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

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oaiki

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Yeah I figured it was a 'you snooze, you lose' thing. Gotta luv sales glitches!

Ahh well, next time!
I snoozed :( only got the single character not the bundle ... which was in my wishlist ... Ah Well
 
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seamanq

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Daz cannot be so generous
ROTFLMAO

They're selling digital files, old ones at that. Generous? Hardly. I recharged my gift card stock last year when it was over 20% off, but I am spending it very sparingly.
 

tk99

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They're selling digital files, old ones at that. Generous? Hardly. I recharged my gift card stock last year when it was over 20% off, but I am spending it very sparingly.

Spending? :LOL:

Daz made ~15$ with me ... in December!
 
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OhWee

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The thing is, all of the bundles that were briefly in today's sale have been offered for free at some point, particularly Victoria 7. Sure, they were part of 'buy this other bundle, get three of these bundles for free' offers and such, but I remember the Victoria 7 Pro Bundle being free at one point with either no or a very cheap buy in.

How times have changed with the new Daz3D.com sales team. I didn't spend a whole lot in December either. I even passed on a couple of opportunities to recharge my store credit via a gift card. And I'm still kicking myself for not renewing my PC+ membership for that 49% off offer (stacked discounts) in October, but as I remember there was a buy-in for that.

I know it's inconvenient for some people around here (sleep schedules and such), but if you should otherwise be up and about just after Daz Midnight (GMT - 6 or -7 depending on if daylight savings is in effect), definitely watch this thread, as a few of us are usually checking the latest deals between midnight and 1 AM, so if a 'may be too good to be true' offer pops up, you can jump on it.

The goal here is to help people stretch people's Daz Studio budgets as best we can, 'cuz assets at MSRP are often really expensive! And no sense paying full price for something if there's a good chance that it might go on sale for say $2-5 or less at some point...

One other note.

I've noticed that the 'sort price from low to high' or 'sort by % off' isn't picking up all of the freebies these days. Specifically, the weekly/monthly PC+ freebies, but I've noticed at least one or two other instances recently. And also not counting a number of the daily sales freebies, which may or may not have buy-ins or coupon codes.

So I recommend checking the two freebie related links weekly, which you may already be doing anyways, but that the 'sort option' might not pick up:


(note that the other link that I used to use is broken, because it's no longer plat club, so you'll need to scroll down the page to spot the weekly/monthly freebie).

 
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seamanq

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The thing is, all of the bundles that were briefly in today's sale have been offered for free at some point, particularly Victoria 7. Sure, they were part of 'buy this other bundle, get three of these bundles for free' offers and such, but I remember the Victoria 7 Pro Bundle being free at one point with either no or a very cheap buy in.

How times have changed with the new Daz3D.com sales team. I didn't spend a whole lot in December either. I even passed on a couple of opportunities to recharge my store credit via a gift card. And I'm still kicking myself for not renewing my PC+ membership for that 49% off offer (stacked discounts) in October, but as I remember there was a buy-in for that.

I know it's inconvenient for some people around here (sleep schedules and such), but if you should otherwise be up and about just after Daz Midnight (GMT - 6 or -7 depending on if daylight savings is in effect), definitely watch this thread, as a few of us are usually checking the latest deals between midnight and 1 AM, so if a 'may be too good to be true' offer pops up, you can jump on it.

The goal here is to help people stretch people's Daz Studio budgets as best we can, 'cuz assets at MSRP are often really expensive! And no sense paying full price for something if there's a good chance that it might go on sale for say $2-5 or less at some point...

One other note.

I've noticed that the 'sort price from low to high' or 'sort by % off' isn't picking up all of the freebies these days. Specifically, the weekly/monthly PC+ freebies, but I've noticed at least one or two instances recently. And also not counting a number of the daily sales freebies, which may or may not have buy-ins or coupon codes.

So I recommend checking the two freebie related links weekly, which you may already be doing anyways, but that the 'sort option' might not pick up:


(note that the other link that I used to use is broken, because it's no longer plat club, so you'll need to scroll down the page to spot the weekly/monthly freebie).

