The Daz Studio and Related Product Deals Thread (Daz3D, Renderosity, Renderotica, etc.)

[SvenVlad]

I had some hopes the last Golden Item would be something from Tesla3DCorp or from Linday, but sadly, life is not nothing but disappointment

At least the featured character looks good. I bought a few stuffs in this PA sale, but overall, was kinda.. meh.

 

[Jumbi]

Hello,

Just a reminder that new freebies have dropped today on the Daz Store.

Here:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[Schlongborn]

Uh, I have a feeling we're not going to like Monday very much.

EDIT: I know, so mysterious, well, you can already see the promo for Monday, and it looks to me like they're going to introduce a new subscription model then. But who knows, maybe its going to be great.

 

[OhWee]

Just a note that I'm seeing a 20% off DOs coupon in an orange banner over at Daz3D.com, for participating in the September sale. Also it's a 'catch up' sale so might be a good time to peruse your wishlist for deals...

As for a subscription model, that'd be a hard pass for me. Which is why i still use Photoshop 7, sold back in the day when you could just buy the right to use Photoshop outright without monthly subscriptions...

 

[Schlongborn]

As for a subscription model, that'd be a hard pass for me. Which is why i still use Photoshop 7, sold back in the day when you could just buy the right to use Photoshop outright without monthly subscriptions...

Subscription like Daz+ is already a subscription, just on top of it I assume. But judge for yourself:
But shhhh, don't tell anyone we can do this.

The way this is presented I assume there will be two level of subscriptions in the future (or maybe just this sale), Daz+ and then Premium to get the good stuff.

 

[taireopiqt]

Dunno, I'm quite content with the way things are. If I was a professional I might think about it, but I've always been a fan of permanent licenses. I prefer those all the way in my professional endeavours.

Just finished up the sale using my non-DAZ+ coupon. Scoring two figures for $1 each isn't too bad, plus I finally got to pickup a good vignette set I've been eyeing. So I'm not sure that anything they present on monday will really be able to blow my kilt skywards.

 

[taireopiqt]

And so it begins. New sub tier is called Premier. A couple of extra little perks, but one thing made me look.
Offers a suite of powerful creation tools:

Gives you more control than ever

• Modify, sculpt, and customize assets directly in Studio
• Convert assets and transfer shapes from previous Genesis generations to Genesis 9
• Simplify scene management and optimize rendering performance with new Render Settings

This means the application itself is now 2-tiered, which I consider to be rather bad. Perhaps they can't justify investment in the application, which is hopelessly behind most others in terms of UI design anyway, unless they can bring in more resources via the Premier tier.
Don't professionals use other applications anyway ?

Here's the page with details on what you get.

You must be registered to see the links

. The tier is $18.98 a month, $227.76 a year.

For the 'premier' tier of DAZ it looks like they integrated some form of render queue system(looks a bit like Manfridays Render Queue), geometry sculpting(good luck prying people away from ZBrush) and a sim manager(dForce companion it looks like).

You also get Head and Body morphs(G9), content converters(figures at the very least), a free monthly character bundle(that's some value if you happen to want that one), content 'available for the duration of your membership' which is hopefully not what I think it is, and a bunch of extra 10% here and 30% there bits.

12 Character packs, the odd freebie more than DAZ+($70/year if you didn't grab a discount), head/body morphs most enthusiants probably already have, some extra savings on DAZ Original bundles, slightly better coupons in the extra 10% range I presume, tools most enthusiants never mind professionals most likely already have in the form of render queue/sculpting/content conversion.

Not sure I'd ever want this.
I'd be completely dependant on the DAZ company picking that character pack, and don't we all wait for the big sales anyway ? So what's the point ?

They don't exectly have a great track record of updating the software very well. I'm curious whether they just bought the source code to all those tools or the original author(s) will maintain and develop these tools. It looks like that may be Manfriday since he made the almost identical looking Render Queue, dForce companion and a figure converter as well.

 

[OhWee]

Well, it's here...

You must be registered to see the links

$19.98/month, subscription is OPT OUT not OPT IN, so you'll automatically be billed at the beginning of each month. Not a fan of opt out.

There's an extra 10% off gift cards (30% off) if you choose to give it a go. With a $500 gift card purchase, yeah that's $50 extra discount minus the $18.99, so if someone wanted to say recharge their store credit, I suppose you could give it a go...

