What inspired you to start pur…
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Hmm, roundabout 2004, saw some 3D art, went looking for Poser...found Daz|Studio 1.4 (back when it was written like that with the pipe in the middle).
Downloaded far too much free stuff (from here and elsewhere) and set about rendering.
Aiko 3 quickly became my fave figure at the time and I saw this wonderful artwork involving Aiko3 wearing the Fortune Hunters outfit and some ravens flying about - the artist's name is on the tip of my tongue but I can't quite remember...Nightsong! that's who it was by (I think) - I knew I had to have the outfit. Then I needed Aiko3 Moprhs and Maps to go with it (doesn't seem to be in the store any more). Thus my spending began...and snowballed LOL.
Way back in the late 90s the 2 nice young men who ran a computer shop on Baker street showed me the first release of Bryce on their shop Mac somewhere around 1994/5. I had to wait a few years for a stble release of Bryce 2 for PC (1997) but it was worth the wait.
What product or purchase was your first?
Technically, DAZ Studio 4.5, but "items" wise, The G2F Morph bundle and Michael 5 Pro Bundle.
What brought you in and made you "take the plunge" to start purchasing 3D content?
Having DAZ Studio "for free", and naively thinking I could sure learn how to model and texture my own stuff. Realistically, I suck at that just as I suck at drawing... which was the other part of what drew me in. With DAZ Studio and 3D, I was finally able to do visual story tellling. The ultimate goal would be making an animated movie... sometime in the future.
But yeah, what really sucked me in was that "things finally looked right", the way I wanted them to look like.
Do you still use the product that drew you in?
Yes, on occasion; I still use them, though I'm slowly shifting over to G3 and the occasional G8. Two of the main characters of my comic are G2Ms, though.
What program did you start with?
DAZ Studio 4.5
SInce teens always had an interest in computers, and ended up spending over 25 years of my life in slavery to them working for HMG. Not sure of the hows and whys, but I came across Daz Studio 2.?? for free and grabbed that. WHat my first purchase ws I have no idea, but knowing me it was probably a materials add-on for a clothing product I did not actually own .. ;) Didn't do much with it and the ss Poser was a paid-for, and hence 'proper' prodoct I got a copy of Poser (7, I think) to try that and just went round and round in circles with it and dropped 3D stuff for a while. A bit later I noticed DS 3 and thougth 'why not?' and gave it a try. NOt sure why, but somethign, this time, clicked and I actually started to understand some things. Been doing it since! Some highs, some lows, and plenty of 'meh'' results!
But those highs ... looking at a render and thinking, 'I did that'. Holding a paperback book of short stories written by a friend and seeing my art on the cover ... yeah, that's nice and makes up for a LOT of meh!
I was looking into buying the Sims 3 and was taken aback at how much it would cost when I wanted all the DLC's as well. So, I bought just the base game and one or two DLC's. After playing and feeling bored, I was wondering how these figures were made and after some searching I ran into Poser. I tried it out but the UI was not intuitive to my liking.
After letting it rest for a few weeks I looked into 3D modeling again and found the DAZ3D website. After trying DS out I found I had a click with the UI and made my first renders. Fast forward 7 years and I've become a PA sinds February this year! And I've made some awesome friends and met some wonderful, creative people along the way.
Stumbing across this site is one of the best things that happened to both my personal and career life!
Congrats on your anniversary <3
Oh, and I looked back and my first purchase was a Platinum Club membership, haha! I see I went all out after that because it was the PC aniversary sale so that helped in getting me kickstarted for sure! XD
I do commercial photography and create many different types of concepts. Many of my images are composites of Daz products and actual photographs.
When you're on the low end of the spectrum, finding reliable models who will show up to a shoot is a hit-and-miss affair. It's also impossible to access to office buildings and other venues. With Daz I can fake a lot of real life situations. My one complaint with the artists is they do not realize the potential for more real life applications such as business clothes and people who don't look like supermodels on steroids.
But I also just have fun doing fantasy and science fiction, I'm finding markets for that also.
