How much is it normal to spend when starting out with Daz Studio?
mojoturnip
Posts: 18
Hi all,
First, apologies if I'm posting this in the wrong place or if this thread has been done before (I did try a quick search but couldn't see anything).
I was wondering how much money everyone spent originally when they were first starting to use Daz Studio.
I've been here 6 weeks, and not counting what I was going to spend today, I have apparently spent $266.07 USD on Daz 3D stuff 
I wondered if that was a normal amount? If I have been too much of a sucker with all these sales and coupons? Please share 
(I think I'm going to unsubscribe from Daz's marketing emails later...)
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Comments
It depends on a lot of factors, like what kind of renders you want to do, how much of your needs can be met with free products, and your comfort level at certain tasks.
I thought Daz Studio would be a nice hobby for my dotage. It's turned into the most expensive hobby I've ever had.
Do the sensible thing, run away now!
I remember spending about a $1000 one month.
I have spent hundreds, but there are some when almost nothing.
I bought a $300 gift card in december that I haven't used anything of yet. That is unusual but the reasons, well I wont discuss.
I also havent bought a gift in either of the three/four good offers since then (a gift card has to be at least 20%; Good is over %20) - for the same reasons. Daz's loss, my gain. I didn't even think about getting one despite their being 28%. Although today's I would have likely ignored regardless, I don't buy gift cards when there are buy-in conditions.
Ahahaha, similar situation here, I thought "well, spending £40-£100 would be the same as paying for a 3D program that isn't free" and BOOM, suddenly I'm way past that point lol
well that makes me feel a little better, thank you. I try to remember that the biggest saving is to not spend any money in the first place
yeah I'm a very low-skill user... It is a little annoying to think I could save money by making some of this stuff myself haha
I think my all time Daz purchases might be in the $200 range. Using freebies and things like blender and gimp makes projects feel more "mine". Making my own stuff adds a whole new level of 'fun' to the hobby by learning other applications. Plus it saves money for my really passion... old sewing machines.
Thanks for the tip! I think I'll try to make today's purchase my last
If you are just lookin for models to mess around with you can get a ton of feebie stuff at sharecg.com
Belonging to the PC+ Club is the first thing to do, as you get low priced items but it also saves you on other regularly released products too (which is where the real savings comes in.) There's freebies each week too. Each month you get $12 worth of codes (two for $6 each) with different restrictions, one for Daz Originals, one for $18 of stuff (no new releases) in general. Wait for a membership sale on that. :) IMO it's not really how much you spend, it's what you COULD be spending compared to what you ARE spending if you don't belong to PC+
sales can make a big difference, as items are regularly 40% off or more.
when i started (recent) i remember spending quite a lot as i literally had nothing to use so didnt have a choice. i dont spend very much anymore as already have all the good stuff.
I wasn't just referring to modeling, by the way. There are other things such as setting up lights, tweaking materials and shaders, and posing, that you may have prior experience with, or might just experiment with and find that you're comfortable with/good at doing. Try to work with default assets and freebies for a while, watch some tutorials, and experiment to see what you REALLY need before you start spending a bunch of money. I hardly bought anything for the first six months to a year that I was heavily using DS, but that was mainly because I was dirt poor. If I'd had the money to spend, who knows how much stuff I might have bought that later turned out to be useless or redundant once I had a better grasp on how to use the program.
What will put the cost of the hobby up is PC+ membership
Famous last words.
Two things worth remembering imo.
Yes, there is only one way to save money; that is to save it.
Buy one get one free, is not free; it's buy one, get one at no extra cost; the important point is cost - because although there is no extra, there is still cost.
It can also be a fun hobby, just the collecting itself!
I look at bundles, and what I want out of the bundle. If what I want is 1 cent cheaper, then I get the items I want, presuming I will use them then - otherwise.
... There is always another sale. ALWAYS.
Give yourself a simple rule. Remember to render with what you have bought, before buying more.
Where was this advice when I started out back in 2004? LOL x 1000!
All jokes aside, this is probably the simpliest, most common sense thing to do...that almost none of us did when starting out, I bet. :)
I've seen some come in and spend hundreds a month right off the bat, I've seen others who rarely purchase anything and stick mainly to freebies - so it varies wildly by person.
Personally, when I first discovered Daz Studio and 3D art I was on a super tight budget, so for the first few months, I didn't really buy anything and just stuck to the freebies. There are a TON of freebies to be found but a lot of it is older content from the V4 days. However, if you're able to take the time, a lot of it "polishes up" quite nicely with some new Iray shaders and other tweaks/adjustment. You have to be super careful with freebies though - make sure to keep them in a separate Freebie Library and don't make the same mistake I did when I first started by mixing them with the rest of your Library and purchased content. Some of the freebies aren't created correctly and can really jack things up for other content in your library (this happens most often with character morphs that are saved incorrectly and will affect every other character from that "generation" in your library - for that reason I've stopped downloading freebie characters, as it's not worth the risk since sadly, many of them have morphs that will inadvertently affect your other characters).
