Are Clay Renders No Longer Required?
Sevrin
Posts: 6,310
Time was when just about everything that had geometry included clay renders so you could see what exactly you're buying. Some PAs are continuing to include them in the promos, but especially new vendors are no longer bothering. Daz written policy doesn't seem to have changed, but a lot of stuff is showing up without untextured/clay renders.
In this case, it's not a matter of some arbitrary policy, but of providing us with the information we need to help us make purchasing decisions. Right now there's a fair bit of confusion of what some products do and don't include, and descriptions aren't always clear or on point, either. If you don't have the Daz Deals browser add-on, you're at even more of a disadvantage and have to rummage around for a readme/file list.
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Comments
AFAIK they never were required
https://www.daz3d.com/community/community-publishing#popup2
Looks pretty much like a requirement to me. I agree that its absence is an occasional problem. I particularly like this with landscape models, as trees etc showing up as billboards will make it far easier on my system, but potentially restrict locations for figures.
Regards,
Richard.
I just wish clayrenders were more often replaced with material zone renders. Or, at least, have renders of both, like here:
Renders showing the material zones like these still give me a fairly good (sometimes even slightly better, sometimes slightly worse) idea of how the geometry looks. But, more importantly, and this can make a product a big seller to me, they show how versatile the product is, how hard or easy it will be to customize colors, patterns, reflections, transparencies. Even if this was a single-piece outfit, I'd know I could at least make a part I don't like transparent, so I could combine it with a suitable part from a different product. That image showing material zones told me more than the clay render. It varies though, pastel colored material zones make it easy to still see the geometry. Bright primary colors with a high diffuse would make the geometry a little less recognizable, so that'd be for the vendors to figure out, what works best.
I won't argue about the desirabilty of material zones, but, in this case, I'm just asking for what's traditionally been required to be included in promos. Baby steps.
Wasn't Templates for products also a requirement at one time? Not all products include them anymore.
I've been a DAZ PA for a long time and clay renders were never a requirement. They may have been recommended, but definitely not obligatory.
That is . . . up until last year . . . when DAZ updated their PA guidelines and asked that we all include at least 1 clay render.
As far as I know, templates have always been required. But with 100s of PAs all over the world all working in their own way, the words 'herding' and 'cats' spring to mind.
Difficult though it may be, it's the business Daz has chosen. It's gotten so that there's no longer a lot of confidence that items you purchase at the Daz store are any less prone to malfunction than some freebie by a no-name artist. We get the impression that Daz has given up on quality.
I don't think they've given up on quality, but there are signs they're overwhelming their QA and other teams. Items in Connect with '2 of 2' as though the name were just copied from one of the DIM files. Bad metadata, missing icons, packages clearly changed just before being posted, and all the other issues you've mentioned. Working from home is contributing to the issues, but I'm wondering if they need to either slow the pace of releases a little or get a couple more people working on things.
I have no idea what the issue is but they need to get it straightened out. I'm buying more products from rendo because then I'm buying more or less straight from the artist and if there is an issue IO can contact the creator directly and get it corrected or at the very least know to never buy from them again. Here it took 6 months to get some really basic stuff corrected and some other stuff I was told there was no problem and if I didn't like it to get a refund only to see that the issue was corrected and the corrected product was finally released.
If there's ever a new standard (and DAZ holds the PAs to it) then I'd definitely like to see clay renders and material zone renders made a requirement, particularly on clothing. Both are tremendously helpful to buyers in figuring out just how useful any particular product is likely to be.
I'd think that this was actually something that could even be scripted fairly easily, reducing the burden on PAs.
Scripted easily? I've written my own modeller (initially for finite element analysis, since overtaken by a change in FE package) that in effect has both as display styles like 'Texture Shaded' is a style in DS. So if I can do it in mine owen program, a script would be dead easy. Dead easy, except for the dearth of decent help files making learning scripting on a non-web connected machine unneccesarily difficult.
Regards,
Richard.
Well, some of the PA's are doing an amazing job. Everything is crystal clear from product description and promo pictures (including clay renders, where appropriate). The product's smart content data are flawless. Plus, the product is fun to use. Some do not have the same dedication. I think this is kind of unfair. Featuring PA's with products, where scenes load with missing runtime files errors, or havving all items listed in lost and found on smart content, is just unfair to those PA's that really do an excellent job.
Gladly, there's no need to script such a thing, since code 66 already did. Fairly useful tool for speeding up something that should be one of the most common tasks for vendors making promo images. Just have to get it at some moment when the discounted price is lower than the cost of the time spent writing (and testing) such a script yourself.
Fully agreed. Documentation of the DAZ scripting API has much room for improvement.
If you want customers to pay good money for your product, you have to show and tell them what it is in the clearest possible manner. That means good promos and a description anyone can understand.
I mentioned PAs from all around the world who maybe don't speak perfect English. The same applies to customers, I always try to name all my product parts - figures, objects and materials - in the simplest and easiest way I can, so people know what they are. No sense in calling a Door material 'WoodenShinySurface'.
Clay renders are supposed to be a requirement now for all products. Texture templates are required for clothing and such-like, but not for environments/props (This is what I was told by Daz). I guess since people are more likely to make free/paid texture addons for clothes.
Likewise.
I spent cash at rendo instead of credit here. I really feel the quality checking has slipped.
Funny. I've always included templates for every product (all props or articulated figures). The way I see it, if a customer has a label or sign prop, they may not like my texture and want to change it. Sure, you can look at the original and work from that, but templates are a courtesy and useful to have.
If every PA were like you, we'd be using the forums to play hangman rather than complain about products.
I’ve been finding so many issues with products lately and it often takes 6-9 months for them to be repaired. I purchased a utility from a major top selling PA who has been selling here I think since the very beginning of Daz and the part of the utility that was the reason I purchased it does not work and CS acknowledges it but who knows when it will be fixed. An issue with another product from that same PA that had files missing took 9 months to fix from the time I reported it! The PAs need personal testers and QA needs to additionally test. And Smart Content is all screwed up because of spelling errors on category labels. I know people are working from home, but I’m working from home too and if I can find these errors, there’s no reason the PA and Daz shouldn’t be able to find them. It’s getting really frustrating.
So true.
Potato potahto. There's no question that QC has gone down significantly over the last year, and DAZ has actually ramped up the number of releases. Whether they've actually given up on quality or they aren't allocating enough time and manpower to QC, the end result is the same. If there's money being spent on redesigning the website for the umpteenth time, producing unwanted and uneeded mistakes like DAZ Central, and extending the Official Genesis 8 figure line past 200 characters, they should be able to bring in enough warm bodies to remedy the QA problems.
I am also working from home. I think that this is a very lame excuse for quality levels going down. My employer developed a totally new business model just with virtual work, i.e. everyone is working remotely. And the quality level has actually increased.
I think I saw this coming years ago:( Using DS 4.9, never using connect or working online, not buying new content, just the odd legacy products (dirt cheap), and installing DAZ stuff with DIM or manually seems to work for me. But seeing this sinking ship and fellow forum members having all kinds of issues makes me very sad.
I included them a few products ago and was told by Daz that they're not necessary unless it's things like clothes. Things like labels/signs might need them too - though I tend to make the label/screen/poster part its own single map - so any 1600x1200 (for example) image can replace them in a plug'n'play manner.