Why so long between updates to Daz Studio?
nickalaman
Posts: 196
It's been over a year since there's been an update to Studio, I'm patient, but this is way too long. Do we know what the holdup is? Is it because Daz Studio 5 is around the corner perhaps? then if so, why all the secrecy? Daz Studio is free program with little or no competition, so I think a little transparency would be nice.
For example, I have a project I'm working on that requires the use if a spherical animated Iray stereo camera. Iray has the ability to handle stereo cameras, but Daz does not. Is it in a planned upgrade? I have no idea, no one does, it's a mystery. If someone told me it was planned, should be released this spring for example. I’d say great, I can plan accordingly.
The closest competitor to Daz I guess would be Reallusion with their iclone package, I remember receiving teaser previews of their upcoming character creator months before release. It built excitement, they even had little videos of the new features.
I can understand to a point why Apple keeps a tight lid on development, but seriously do we need this veil of secrecy for Daz Studio. I’m not saying be transparent for everything, I could see not wanting to publish the release date of genesis 9 or any major character releases. But not studio, come on Daz enough with the secrecy.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Over a year? For latest general release maybe, but there have been several public beta versions of 4.11 released in 2018...
Anything mind blowingly new/interesting in 4.11? I'd love to see a roadmap for DAZ Studio and the Genesis figures. I have been having a lot of fun with Blender 2.8 realtime over the last year and hardly touched DAZ lately. Getting figures/props ported over is a challenge however.
DS is the very definition of a closed source product. It may be free as in beer, but it's very definitely not free as in speech. (I'd say it's more accurate to say it's freemium rather than free: the software itself is free but to do interesting things you need content, which is paid for.) Some closed source vendors like to tease what they are planning, Daz seems not to feel that would be helpful to them, except in so far as the public beta reveals what is ahead. (Perhaps there are some commercial partners who get more info e.g. plugin developers.) That is a commercial decision Daz has made - or they just want to be able to jump out from behind a wall and yell 'Surprise!'.
Reallusion has a different business model than Daz.
They generate revenue from selling licenses to a multi- tiered suite of
Character animation products with a strong focus on Exporting Characters & Data to other environments
especially game engines.
It is in their best interest to publish Roadmaps and teaser videos.
Daz is a 3D figure & content platform
the Studio software is a classic "Loss leader" product to foment content sales
and provide a platform to use the content
the "Changelog" can sometimes give hints about new upcoming program capabilities
if you can manage to decipher the seemingly intentionally cryptic language it uses
The Daz PA's sometimes announce upcoming figure products.
As an Addendum; IMHO Game engines and realtime rendering are the future.
Video game industry revenues typically eclipses both Hollywood and the music
industry by wide margin.
People now have begun realize the animated film making potential
of engines like Unity &Unreal
This is where the next battleground will be in terms of screen resolutions,frame rates and
Graphics hardware performance
If you want to see some "sneak peek, "roadmap" type promotions of what the
Daz parent company is doing on the Game dev side, there is some
really cool looking "eye candy"over at the Daz sister site
https://www.morph3d.com
I prefer to be surprised than have what marketting feel will help sell the product; generally I don't trust marketting departments to get it right.
They have been telling us what changes they have been making in each beta update. In the thread at the top of this forum. Hilights include a newer version of IRAY, Improvements to dForm, expanded scripting tool, Improvements to content creator tools.
But why do we need updates anyway? Sure, if there are bugs detected then those should get fixed, no arguments there, but I'd rather stick with one single version for a whole year and actually get some work done in comparison to having something "new" and "hip" every 3 months. Because that would mean having to deal with the upgrade process, which is something I'm very careful with because... just because something is new doesn't automatically imply that it's good.
Heck, look at Hexagon & Bryce. Those programs also went for many more years without updates yet they simply kept on doing their job (at least on my PC) and I never really felt that I was missing out on anything. Even now... recently I finally caught up with iray (which is a very impressive experience) but despite that I still highly value Bryce, even with the older 3delight engine.
I personally couldn't care less about "new", I'll take "working" and "functional" over 'new' any day of the week.
How do you detect and repair a bug if you have no orderly way to study and report them.... software development is a continous process... Something that you and I might never notice as a bug might be a monumental problem. You gave a great example of this: Bryce doesn't run on any Mac software in the 12 or 13 years and Hexagon is highly unstable.... you probably would never notice it, but for me, I'm painfully aware the lack of updates...
I am still on 4.8 with no plans to update
I have it perfectly configured with all of my animation related plugins and scripts.
I dont use the G8 models... period
I dont render in IRay.( even though 4.8 has it )
I dont use Dforce, preferring optitex instead
No need for any "new" versions in my case.
I'm still using D|S 1, poser 2 and Possette on my 486 and CTR 15" display and damn proud of it too! *rattles his cane at whippersnappers to get off his lawn!
All jokes aside, I hope that 2019 will release 4.11-4.5 officially as I'd love to see what the eventual future DS 5 will bring!
I wish the updates were a bit more frequent, or they would offer a normal installer for the beta so I could use it at least. Not holding my breath though lol.
If you object to DIM for content you could use it solely for the beta.