NFT''s - again? You ARE kidding, aren't you?
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A few renders of characters wearing t-shirts and holding picket signs in protest should do the trick. lol
I'm not on team boycott, but I'm not exactly a fan either. It's probably a craze that'll fizzle out into the fringes in several years. Bubbles tend to burst, too, BTW.
Literally one step required to turn both Daz and Poser applications redundant is someone coming with Daz-levels simpler interface for Blender. Which would not affect Daz company much as Daz is all about being the assets store, but would be much worse for Poser with their only partial implementation of Cycles.
Plenty of 2d artists already are using Blender for making 3d references.
Given all the recent developments with Daz, I actually DID try Blender. And it is not too bad at all. Yes, you need to learn a bit. But there are gazillions of free tutorials available. True, there is no such thing as a "Make Art" button. Daz Studio does have an advantage if it comes to getting quick results from already existing assets. Blender does require more tweaking, but it is getting better. And, you have more options easily modifying things. Besides that, there are GPU render engines available also for non-Nvidia cards. Daz Studio is lacking a decent particle system. Thats where PA's jump in. You get that for free with Blender. Soft Body Physics? Not available in Daz Studio at all. An easy way to model a tree? You need PA products in Daz Studio.
Blender is getting support by an armada of programmers, while Epic is pumping lots of $$$ into Unreal. I don't thing Daz can cope with those. I suppose Daz has already realized that, given the effort put into the Daz bridges for both programs.
It literally took 25 years for Blender to be given an interface that didn't look like the cockpit of the Space Shuttle, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to become as easy to use as Studio. ;)
Blender is awesome, but it's overkill for anyone just looking to buy DAZ products and make art with them. After years of going back and forth thinking that I needed to add Blender to my workflow, I finally came to the obvious conclusion that it's far more trouble than it's worth if you're mainly going to just load stuff into a scene and do a typical raytraced render. DAZ doesn't need to provide a program that can do it all, their job is to provide a program that can use their own content, which they've done. To be honest, I would rather see more integration with other programs going TO Studio rather than from it. I don't want to send my figures from Studio to Unreal, I want to bring Unreal landscapes, instanced foliage, and animations into Studio. I know that's not entirely up to DAZ, but it would sure make life easier for those who don't need to learn a game engine or a modeler to make their art.
Although I think this is a side discussion (or an entirelydiffernet one) I agree with most of what you say here. One day, someone is going to read these comments and either write bridge products into DAZ Studio or DAZ is going to improve the tools they offer (physics, cloth sims, animation, morphing tools). I rather think that it is more likely that Blender becomes more accessible to DAZ users than DAZ developing any of those improvements, however. This nonsense foray into NFT probably tells us all we need to know.
Yeah, I may want to see bridges that bring stuff into Studio, but it's much more likely that we get minor improvements here and there and that the focus will be on getting DAZ content out and into more robust software packages. I get that, and I'd still rather see that than go down this NFT road. Like another user said, I really don't get why DAZ even posts their NFT stuff here. No regular customer is going to be interested in them when most of us could make similar artwork ourselves using the products they sell here. If they want to push this on NFT sites, that's up to them, but seeing how there's a forum firestorm every time those three letters are mentioned, they ought to resist trying to push them on us.
...back in the late 70s and 80s it used to be great.
...I'd still like to see a Daz <> Gimp bridge Early on I didn't have the income to drop 700$ into Photoshop and these days I'm not into subscription software.
Logged in just to reply. Have you given Affinity Photo a look? It's not subscription based, and doesn't cost an arm and leg. I still use GIMP along side it however, if only because I've grown so used to it over the years.
I don't understand this thread. I'm not a content creator, just a hobbyist gladly paying artists for their content. Daz Studio is free. Free, I have been using database and business intelligence software professionally for 25+ years that doesn't come close to being as well developed as Daz Studio is. Their business model is they give away this free software and we buy stuff from their store. Do the math. There aren't millions of 3D hobbyists out there. There are only 30-something thousand products in their store, many essentially obsolete. I don't care how Daz makes money as long as it is legal and ethical. Is there an ethics issue with NFTs that I do not understand?
1) NFTs are, in many people's opinion (including mine) a scam. If you buy an NFT, you're not actually buying a piece of art, you're buying a token that says you bought something which resides on a server that you have no control over. It's like buying a receipt which allows you access to see your painting in a museum. That link can go dead at any time and you have no recourse - aka that museum could close at any time and you lose access to your painting. Sure, you can download a copy of what you bought (take a photograph of the artwork you bought), but the "value" of what you bought is gone if the link ever goes away.
2) There is no authentication to the original artwork ownership. People have been selling NFTs to artwork other people created. You can easily be paying art thieves and it doesn't matter in the NFT world.
3) Whatever you bought can be sold again using a different token. I could do a 100 token "limited edition" of an NFT then turn around and sell another 100. Technically it's considered a completely different transaction set but in reality it waters down the value because there are now 200 floating around instead of 100.