Thanks for the reminder. I picked up over $200 of free goodies that I hadn't checked for a while. Fun times.
 
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amster22

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There is clearly a change in daz pricing policy.
Out of curiosity, I just checked my previous orders. Last year, between 12/31 and 01/1, I spent around $150 at daz3D in a couple of days. But I have bought 15 (fifteen!) G8 pro bundles and some other stuff. The least expensive G8 pro bundle was at $5.30 (Olympia 8 and some others) and the most expensive at $8.93 (some more recent bundles like Zelara, Kala and one or two others), while most where at $7.15. I also did a gift card refill at 30%off with a $1 buy-in.
This kind of discount was exceptional, of course, but did happen. And 30% off a GC was common.
As a raw result of this pricing policy, this year, since December/01 I spent less than $40 at daz3D, despite my 25%off loyalty discount.
New Daz management should understand that they can gain more money by reducing their prices. If assets were at $100 each, nobody would buy any (except if they target professional studios as customers). At $20 for an asset, people may buy 4 or 5 per month for, say $100. At $5, people may spend $150 or more per month. And at $2, people will buy things that they will probably never use.
So, reducing prices can make more cash for daz and happier customers. But I am not not sure that this will happen...
In the daz forums, people are constantly complaining and most say that they significantly reduced their purchases. And personally, I presently prefer buying at rendo than at daz. You can frequently find crazier and sexier outfits and if you wait to get a 60% discount (and it is not uncommon), they cost under $5.

This are not good news. Daz business model is "give a 3D program for free and get money to develop it by selling assets". Less cash for daz means less improvements for DS (and we all know that DS would needs it).

I was a bit worried last year when daz issued their bridges for maya, c4d and so on. Even with a less aggressive pricing policy, daz assets are significantly cheaper than native assets for these programs. If they gain a good part of the customers of these paying programs, daz may be tempted to drop DS and to concentrate on this new market. I hope that this is not what is happening.
 

OhWee

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amster22

I think it's a combination of factors.

When items go on sale, the PA loses a percentage of what they think they otherwise might make off of an asset. And if some of these PAs can sell stuff for less of a discount on other sites (Renderosity, etc.)...

Anyways, a few of the PA's I understand have been complaining when their stuff goes on sale for really cheap. For PC+/Daz+ items, I believe that Daz Productions (or whatever their corporate name is) purchases rights to assets outright, and also for some of the Daz Originals. I don't think that all DOs are done this way, but I really don't know.

My point is that for the items that Daz owns, they can more easily arrange for discounts on these items, which is why we see steeper discounts on these items.

Daz3D.com has lost a few notable PAs over the last year, which may be related to the sentiments now. Of course, they aren't going to tell us their sales numbers, but what I'm guessing is that their hope is that the newer customers, who weren't around say a couple of years ago for the 'better discounts' won't know any better. It's also been all but confirmed that they consider their customers that actually use the forums as a tiny percentage of their customer base overall.

So my point is that IMHO they feel that they can continue to raise what us customers are paying on average for items, and perhaps maintain their bottom line. But with all of the games they've been playing lately (NFTs, trying to move everyone to Discord where posts get buried more easily, etc.), this tells me that they are scrambling to try to attract more customers however they can, but aren't willing to go back to 'what worked before' i.e. really nice discounts on stuff.

In any case, unless the bottom line is indeed dropping and someone gets new marching orders, this is the 'new normal' I think.

I don't mind paying $4-5 for good items, but only if I haven't seen those items on sale for cheaper, and that's where I am with Daz3D.com ATM. My Daz Deals history tells me that we WERE getting better deals within the last year, and this year's fall PC+ sale was a little less exciting, but I still feel happy about what I bought then. But my purchases have tapered off significantly since then.

So that's the catch 22 I'm in. Plus my library is well stocked atm, so there isn't much that I need, just stuff that I'd like to have if the price is right.

That's my take on this.
 