Not sure about the other stuff. Specifically why you can modify stuff in Daz Studio (as opposed to say sending it to Hexagon) but only if your Premier membership is active.

So far I'm very skeptical.

Still need to evaluate the rest of the sale...

 

[SvenVlad]

Is this really monthly only? If it is, Jesus man, I fucking hated it.

 

[OhWee]

So apparently there's a paid 'enhanced' version of Daz Studio now, that is tied to your Premier membership. So you'd need to install Daz Premiere I guess. The Daz3D.com sales team must really hate their longtime customers...

I'm pretty sure that any 'bitchy' posts about Daz Premiere on the Daz3D.com forum will be promptly deleted by the moderators there, so feel free to bitch here. That way our bitching will live on via google searches and such maybe...

 

[OhWee]

Oh, look, Daz+ memberships have a monthly $9.99 fee too. No idea if we still get deals on yearly memberships atm...

Here's a breakdown of the tiers that I screenshotted from this page:

You must be registered to see the links

Joy... thanks for nothing Daz3D.com sales team! I'm not about to install something that will lock me out from using it at the whim of the publisher (Daz Studio Premiere) should I choose to 'opt out'...

I'm still on Daz Studio 4.16 anyways for legacy compatibility reasons, and my Daz Drive is almost full atm. I guess I'm defiinitely on the fence/pretty much a 'hell no' atm.

Also note that tokens are now awarded via tiers ($15/$10/$5 depending on membership level).

 

[taireopiqt]

Thanks for screenshoting that chart. Looks like a definite no for me. My DAZ+ membership is running out sometime soon. Doesn't look any renewal is in the cards.

 

[OhWee]

OK. so about those Daz+ memberships (I WAS renewed through 2026)

I guess don't panic yet, but apparently if you go to one link, you'll see that your membership is active:

You must be registered to see the links

But if you click on the account menu (which has now been reformatted)...

You must be registered to see the links

You'll show up as only a base (free) member.

Hopefully that gets clarified very quickly. Also, no refunds on memberships, so hopefully the Daz sales team does the right thing and honors those that had Daz+ memberships paid to whatever date.

I ended up going on a bit of a spending spree yesterday, glad that I jumped on a few deals then. The current sale isn't really wowing me so far.

 

[OhWee]

The one potential bit of happier news is that Tokens earned at Daz3D.com will now be good for two weeks, regardless of Tier assuming that the new Token system page is correct. The five days thing was very annoying. Two weeks thing is a bit less annoying...

You must be registered to see the links

Looks like the two weeks thing is retroactive. My existing tokens were 'upgraded' to the 2 week rule.

I'm guessing that 'double token' Mondays/Tuesdays is no longer a thing, but I don't really know. I wish that they'd just go back to giving us 'straight up' discounts, but that ship is sailed.

 

[taireopiqt]

OK. so about those Daz+ memberships (I WAS renewed through 2026)

I guess don't panic yet, but apparently if you go to one link, you'll see that your membership is active:

You must be registered to see the links

But if you click on the account menu (which has now been reformatted)...

You must be registered to see the links

You'll show up as only a base (free) member.

Hopefully that gets clarified very quickly. Also, no refunds on memberships, so hopefully the Daz sales team does the right thing and honors those that had Daz+ memberships paid to whatever date.

I ended up going on a bit of a spending spree yesterday, glad that I jumped on a few deals then. The current sale isn't really wowing me so far.

Just saw that too. Will probably get cleared up real fast.

Glad I got what I got in the sale too. Was about to pick up a little prop set when the clock turned midnight in DAZ country. Oh well .

 

[orgtech]

What a clusterfuck.


And I thought nothing could be worse than their NFTs.

 

[amster22]

There is some kind of upgrade from daz+, but it seems to be really randomly determined.
I have a d+ subscription till august 2025 and I am offered either to keep it or to get 1 (one!) month free premier.
But in the forums there are many different offers: 2 premier months for 9 remaining daz+ months, 2 for 13, and so on. A person with a daz+ membership till end 2029 (!!) is just offered a few months of premier and he feels really cheated.
People in the forums are very angry and consider the premier upgrade offer as a complete con.
And I completely agree!

 

[OhWee]

There is some kind of upgrade from daz+, but it seems to be really randomly determined.
I have a d+ subscription till august 2025 and I am offered either to keep it or to get 1 (one!) month free premier.
But in the forums there are many different offers: 2 premier months for 9 remaining daz+ months, 2 for 13, and so on. A person with a daz+ membership till end 2029 (!!) is just offered a few months of premier and he feels really cheated.
People in the forums are very angry and consider the premier upgrade offer as a complete con.
And I completely agree!