Don't earn enough to quit my day job but I earn enough to have invested thousands for Daz products. It's all tax dedcutable too so I get another discount every April 15. :-)
In 2017, I wanted to do an ambitious graphic novel of around 800 panels, and knew my drawing skills were not good enough for what I wanted to do. I reckoned I could "cheat" by using Sketchup for the backgrounds, and just worry about the figures. Then I wondered if there was a program that was like a digital version of a posable artist's mannequin. I figured there must be, but when I got hits for stuff like Daz et. al. I was completely blown away. I had no idea at all that there was consumer-level CGI available!
Gen 3 was out, but I figured I'd go for the best and get the latest and greatest: V4! I mean, it was Gen 4, so it had to be better, right? Thus, my first purchase was the V4 starter bundle, for which I paid full price ($50). At that point, I my plan was to copy and trace so that my final product would be a traditional drawing, but I soon realized that I should just do it all in Daz and skip the drawing part.
I'm up to around 600 panels now and the book starts with M4/V4 in 3DL and is now using G8 with Iray. It worked out because the story is chronological, and the stuff in the distant past is more dreamlike, and as the reader moves through time, things become more and more photoreal. At least I hope it worked out!
What product or purchase was your first?
My first "purchase" at Daz was the DS beta (the first public beta ever, before DS1). My first non-free content prurchases were SP3 base and starter pack, with MFD for SP3, the kimono add-on, and a texture set for it. Both of those were in 2004. And I've been a PC member since 2004 too (good way to get great content cheap ^^).
What brought you in and made you "take the plunge" to start purchasing 3D content?
I took a Computer Graphics class when I was in first year in Engineering School (that was in 2001-2002). We used POVRay among other programs, and had to create a short animation with it as part of the class. Mine was a walk in Tulgey Woods from Alice in Wonderland, and while I managed to model the forest creatures I wanted, Alice herself was proving a challenge.
While looking for ideas and resources to use for my little project I stumbled upon Poser, Victoria and Daz. I couldn't afford Poser at the time so I didn't use those for my class, but I still registered at Daz as I found it interesting (and there were freebies ^^).
A few years later Daz created DS, and it was free, so I started to play with it. I used only freebies at first, with the reduced resolution figure included in the beta content, and finally decided to invest in a "better" figure when Daz released SP3 (I never really liked V3). Most of my purchases at the time were PC items.
I started purchasing more content after A3 was released, as I loved the figure.
Do you still use the product that drew you in?
Very occasionally for SP3, but I never got that much content for her in the first place. I still use quite a few of the sets I purchased at the time though (Redhouse Studios sets in the PC, for example).
What program did you start with?
Initially POVRay and a free modelling app called something like "spatch". At Daz, DS since first public beta.
First product was Victoria 3 and Poser 5, did try Daz Studio way back then but it was clunky and laggy, so I stuck with Poser for a very long time.. I still use Poser for searching for some of the content I have as Daz Studio's search is so so.. I moved over to Daz Studio after getting stuck into Genesis 2..
And the main reason for going 3D is I have the creative bug but can't draw for quids..
I've been interested in it for a long time, getting my start trying to render on a Mac LCII (sigh), starting off with Ray Dream Studio and the first version of Poser (and Bryce).
I had given up on it by the late 1990s because I just couldn't keep up with software and hardware costs, and it was depressing seeing what studios could make with good equipment/software. Meh.
About 4 years ago I was trying to put together a RPG supplement on my own and facing the issue of artwork. I could buy royalty free artwork, but given I didn't expect to make very much off a freelance indie supplement, it looked like I'd end up spending several times what I'd ever hope to make. Additionally, some of the stuff I wanted in my supplement, I wasn't ever going to find artwork of (like giant spiders on a boat fishing)
I then thought 'Hmm, I wonder what's out there for making my own artwork. Maybe it's not too expensive.'
And almost fell off my chair when I found Daz Studio, free. Holy moly!