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amster22

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My point is that it is a silly policy to raise prices, either for daz or the PAs.
Everybody prefers to sell 100 items at $5 that 10 at $20 (given that the unit cost of a virtual asset is null).
Of course, everybody would prefer to sell 100 at $20, but this is not going to happen. At least while they mostly target the hobbyist/free-lancers market. If they decide to target professional studios, that's another story.

Recent experiments of the daz staff were all oriented towards targeting people that would pay more for an asset, instead of selling more cheaper assets. This is true for the season pass (that was blatantly a fail), the "special" PC+ items (do not remember the actual name) at an insane price, and what OhWee mentioned.
Actually, I am not really worried for the assets. I already have a decent collection and there are excellent alternative outside of daz3D.
But I am rather worried for DS. If the daz policy is to attract professional users (and the average quality of (some) daz items is somehow comparable to professional assets while being 10x cheaper than say cgtrader or turbosquid), and if they succeed, they no longer have any reason to continue supporting daz studio.

By the way, there was in July a big announce on DS5, with a beta planned in september. We are in January and ... no news (and I am not sure that no news is good news).
 
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OhWee

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Was trying to decide where to post about this. Since it requires a Renderosity Prime membership, it's free but with prereqs (membership) so I'll go with here.

There wasn't a December Prime Freebie, so there are two freebies for January to make up for it. Check the Renderosity Prime forum for details. It's two V4 characters, so nothing overly impressive, but free is free.

Might be good for a background character(s) or whatever...
 
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OhWee

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flashsale010622a.jpg

65% off isn't overly impressive, but I suppose if there's something you need...
 

Boogie

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One thing this Flash Sale was good for...

Found an asset I wanted has returned to the store 5 years after being pulled, shortly after release:



Goes to show... Well, I don't know what it shows. There is always just some crazy shit going on over there. :)
 

OhWee

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One thing this Flash Sale was good for...

Found an asset I wanted has returned to the store 5 years after being pulled, shortly after release:



Goes to show... Well, I don't know what it shows. There is always just some crazy shit going on over there. :)
Hey, I can post about that here!

So, it was briefly released at Daz3D.com on 4/28/2017, but was pulled later that day after it was suggested that permission to share that asset on Daz3D.com (it's originally a Unity asset or some such) was in question.

So no idea if that has been resolved this time around, but a few people did manage to buy it before it was pulled last time. I used to care about such things, but these days, I'm just tired of the Daz3d.com sales team shenanigans in general, and am trying to not let the 'store politics' get to me.

I have wondered about the origin of the other Polish assets though. For a while after this episode, I wasn't buying Polish assets because of this incident, but have softened my stance since then, as a few of the other Polish assets are interesting to me. if it's good enough for the Daz sales team to allow the other assets to be sold, it must be legal, right?
:whistle:
 

Boogie

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Thanks OhWee, I didn't know the story very well as it was before my time. I first saw it when it was posted in the Asset Releases thread here on F95 (so someone among those few purchasers shared it) and thought it was a shame I could never buy it.

Oddly, I also started wondering if all of Polish's stuff was legit after I learned about it. But since they have been bringing Unity assets to Daz for a year or two now I'm sure it's all good. Just thought it was strange that there has been no discussion at all about it's return on the Daz forums.
 

OhWee

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Thanks OhWee, I didn't know the story very well as it was before my time. I first saw it when it was posted in the Asset Releases thread here on F95 (so someone among those few purchasers shared it) and thought it was a shame I could never buy it.

Oddly, I also started wondering if all of Polish's stuff was legit after I learned about it. But since they have been bringing Unity assets to Daz for a year or two now I'm sure it's all good. Just thought it was strange that there has been no discussion at all about it's return on the Daz forums.
The people's posts that chose to bring this up over there, as I remember as I used to participate in the forums somewhat actively, had their posts deleted. For all I know, the entire thread may have been deleted, it's been a long time.

Looking at the Daz Deals sales history for the saloon, it looks like it was brought back about a month ago. The fact that it has stayed this long this time is probably a good sign, but of course stuff disappears from the Daz store all the time so if you want it, grab it (for a good deal) as soon as you can, in case it vanishes again.