4) NFTs are based on crypto currency. They use the same resources so buying/selling NFTs increases the value of crytop currencies. That's why there have been a few stupidly large purchases, such as the beeple NFT. People who own lots of crypto currency made a few high dollar purchases in order to get everyone's attention. Now people are buying NFTs, raising the price of crypto currency, inflating the value of the base crypto currencies even more.
5) Crypto currencies use a TON of resources. At this point, they're using as much energy to produce per year as the entire country of Sweden uses. The energy usage keeps going up. Several currencies keep promising to switch to a different method of creating new coins that uses less energy, but those promises have been around for years. It makes DAZ Soon(TM) look speedy.
6) Most crypto currencies rely on graphics cards to do the mining (creating more currency). That has made it nearly impossible for people to get graphics cards. I've been trying to get an NVidia 3090 for months, to no avail. (It's not the only reason cards are so hard to buy, but it is a big one.) Mining wears out graphics cards far more quickly than gaming or creating art, putting further pressure on the graphics card supply, and adds to the overall waste of crypto mining. One currency coming out does its mining using SSD drives so now hard drives are becoming more expensive and harder to find. Someone burned out a 2TB drive in 2 weeks mining that currency.
7) The more people who jump into this, the worse the energy consumption gets. I think it's one NFT transaction costs as much energy as a typical US household uses in 2 days right now, and that energy usage will keep increasing. Sell 200 tokens of artwork and that's more than a year of energy usage at this moment. In a few months, it could be 2 years of energy usage.
8) The fee to sell NFTs is overlooked. It's called a "gas fee" and in many cases it's over $100 at this point just to list. When all is said and done, you can easily end up losing money even if you sell some of your art tokens. DAZ has sold so few tokens, as far as anyone can tell, that we're pretty sure they've lost a bunch of money on this scheme. (And that's not including all the time spent on marketing, redoing the website, etc.)
9) Crypto currency is often used to hide illegal transactions such as drugs, guns, sex trafficking, etc. The more it's used, the more profit criminal organizations stand to gain.
I've probably left out some other objections. There's a ton of information about all the NFT and crypto currency problems in this thread.
I haven't completely stopped buying DAZ products because of this, but I let everything sit in my cart for a while and usually end up clearing the cart. I'm down to a small fraction of what I used to buy. I'm learning Blender and Unreal now because I don't want to support a company that is encouraging something which is making it near impossible for me to get the equipment I need to use their products, such as a new graphics card.
All it takes is someone figuring it out how to sell it on the Blender Market.
Daz is is a very handy entry level application. It has its own faults, but it's a very smart move to have a free application like that. It does expand number of people purchasing anythinging from Daz for hobby use. Blender is not hard to use but the complexity takes getting used to. That's the "entry fee" not everyone is willing to (or has time) to pay.
Past the certain level of complexity it is better to take it somewhere else and I don't think Daz could match the level of development of Blender or Unreal. Leaning towards making things cross-platform is a very smart move. Unlike NFTs which I intensely dislike (Yes, by all means let's push crypto with a customer base that is dependent on the dwindling GPU availability as their "art supply". It's going to work great).
Since you sorta asked... (and no ill feeling intended, it's a legitimate question)...
NFTs, like most cryptocurrencies use insane amounts of energy (through computer usage) to process the transactions and create the currencies themselves... The process of creating a crypto coin is called “mining” and for an NFT, it’s called “minting”… they are both very consumptive of energy because of the large amounts of computing power required to process the mathematical computations involving in solving the blockchain.
Due to this, many humans who like living on a habitable planet are at odds with this sort of thing because living in real time version of Kevin Costner's Waterworld is not appealing, and that’s becoming ever more likely thanks to the contributions of pollutants and greenhouse gases these transactions produce...
And cryptocurrencies are very, very good at producing these greenhouse gases... According to the Web site Digiconomist, a single Bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of power that the average American household consumes in a month, and is responsible for roughly a million times more carbon emissions than a single Visa transaction...
Data from the University of Cambridge suggests that the emissions produced by bitcoin mining are the equivalent of between 53 and 127 million megatons of carbon dioxide… Bitcoin uses almost 150 TWh per year — more than the whole of Malaysia… Ethereum’s carbon footprint is about 22 million metric tonnes, comparable to that of Lebanon. And its electricity use rivals that of Hong Kong… Dogecoin (which was originally founded as a joke) has the same the electricity usage as Zimbabwe...
Recently a town in upstate New York sold an old decommissioned power plant to a new cryptocurrency company so they could cut out the middleman and attach their cryptocurrency mining operations directly to the plant.
If you need a power plant to run your operation, chances are it’s not that environmentally friendly.
And it’s not just the top handful of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, Ethereum or Dogecoin that are a problem, it the vast number of individuals who are jumping on the cryptocurrency wagon making their own coin… As of January 2021, there were over 4,000 individual cryptocurrencies.