And then I ended up realizing I found doing visual artwork way more fun and engaging than writing, so ... now that's what I do.
My arcade lizzard brains says: "must have, or I'm gonna die."
I'm glad I started this thread! I LOVE reading everyone's "back story" on how you all got started! I feel like I know some of you guys a bit better now too (bonus!). :) It's funny the variety of backgrounds and interests that drew many of you guys in. Though I noticed a few have a similar theme of "wanted to make a comic" or "wanted to make art but can't draw".
Thank you for your stories! I'm really enjoying this thread and am glad I asked. :) It's heartening to see such a variety of backgrounds and reasons for doing 3D art, and somehow we all found our way here. Awesome! :D
I hope more people post with their stories as I'm having a lot of fun reading them!
At first, to produce scenes, I cannot draw or paint to save my life, but my brother is an artist and I bitterly envy him his skill, I wanted to create too. Then I got into it I wanted to produce my own stuff, I mainly buy now when some technique or look catches my eye and I want to try and emulate it. Only now am I daring to venture into working from a blank page and producing very much my own thing, not sure I will ever get there, but it is fascinating trying! This weekend's work, very much in progress, not the character, the shirt, Royal Navy Number 8 Battle Dress, no textures or anything added yet, still struggling to balance smoothing and accuracy, seems the two are often not compatible ;}
My memory is starting to fad about what got me started, however I do know that I found some Bryce renders in a webpage gallery that got me pointed in the right direction. Previously I had done art using pencils, but color pencil drawings were horrible grainy and impossible to edit when a mistake was made. I very briefly tried paints but that went very badly, the brush tip flops all over the place and it's seemingly impossible to get anything even close to where it's supposed to go, much less with the same accuracy you would get with a .5mm pencil. I think I was decent at pencil drawing some things such as vehicles and landscapes, but absolutely sucked at drawing people. 3D graphics solved a bunch of those problems all at once. Color (on the monitor) was perfect and grain-free. I could use the pre-made poser figures. And it offered many cool options like automatically getting the shadows right every time, the ability to experiment with a wide variety of materials and lighting angles by just changing a material or a light and re-rendering that would be impractical on a hand drawing (wonder what this would look like if I used a chrome shader? Or a glass shader? Or moved the sun to that angle? Or made these lights half as bright, and make that one blue?).
I purchased the first version of Poser and moved from there... A high point was going to a convention and meeting a French?/Canadian? guy who was working on the nacient Carrara....
Strictly, my first purchase would be various assorted games on the Source engine, which I purchased in order to use their game assets in Source Filmmaker. (Valve's terms and conditions do permit using their game assets in non-commercial art projects).
I suppose that answers the question that I started with Source Filmmaker, through which I progressed into a lot of custom modelling work in Blender. Graphically, it falls a long way short of Daz (given it's based on a dated game engine), but it does have a much better scene manipulation interface and is generally less demanding on hardware.
As far as Daz though, what drew me in was Monique 8. I'd seen Daz stuff before, but it was her that really impressed me. I do still use her, but often now mixed in with other characters.
I saw the brand new Poser 5 being demonstrated at a convention... I think it was Wondercon back when it was still in San Francisco. Took it back to the room and loaded it on the laptop and was blown away. There was an ad in the package for DAZ's website and found myself buying Stephanie 3 shortly afterward.
Fiddled with quite a few flavours of 3d packages in the late 1990's, early 2000's. Never could quite get to grips with them or find the time to perservere.
Roll forward to 2017 and a back injury that had me pretty much stuck at home for several months. Surfing the web to pass the time an advertisement for Daz3d caught my eye. The free price tag also attracted me as I was now into the unpaid leave portion of my time off work. A few renders later and I was hooked. The interface now made more sense to me. The forums often found me good advice or tutorials to watch.
As for first product bought, once I decided this was a hobby I really enjoyed and could spend a lot of time doing I lashed out and bought the Lilith 7 Pro Bundle. Talk about jumping in the deep end. To this day I still love that figure and use her often as I can. I still hold out hope of a G8 version (Tasha is close but not quite the same feel - Vampire instead of Seductress).