Eventually, I was able to become a PA and I'm now, thankfully, on a much less restrictive budget so I'm able to purchase content on the regular. :) Which is good since, despite my now pretty hefty Library, Daz3D somehow keeps releasing products that are just too good to pass up! lol :)
...for myself its a tossup between this and my collection of single line and multi line sport kites. I have several thousand invested in that "hobby" as I used to travel around the country doing the festival and competition circuits. However at the time, I was also working at a fairly decent paying job in multimedia development so ai cold afford such expensive toys (an average dual line sport kite could easily go for between 150$ - 300$ or more).
When I first got into this I was still working (albeit not earning nearly as much). Even so, it still often came down to the choice of Hot Pockets or "nukit" burritos for lunches and turkey hot doggies for dinner for the week, or that new big shiny Stonemason set which just hit the store. What helped lure me in initially was I didn't have to pay 250$ (or more) up front for the base programme (before I could see if I even liked it), just the thousands since on content and plugins after I took the bait all the way up to the reel on the fishing pole. However, every software has this same issue, (even the spendy pro grade stuff) unless you can grasp the process of, and have patience (as well as years) to devote to learning modelling, mapping, and texturing.
On the other hand, if you are game to give that a try, there is Blender 2.90 which is free..
The only way to use DAZ economically is to only do nude renders of bald people.
...that is what I did for several months until I encountered my first March Madness sale and joined the Platinum Club,. Things went south from there.
Actually got into kitbashing early as with Gen4, there were no teen or child characters (K4 was about the last before Genesis) and wasn't fond of the Gen3 versions as they were poorly supported. Back then there was no "autofit" so you had to use a third party clothing conversion programme, pay for the various figure licences, and even even then it was hit or miss.
A few folks have been at this for long enough to have spent an entire HD pickup truck's worth of money at this enterprise, if not more (all of you crusty old bastiches can just shut right up with your stupid denials. We all know better.)
OTOH, a hobby that has lasted (in my case) for just shy of 20 years of aesthetic entertainment (and, no kidding here, was once a means to get a hormonal, introverted, and scary-smart young lady to actually want to hang around the guy who eventurally married her mom way back in the day) ain't a half-bad hobby to have. So I really don't count the money anymore, any more than the way my friends count the money they spent on exotic huning trips, massive RVs, boats(!), an old project classic car restoration, etc...
That said, budgets are totally understandable. This is why a lot of folks go get Blender (or a similar low-cost prosumer-grade mesh-mangling application) and make their own stuff. They also go suck the Internet dry of freebies, and then repurpose them to taste (and even the cruddy ones can clean up fairly well with a bit of subdivision tweaking and texture swapping). I'm willing to bet there's at least half a terabyte of Poser/DS-oriented freebies alone that will work in DS right out of the zip file, with no modifications. More than enough stuff to keep a neophyte busy for a couple of years at least.
Many people have come to view the act of shopping/purchasing of DAZ 3D models to be equally as enjoyable as rendering with them. I tend to fall in this category. I remember buying my first model from DAZ, for something like $3.50 and I felt HORRIBLY guilty as I was going through rough times and needed to put food on the table for my family. Fast forward to present day and spending considerably more almost daily. I first broke that guilt/shame barrier by saying "I am building a library, and only buying things on sale." While buying things on sale is still the general rule, I buy A LOT of the things that are on sale, and there is ALWAYS another sale. But, there are A LOT of things in life that I DON'T do and so having a 3D rendering hobby that I use to produce a pretty large amount of content for my DeskToppers (link in sig file) each month to a fairly large audience gives me something wholesome to do with my mind, and time (and money) and I am not the sole benfactor of all this. I sleep just fine thank you very much.
If you are experiencing problems in other aspects of your life due to your spending habits on DAZ products then you might have a treatable problem and should seek help. (That was meant to be funny, but sadly, may actually be the case for some - and in that case no joking matter. Seek help! Get better and then get back in the game!)
Render On!
i get kind of the same micro-serotonin boost or w/e from making Collections on sketchfab. I have created many collections of freebies on sketchfab, which i think activates the same maladaptive neural pathways that makes me want to buy things from cgtrader, turbosquid, artstation, and daz store.
I know this is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but in my opinion, $0.00 is the best amount to spend on this when starting out. Unless you are doing this for a job, start out with freebies. This hobby is far to expensive to start splurging on content that you may not know how to use. And freebies will teach you how your content should be installed on your system, in case purchased items or freebies are broken. Sharecg and Renderosity's freebie section are good places to start. Also whaterver3d is a great search site that searches all the legit 3d sites for content.
...I have years worth of freebies on several USB sticks as well as a stack of R/W DVDs, some of which you no longer can find. I still tend to hunt for and use freebie material, save for what requires G8 or uses dForce (I got off the bus when G3 got the "pink slip" and my old system chokes on animation sims).
Except I NEED heels, lots of heels!
This. I started awhile back and while I didn't buy much in the beginning, I have had my share of spending sprees over the years. I honestly feel a new user should play around with the basics and the app to find out what it can and can;t do before spending money on content. there are so many utilities in the store that a user can do for themselves if they would just take the time to learn what DS can do.
Between 300€ and 900€, something like $700 depending on the G8M Pro Bundle, new releases and discounts.
Generally I spend less in Jan-Feb-Mar-Apr and more in July-Sep-Nov-Dec.
Today I spent 600€ ( $673 ) for a gift card + 2 new releases and I received $900 of store credit.