Into the Night

 

First Thing In The Morning

 

Caught in the River

 

A Floating Ride

 

A Magical Visit

These came out pretty good (although the light source somehow got shifted between panels). Unfortunately, this extremely simple set up took hours to render and my comp went through four crashes in the attempts to build the scene and a couple blue screens mid-render. I think at this point, its clear I need to find some better workarounds with DAZ, or switch to another program, or something.

This model was just a quick slap-together, but it gave me an idea for a comic. Unfortunately, I'm just not going to be able to make those with DAZ at this rate. I was going to add some dialogue and effects to these panels, but my hacky caption style clashed too much, and I couldn't figure out a good effect to make in Photoshop. So, here's the raws; I think they speak for themselves. :V

Working With DAZ Studio

Sneaking into your room for a visit.

A Sex Mage has fun with the boy next door.

Three Sex Mages training their powers on the neighborhood Test Boy.

After a year or so of flirting with the idea, and several brief attempts to try it only to drop it, I have finally taken the plunge to work with DAZ 3D Studio. These are my earliest results; as you can see, it allows me to create impressive 3D graphic scenes, with a variety of great-looking models and sets for purchase, and a robust lighting engine. The best part is, assets made in DAZ can be used for commercial projects, meaning that I could finally make 3D comics and Visual Novels with custom models and put them up in stores, unlike the stuff I make with Koikatsu and Honey Select.

Unfortunately, DAZ is also an enormously clunky, resource-hogging, laggy, extremely costly, and time-consuming program that will randomly crash or blue screen my computer multiple times in a single project. It's a trade off, of course. Koi and HS/2 come with a host of limitations, at the benefit of being pretty quick and easy to use. Learning DAZ is a skill that requires having an optimized computer, a lot of patience, more artistic pre-planning going in, and a fair chunk of money to throw down in order to do anything beyond the utmost basics, and even the utmost basics can give experienced users headaches. Beyond that, a lot of users of DAZ also supplement the images they generate with post-render work in Photoshop and other such programs, so even after you've finally gotten DAZ to spit out the image you want, you're not done working on it.

To compare, from loading the program to having a finished render, producing an image in Honey Select can take me anywhere from ten to thirty minutes, if I know exactly what I want, and I just need a little bit of fine-tuning to get it right. All of that time will be in constructing the image, and then hitting a button to take an instant screen shot. Replicating the same image in DAZ can take anywhere from three to five hours, with another hour or more on top of that just for the program to actually render the final image once everything is set up. That's just doing the scene with the three girls floating a guy in a yard, with minimal props, two basic light sources, and simple clothing.

And this is to say nothing of the costs. DAZ nickel-and-dimes the living shit out of you for every little thing. Even factoring in sales and the occasional freebie and DAZ being supposedly the best deal on the market, things add up very fast. Every set of clothing, sometimes even individual sets of clothing, every figure model, every wig, every pose pack (basically a must to cut down on the sheer headache of posing), every expression pack (same), every location prop, backgrounds, sometimes even alternative colors for hairsets and clothes you already have, all of it, is piecemealed out separately. You can very easily blow a thousand dollars and still not feel like you have enough to work with past a couple very specific shots you want to make. And not all of it works, not all of it is cross-compatible, and some of the assets by themselves will beat your CPU like it owes them money, even if the scene you were building up to that point had no problems. The shot of Lettie just floating there with no background? I wanted to have her standing on an outdoor set, but her outfit by itself floored the gas on my computer, to the point I blue screened twice trying to set up the scene, and finally had to just render her by herself.

A project can, of course, go a lot longer, and the more you want to do, the harder it is to get the program to cooperate, if you don't have a computer optimally specced to handle the load. I have a "gaming rig" computer, but it's already a few years old now and wasn't the beefiest to start even by those standards, and I'm not in position to plunk down money on a state of the art new computer, just to then spend several thousand more dollars for assets, all for a single program.

There are certain ways to work around the system, depending on what you want to do. It is clear I'm not going to be able to reliably make full-fledged comics like I've done with Koikatsu, but if I can at least do good renders of stand-alone models and just paste them on backgrounds in GIMP or PS, I can probably do more character art to supplement my websites, cover art and stills for ebooks, and maybe even be able to make custom sprites for future VN projects.

So, for all my bitching thus far, yes, I still want to keeping trying to work with DAZ, because the results certainly speak for themselves. Even my fledgling first steps I feel like an upgrade to some of the stuff I've posted so far with the Illusion programs. But from a practicality standpoint, I'm not going to be able to fully convert to DAZ. I may still make some more stuff with Koi and HS2, especially when it comes to comics. The same comic that takes me a weekend to make in Koi will literally take me a month in DAZ, assuming my computer didn't melt from the effort.

Big thanks to Jasmine VanCroft for pushing me to take the plunge, and guiding me through the program. Without her help, I don't think I'd have even made this much before giving up on it again. She's been making some fantastic stuff with DAZ on her own website, and you should definitely check it out: http://www.jasminevancroft.com/site/main.php