I now use Daz along with Ren'py to work on publishing my first visual novel/game. One of the benefits of Daz is that being very heavily colour blind being able to pick labelled materials (blue eyes etc) helpls me a lot. Now if I can just convince PA's to stop using eye colour 7 instead of green eyes my life would be even easier.
And for those curious my back is now almost as good as new. This reinforces the fact that I love doing this hobby even thouygh I am no longer house bound.
David
I have allways drawn superheroes. Mostley pencil, markers or ball pen. I can't do colored. I fail at coloring. So the reason to have a PC, was to have it easier to color my artwork. Then I got introduced to Poser. This was perfect timing, for I was unhappy with scetching. Weird things happened. People kept saying: "Oh your scetches look so well 3dimensional", but to me all the illusion of scetched 3d effects didn't work anymore. To me it remained just the flat paper. That's what thrilled me, when I got into Poser. I could pose and twist and turn my characters.
So now G8F Roxy and DAZ Studio are my drugs of choice.
"free modelling app called something like "spatch". "
Not something like, exactly like, Leana. Or pretty nearly so, anyways. I remembered it as soon as you mentioned it. I still have a copy of it on an old archive CD of ancient software.: it is a spline modeller called sPatch by Mike Clifton.
What product or purchase was your first?
My first paid purchase at DAZ3D was the Victoria 4 Pro Bundle. I had a bunch of free stuff that I had collected, including a number of the generation 3 figures, but when the V4 package came on sale I opened the wallet. My purchase habits have tended to be sporadic since then, but the marketing early on was not quite as aggressive as it is today.
What brought you in and made you "take the plunge" to start purchasing 3D content?
Since I was using DAZ Studio and Poser and Victoria 4 was compatible with both, in addition to becoming a kind of defacto standard for 3D female figures, with a ton of content even back then, it was a "no-brainer". Especially since it was on sale (worth it for the Morphs++ alone, I think).
Do you still use the product that drew you in?
Yes I still use Victoria 4, not to mention the free generation 3 figures that I also had. Why not? Its still fun, and part of the fun, for me at least, is the challenge of overcoming the limitations of the software and content, so what's not to like?
What program did you start with?
I got started by dabbling in a number of different graphics programs, too numerous to mention. Jack of infinite curiousity, master of nothing. Eventually my collection included a copy of Poser 6 and DAZ Studio 2.1. Very slowly I tended to gravitate towards these two, although it was simply something that I liked to toy with occasionally, rather than a passion. I guess any progress that I may have made was hampered by my tendency to bounce back and forth between the two. I now still have and use both DAZ Studio 4.x and Poser Pro 2011. Not to mention Carrara and Bryce, and others. I believe that I may just have become a perennial dabbler. I just enjoy playing with them. A few renders even manage to sneak out from time to time.
I don't have any art background and just play around and see what emerges. I started with PovRay the last millennium and failed miserably. Terragen appeared and I really liked it. When I finally could afford it I purchased Bryce 5 from Corel. Corel abandoned it, Daz 3D took it and brought out version 5.5, nothing new except the bridge to Studio - which I got at version 0.83 or so. I also got myself Carrara 3 at the time and even though I continued to buy the updates until v8.1, I stayed mainly with Bryce. Studio has always been just a tool to bring in assets, to pose and dress the people. I tried Octane v1 as a renderer, which I found quite good, and had a short interlude with Blender. Studio 3DL is not a bad renderer, Iray doesn't convince me. But then, for photorealistic scenes I have a camera and 3D art is for creating the imaginary. Although I own Hexagon, I prefer to use Wings3D but then, I'm terribly bad at modeling anyway. For Bryce 6.0/6.1 I was a beta tester, for 6.3/7.0/7.1 in the Steering Committee. I've been a PA here since 2010. I'm a dedicated "brycer" because the best 3D program is the one I know how to use and the longer I use it the better I know it - and still find new pearls now and then.
