orgtech
I discovered Daz Studio in early 2017, and have researched the history a few times. Not too long ago, I had someone track down the original Aiko figure for me, which is now in my runtime, mainly so that I could attempt to pull Aiko forward to G3 era. There just isn't enough detail in the face to begin with, so it just comes down to what pleases you most I guess.
Daz Studio really helped democratize 3D rendering. Blender does this to a degree too, but Daz Studio just has such a vast library at this point that you don't really need to build anything, and can just use prebuilt assets, and there's enough free assets out there that you can get started pretty easily. I'm preaching to the choir here though, not telling y'all anything new.
I ended up with a lot of V3 and V4 era (and a few V1-V2 era) assets thanks to weekly freebies and such, and more importantly the absolutely awesome March Madness sales in the 2017-2018 era. My budget could only go so far though, but when items are showing 9 cents or less in your cart, it's pretty easy to grab stuff that you might use someday, and not feel bad if you ended up not using it.
This is why I also now own Carrera and Bryce, they were on sale for cheap at the time, but have never used them. I paid for Hexagon, which is now free, and do actually use Hexagon so no regrets there. Back then there were some really cool deals.
Which is why a number of us now refer to March Madness as March Mehness...
It's interesting that there are still a few PAs that think that they can sell V3 and V4 era assets for over $2 each. I do occasionally dip into my V3/V4 era pool for outfits, props and environments, but yeah assets that are that old, well they should be on sale for $1 or less these days, before token bullshit IMHO. What do I know though.
In other news, my Daz Deals is now completely broken. No more history graphs, sort options, etc. Which makes me sad, but I've talked about that before. Ahh well...