Yeah they offered me 2 months for almost 2 years of Daz+. I'm not pressing any buttons/agreeing to anything until I have assurances that my current Daz+ expiry date is maintained/not reset in any fashion.

I don't think there's any other way to put it. The current offers are insulting and disrespectful to longtime Daz+ customers. Not a good way to maintain customer loyalty IMHO.

Someone should start a change.org petition or something, about treating existing Daz+ members more fairly, but the trick would be getting Daz3d.com shoppers to see said petition, so that probably wouldn't go anywhere. Maybe bitching on Reddit or something...

I was pondering grabbing a gift card to recharge my credit, but so far, with where things are at with the current sale, even with Daz+ taken into account, yeah I'm probably not going to be spending any more money at Daz3D.com for a while. I have a LOT of product packages at this point, so I'm not feeling the need to shop for anything. And since G9 doesn't interest me, yeah...

But I'm just an angry old dude, I get that people just starting off their product library may find value in Premier, but yeah at about $240 a year, I doubt it'd be worthwhile vs. my existing Daz+ membership discounts.

Most corporate software execs are enamored with the monthly subscription models, which just makes me sad. The old values are dead as far as software is concerned...

 

[Schlongborn]

I don't find it that attractive either.

I'd totally be willing to pay ~20$ per month if I got something actually useful out of it, and right now the only thing I can see that would make me want to subscribe is better gift card discounts. And that means of course spending even more money to make use of it. Same reasoning goes for better tokens (5$ for one instead of 10$) and coupons, you'll have to spend to make use of that (also notice how it now says "select items" for what previously was the 6$ off of 18$ of PA items, a subtle downgrade I assume cause those "select items" are probably not what you'll want).

Also feels like the gift card discount is just there to entice people to join now, 30% is pretty good but of course we can't tell if future gift card sales will be equally good for premium members, or if they'll just fallback to the more standard gift card discounts of ~20% for premium members and less for everyone else. So same thing as before, just with an additional monthly cost.

The features of Daz Premier itself seem to be mostly stuff that's already available as plugin. The sculpting seems interesting, but people already pointed out in the forums that it is probably only for base level meshes, not HD. I guess using Blender for stuff like this will still be better.

The rig conversion stuff and better autofit could also be interesting to me, but I've already built my own solution for rig conversion/bringing stuff to unreal, so I feel like I can live without it. Better autofit would be nice, but I think it's just a bunch of additional autofit profiles and not an actually improved feature. You can also create those yourself and there are some free ones in the forum somewhere that also help improve the existing autofit, so that might be a nothingburger too.

There will be a free monthly bundle and free legacy content, but if you already have bought a lot of stuff then you might just get something you already own, and that will just be disappointing then. Also there is a wide range of what a bundle could be, like those really old ones are still bundles, but getting those for free would certainly not be very exciting. The other "Weekly and monthly free content" is just the same stuff we already get I assume.

Also "Access exclusive Premier Only content - available for the duration of your subscription" means you'll get access to stuff that you'll loose access to once you subscription ends. I guess I am even somewhat fine with that, but it's just another thing about this where it seems they're trying to sell me an obvious downgrade as an improvement.

So overall, I guess nothing really makes me want to subscribe, maybe the gift card discount and better tokens, but yeah not so sure right now. I also still have Daz+ until 2027, I get 4 months for free in exchange. Probably just gonna wait for now.

However I do feel like eventually they'll lock something behind that I'll want, and then I'll probably subscribe anyways. Like Daz Studio 5 with some actual new features maybe. Or they have sales where you can subscribe for cheaper or something like that where I'll just get it because I'll "save" the subscription cost for an entire year by getting a big gift card discount.

The whole thing just feels like a price increase to me. Downgrade the current Daz+ subscription a bit, then make Premier mostly the same as Daz+ is now, ask 20$ per month for it. Presto.

 

[Schlongborn]

Oh, someone posted the character bundles for the current month:

You must be registered to see the links

Those are actually... different bundles. I assumed they meant pro bundles, but they don't. They have these cut down versions of the pro bundles where you only get a portion of the pro bundle instead.

That's super annoying imho, you'll then own like half the pro bundle and buying the whole thing will always suck and make you feel like you "wasted" money on buying the same stuff twice.