Back in the late 1980s, as a grad student teaching asistant, I helped the college TV station put graphs on the screen to accompany my professor's undergraduate economics class, which was broadcast on local cable access. Another professor hosted a one-time election night special for local races, and they asked me to help. That introduced me to using people in graphics, instead of just statistics. Although my subsequent professional life was buried in statistics, and back then I had very little time for art, those experiences sparked a lifelong interest in 3D graphics of all sorts. I found Poser relatively early on (sometime in the 1990s), and lurked on related forums for a few decades, but didn't do much with it. However, I did buy occasional items that were Poser compatible. Not sure what the earliest would be because my Daz store account treats the oldest content strangely, but I have some zip files with content acquired elsewhere in 1999.
What product or purchase was your first? Well, Daz per se... but V4.2. Genesis was the new big thing, so I bought what was cheap to 'try it out'.
What brought you in and made you "take the plunge" to start purchasing 3D content? RPGing & writing, and a need for a hobby that didn't have mess-potential for all my kids, who were shorter then :-). I was in-between major hobbies, and a mega-project of learning to use software to create illustrations for our already massive story sounded like fun. Little did I know... three of us started this journey together. I'm the one who does all the character stuff, now.
Do you still use the product that drew you in? Both Daz and Vicky, though I have mostly switched up to Genesis for the morphs and autofit for all the characters. Still love the look of V4, though, and use her frequently for one-off renders, which I do more often than I should.
What program did you start with? Was it Poser or Daz Studio or something else? Daz 4.5, or so the records tell me.
I can model many things, particularly cars; I have had little success with Figures. And... Perhaps most importantly, I hate rigging.
I think by Genesis 2, I liked how well the tech had matured, which is when I really started. My first item was in June, 2010. Looking back, my skills were also very much the issue. I investigated because I wanted a book cover, which I have never done; one day perhaps.
Todd started way before me, which was prior to Daz as he was playing in Bryce quiet a bit and then started porting human figures (early Victoria iterations) into his artwork.
What had me coming here was my eternal fight with Blender. I was still on Linux/Ubuntu and wanted to try 3D animation of the likes of Pixar and Disney as I was totally enamoured by it. Girl 4 base was offered free of charge at the time and kept popping up in my ads wherever I went online, so I made an account and grabbed Girl 4, Aiko 4 and V4 in the store but had no idea what I was doing and it didn't match my beginnings in Blender so I let it go pretty quick. Ads remained though, so with the release of Genesis and Daz Studio 4 I finally decided to come back and get my toon on. My first figure I loved was Aiko 5 and all the 3DUniverse toons at the time, but soon I morphed my first girl and started rendering and learning 3Delight and basis of Daz creation. My love for toons still shows through my artwork even now, but I've eventually settled on having couple of my original characters which caught Todd's eye to recruit me into the promo team Elite Models 3D as the promo artist, and soon after to start being a PA and sharing my creations here with his support and encouragement :)
My life completely changed after that. I left my job of 7 years, came to US, we got married and now this is pretty much my job now for the past 4-5 years. I still fight with Blender on daily basis ;)
Hmm, the very first 3D content (or "assets" as thye call it now) was an optical disk with data called "Manga Babes". It was a manga inspired single envelope wireframe figure which could, in theory, have been "rigged" within TrueSpace. This was sometime in the latter 90s and I never accomplished much, the "falloff zones" causing the torso to collapse upon itself trying to bend the arms.
My first DAZ purchase was the Victoria 1 "reduced resolution" figure on May 16, 2002 and two weeks later, June 1, I purchased the original "Aiko" figure based upon the wireframe that made Michael 1 and Stephanie Petite. I guessI've always veered towards more stylized body sahpes than "realistic" figures. There was, of course, no "Aiko 2", but I purchased "Aiko 3" when she debuted.
