Daz has just released version 3 of their popular Studio application. Daz Studio is very similar in use and capabilities to Poser. Both have their strenght in character scenes, and both provide a good entry point for aspiring 3D artists for their fairly shallow learning curve and ease of use.
I haven’t used Daz Studio much in the past preferring to stick with the more familiar Poser, However as of late Poser has been gathering some dust for me as I’ve moved on to a few more full featured modeling tools. A few times now when I’ve needed to create a character for a scene I’ve opted for Daz Studio and feeling more comfortable with the interface.
Up until version 3 Daz Studio has always been a free application, with the release of version 3 Daz has now introduced a “Pro” version which is no longer free but at a very reasonable price, currently on sale for $50 and some change. A slightly toned down version is still available as a free download.
Several enhancements have been added in the areas of animation, texturing, and character morphing. They have also improved the rendering, which bottom line, while all the other things are important and useful, nothing is more important in my view than the final output. So I downloade the 30 day trial of the pro product and thought I’d do a test project. The results are the image below:
This was straight from Daz Studio with no real post work performed. Some like to do renders that have a cartoon or drawing like look, I much prefer to do images that are as lifelike as possible. I thought this came out close to achieving that goal. Her eyes don’t quite have what I would call a natural quality but that has more to do with the texture rather than the render engine. All in all I think its decent.