to go through all these items and convert them to Unreal compatible downloads IMO is a telling sign of just how serious Daz is taking the idea of providing game compatible assets. And yet...Tafi exists.
And that does not count the massive list of Daz to Unreal or Unity Bridge products, which adds thousands to that total.
So how does it make sense to say that Daz doesn't sell gaming assets when they in fact offer many times more gaming assets as their gaming asset sister site???
I am not saying that Tafi cannot sell on the Unity store. I advocated Daz to sell content on Unreal and Unity in the past. But they can also sell their content here. I don't see the issue unless they are somehow forced to be exclusive to the Unity store, which would be awful business by Unity. I also do not understand why Daz cannot just use their own brand. That is the most baffling part to me. Daz has been around over 20 years. The Genesis brand came out in 2012. That is a long time in the 3D world, and I don't understand why they do not take advantage of that branding. That is my real issue with all of this, why don't they use their own brand?
You don't have to be making games to have a desire for gaming assets. Gaming engines can appeal to animators, and there is a growing number of productions, both big and small, that are using game engines for animation. I would wager that a large percentage of the people who do buy game assets here are getting them for animation, not video games. That is where the overlap in demographics comes from. There are people who want to do more than make static pictures, and Iray just isn't that great for animation.
at least the only place where the name Tafi shows up in the shop is at the NFT site
powered by Tafi it says
whatever "powered" will be
just visited the tafi website
"subsidiary" is the word used for the relationship to daz
and these new bridges to unity/unreal etc seem to be coming from them
Tafi sells on Unity Asset store and we have already received banner on Daz 3D shop page recently.
You have just missed that...
This is, how it looks like...
Maybe they are the ones hoarding the RTX 30xx GPU's to power the blockchain...
McGyver, that TAFI post was so hilariously insane...that my ganglia have not stopped spasming....But I Love It