Sincerely,
Bill
i was cursed by a gypsy. don't ask. :)
my first purchase was esha's green backyard garden. (i'm into gardens.) i wish to this day that i could find those terracotta pots somewhere in the real world.
esha's promos for the garden pointed out the pre-iray wonders of AoA's lighting sets. it didn't take long for me to follow up on that.
i've been falling down this rabbit hole ever since.
:)
j
...started dabbling around with Daz and Poser back in late 2007.
Like Pack58, I also have a disability (advancing arthritis) which made it difficult to hold a pencil, pen, or bruch steady for very long. Now I had a lifetime of training and experience in traditional media (almost a half century) and was noticing the quality of my work declining due to my disability. On one of the RPG related sites I frequented, I noticed some really nice works being posted. When I inquired how they were done, I learned they were done with a 3D art programme. One of the artists provided a couple links, one to Poser (which was then still marketed by e-frontier) and Daz3D. I downloaded both the Poser7 demo (which expired after only 20 instead of the full 30 days) and "free" Daz3D.
Seeing that Poser cost 250$ was a bit of a turn off as well as the demo really didn't help very much (several features were also disabled), I then moved to Daz 3D (ver.1.8). The interesting part that attracted me with Daz was that it was the complete base programme without an expiration date and none of its functions disabled. There was also a reasonable collection of freebie content I downloaded including what was then called the 3D Bridge Pack (now the Anime Starfighter Bundle). I also downloaded freebies from ShareCG and Rendo which gave me a decent base set of content to play around with to evaluate the programme. I was hooked almost immediately thanks to how simple it all seemed (the lighting system was very similar to theatrical lighting which I worked in), though I was a bit daunted at some of the prices fo content, paticularly the character figure bundles (I only had the free Aiko3 at the time). What really sold me though was that I saw that I could put together images which where of the quality I used to produce before arthritis began crippling my hands.
Then came MM 2008, along with a nice tax refund. My first "real" order was the V4.2 Pro Bundle and Teen Ashley character. Back then there was also the opportunity to earn credit vouchers, so I signed up for the PC (getting a 30$ one there) and began submitting works to the monthly galleries (which offered a 25$ voucher if your work was selected) and various challenges. Between the vouchers, coupon deals and discounts (along with more freebies), I soon began to accumulate a rather nice library of content and to use an old well worn phrase, "the rest is history". Were it not for Daz's model of offering the core programme for free for an unlimited amount of time, I might never have become involved in this. Yeah it was sort fo the "gateway drug" as to create really elabourate scenes you needed effects plugins, characters, clothing, hair and props, but not having to lay out hundreds, or thousands in the case of pro grade software, for the core programme, is what made it attractive. Yeah Poser came with a core library of content, but one had to pay extra for update releases as well as extra content, whereas that wasn't the case with Daz (well there was the 3.1 Advanced and 4.0 Pro, but that didn't last very long).
Today with the Genesis concept, and various resource content, I can easily create custom characters of my own, of any age (which was a real struggle in the Gen4 days as there were no viable teens/pre teens like Gen3 had and I remember spending the better part of a half year working at creating a young teen character out of tall, lanky buxom V4).
I can't even remember how many years ago it was. At least 20. I bought Poser 2 on a bargain table at a software store (remember those?). Someone had returned it because it was "too detailed." Imagine that! The characters didn't even have real faces yet. I thought it would be fun to play with. Then I found Ray Dream Studio. Eventually, I upgraded Poser to higher versions. When DAZ Studio was first released, I downloaded it, but wasn't too sure about it because a new learning curve. Now, DAZ Studio is the only one I use. Going from Poser 2 to DAZ Studio 4.10, my 3D experience has come a LONG way!
I only came across Daz in the Summer of 2016 (ah, those heady carefree days). I had been playing about with Makehuman, and I think I was looking for an alternative to MMD, XNA, something that would actually run on Wine.
I didn't buy anything until December 2016 though, and I think it was probably Michael 6 Pro bundle or a Michael 4 bundle, I think I bought rather a lot the following three months.
And the Buddhist possessions thing was going so well the preceeding few years too....
.....digital stuff doesn't count, right?