There's still a few things that I've been kicking myself for not grabbing earlier, but my Daz library is rather extensive now, and I've learned to build/modify assets using Daz Studio and Hexagon since then. I even cobbled together this outfit, spaceship, and Rifle, which RustyV 's used for the dream in our silly game FmF!



Not the boots though, although I had to merge two different boots to get the 'cuff' look on a G3F. There's some G8F 'Amazing Morphing Boots', awesome product btw, but I always have issues trying to transfer footwear between G3 and G8 (and other generations), and it didn't go well here either. But yeah the ship and rifle, I started with pieces from .stl files and ended up pretty much redoing the entire structure in Hexagon, so they have almost no polygons left from the .stl files...

The outfit is a bit more complex, but I started with the G2 ultra bodysuit, and modified it in Hexagon from there, and saving it to a new G3 skeleton. Learned some things with this one, but I've probably forgotten whatever I learned but it should come back to me again should I decide to try to offer/sell clothes/models on Renderosity or something.

I still think that the G2 Ultra Bodysuit is the best bodysuit out there as a starting point for custom work, due to how many material zones are set up and it's basic fit. The newer bodysuits have more specific design related stuff going on, and I always seem to fall back on the G2 suit...

I should get the discussion back on track though!

But back on topic, yeah, Polish stuff and deleted Daz forum posts. Yeah, that happened, I was watching it unfold at the time. I had jumped onboard the Daz wagon a few months before, and the deals were more awesome in general back then...

I really liked the 'buy this G8 bundle, get these 3 older pro bundles for free' deals when they were trying to move everyone go G8, and even the deals on the 'qualifying' bundles were pretty good. This is primarily why I own almost all of the Daz3D.com Pro bundles now, the latest bundles haven't been 'pro bundles' so I can still make that claim. To think that bundle offer was years ago now... I feel older somehow!
 
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seamanq

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Out of curiosity, I just checked my previous orders. Last year, between 12/31 and 01/1, I spent around $150 at daz3D in a couple of days. But I have bought 15 (fifteen!) G8 pro bundles and some other stuff. The least expensive G8 pro bundle was at $5.30 (Olympia 8 and some others) and the most expensive at $8.93 (some more recent bundles like Zelara, Kala and one or two others), while most where at $7.15. I also did a gift card refill at 30%off with a $1 buy-in.
They had an absolutely insane sale on pro bundles last year between 12/31 and 1/1, and I bought a crapload of pro bundles myself. Most of them were around the $8 price point, and I bought a highly discounted $300 gift card at the time to get them. Since then, prices have become meh and lately, even more meh. The prices around this "new years" were nowhere near as generous as last year, and the "sales" have been really uninspiring. I charged up my gift card balance on the last sale (I think somewhere between 20-25% off) but I am spending it very sparingly at this point, as I just don't see anything other than the "oops" the other night with the $5 Pro bundle (TYVM OhWee for that one) which I grabbed quicker than you can say "hey, where's my biscuits?"

At this point, I'm probably gonna go back to grabbing what I can on the cheap for the Daz+ discounted prices and anything else only if it is exceptional. It might be different if I was making some money on a game, but that's not happening any time soon, so it's back to the sideines for me. Besides, like you said, grabbing all those pro bundles gave me a pretty sweet set of assets to play with.

On the side (and completely off topic for this thread), I finally got approved for the F95zone iRay server. That's really good news considering the fact that my GTX-760 got deprecated over the past year and I can only render on my machine in CPU. Even with a ridiculous Xeon 16-core CPU and 32GB of RAM, it is still crazy slow. Now I need to see what I can do with the iRay server and maybe if I can render enough, I can choke out another chapter of my game.
 
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OhWee

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Is it just me, or has it been a bit since we last saw an orange banner, one that just wasn't parroting what was on the sale page, over at Daz3D.com...
 

oaiki

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got one this morning, for the butchers texture but even with that the buy-in to the rest of today's deal was too high ... absolutely underwhelmed by the deals this year ...
 
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OhWee

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Well, Aiko is in the banner, so it must be a good sale, right?

I do love those Aikos!
:love:
 
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