All vying to process new coin and producing mass amounts of greenhouse gases… and that’s not getting into the NFT part which needs cryptocurrency to process the transactions and requires minting (it’s form of mining) to create the NFT…
So… there’s that…
Then there is the issue of what the hell an NFT actually is… I’m not gonna touch that, because it’s really an issue that one has to embrace or struggle with in their own heart of hearts and decide if they really want to pay money for what amounts to a receipt that says you paid the artist some money to maybe own or own a portion of that artwork, maybe, sorta, read the fine-print… that’s up to you, everyone needs a hobby… for some it’s collecting Pokémon cards, for others maybe it’s cash register receipts…
Next it’s the issue of this NFT nonsense being sold to artists like it’s a panacea for all the woes of the struggling artist, when at best… very best, it’s just another avenue to sell on, but one with lots of pitfalls… One in which “It costs money to make money”, but you might not make money if you can’t sell the piece for a lot of money… but you have to have a little fame or lots of appeal to sell a piece for a lot of money, so… same pig, different hat?…
Then there is the problem with artists getting their work ripped off by thieves who steal artists’ work and mint it for themselves without the knowledge or consent of the artist (yes, that’s definition of stealing).
Minting an NFT requires no proof of ownership or authorship or authenticity to one’s legitimacy… So NFTs have basically just opened one more door for thieves to use to rip off artists.
Yay.
Then there is the “Stop Asian American Pacific Islander Hate” thing…
Okay, I feel weird saying this because I’m not of AAPI heritage, but my wife is and I know how this makes her feel, especially my daughters too… it’s a real issue, we’ve experienced, not just in the hate department, but in the general stupidity department as well...
The giving to charity is great, but the things attached to it are not really “representative of AAPI individuals”… it’s kinda like donating money to an earthquake relief fund in Italy every time someone buys an NFT of that Italian guy on the pizza box… I’m half Italian and it’s a little effing annoying to always have that associated with pasta and mobsters, so I can imagine what it’s like when your heritage is always portrayed as sexy martial arts stuff and belly dancing, because like pasta and mobsters, there is a little more to AAPI heritage than that depiction, and tying a donation to that sorta enforces that image, so according to my daughter, “yeah thanks a lot”…
The better idea would have been to have had a sale, and donate a portion of the sale’s proceeds to the charity… so you are not picking specific things people might not feel are representative of their culture, but in fact your version of them they don’t necessarily agreed with or feel comfortable perpetuating...
Another good idea, (which was just pointed out by my daughter), would be to instead highlight PAs who are of AAPI heritage and for DAZ to donate DAZ's share (or a percentage) of their profits to the charity from that PA's sales on the day they are highlighted... that's a win-win because it's not perpetuating a stereotype and it's directly supporting people of AAPI heritage and comes across as more altruistic, which if you are in marketing " = feel good points"... of course that's all contingent on the PA wanting to reveal their heritage or participate, but it's still a more direct way of support.
Like having a store where you sell lots of diverse items and saying, "buy these fortune cookies, yoga CD or this ninja action figure and we'll donate money to Stop AAPI Hate"... Why those items?
I can see (I hope) it was well meant, but not necessarily well executed.
So yeah… that’s some of it.
I hope I didn't offend anyone or come across as more of a jerk than I normally do.
Eloquently stated and worth repeating. Thank you for posting this.
+1000 to what McGyver said.
Well-spoken, McGyver!
NFTs are unrelated to Daz succeeding as a business.
You want Daz to succeed? Buy stuff from Daz. Simple as that.
NFT has nothing to do with the mission.
Daz can sell NFT if they want? Sure. It's a free country.
Daz could also get into arms sales (should be a big industry in the years ahead with all the world turmoil), silicone adult companionship (aka sex dolls), all kinds of growth industries out there.
They'd also be side gigs that are irrelevant to the mission.
/"buy your genuine Daz multiple missile launcher, just like the 3d-model you see on our website!"
/"buy your genuine adult-size Victoria Perfect 10 Doll!"
Technically, heavily armed gynomorphic "adult recreational" companions are a natural evolution of the current content library here in at 678,954,986,129,002 possible variations of the current timeline... Oddly in fourteen possible futures, it's various flying biomechanical squid and in four it's robotic sheep with multiple detachable accoutrements.
LOL, yes... "More human than human" is our motto!
Someone should really take that idea and run with it.
This should be stickied on the front page.
Been on the road for two days and this thread just go SO MUCH more interesting while I was away :-)
Cheers to you all!
I had a little check on things regarding the AAPI NFTs, Daz did not release them on Wax, they were released on OpenSea using the ETH blockchain, the more polluting option. So Daz is releasing NFTs both on Wax and OpenSea.
It's the next step after 3D printing them.
Using liquid metal, "mimetic polyalloy" as an ink...
So NFTs got a whole forum now... I guess that assures nobody will ever read this thread again.
Cool.
Eh...this was a surprise, a whole subforum dedicated to discussing NFTs from a non political point of view
. Well not much we can say then really...except all this crap makes me feel sick
.
Does anyone else hear the crickets?...
Yeah, the crickets are deafening... or perhaps it's the sound of our cries that are falling on deaf ears.