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Talking about bags and rigging ... I have bags in my prop collection which have handles (common old semi-circular handle pairs) and they remain several inches apart so are impossible for a hand to hold them together. You'd imagine that would be a no-brainer but I have more than one of these props (can't remember where I bought them at the moment though).
I don't know much about rigging so I sent the bag to Blender and created a morph. Not ideal (rigging woul be better) but it took me 5 minutes to fix. I'm sure an experienced PA could correct that in less time and with better results than my amateur efforts.
FG products are usually not rigged; the doors and windows do not open. Sometimes there is no door to a room. So, just make that assumption unless otherwise explicitly stated. The selling point is coverage of categories that have little to no representation in the store.
...I have the old Flyer Jacket for V4/M4 and the front zipper tha has three setting open top, open half, or open (fully unzipped). The 3D Wizard's old Jeanz for V4 also has unzip morphs.
There have been a number of times I passed on female clothing because a dress, shirt, or blouse was open to reveal cleavage and didn't have a "button up" morph or "closed" option. For example with the Fight Uniform sets for G2, the male version was closed up properly while the female version was open down to about the mid bust line to show the obvious.
I completely stopped buying FG products after I bought FG Home Props. They have no consistent scaling. Look at that toaster next to the mixer. It is ridiculous. I immediately submitted a help request. My request went to the bug tracker black hole last November and stayed there. Nothing was fixed.
That was my second bad experience with FG products. The first was a hoodie with such low resolution textures it was unusable. I immediately returned that one.
It is even worse: If you use the Zipper in MD, it will alter your garment. So, if the Zipper is closed, you have another number of Vertices than if it is open. So you can not export that Cloth as a Morph Target for DAZ, because it would not have the same count of Vertices and Morphloader would not be ablet to load it as a target. The only way to do it is to Sew it together like it is zipped, Freeze (or pin) the whole thing, Delete the sewing, Simulate to create the "final" garment and then start deleting pins one by one to start opening the zipper and export those states as Morph targest. It's a great feature, but only to use inside MD and not for creating garments for other software. I don't even want to think how rigging such a thing would work...
I'll call your toaster, and raise you Ice Cream vs Laptop
I agree, the zipper in MD isn't actually rigged and just a kind of fake zipper but it's sufficient for my animation purposes, if it has to be a real rigged zipper for whatever reason, this could be done in Blender with ease, here is a tutorial of the principle and how it works:
The best real zipper I found at Turbosquid costs unfortunately $159. Since I can't link to an other shop you have to google for "Zippers metal nylon 3D model - TurboSquid 1243415" and there you click on the 360 degree icon, it will load a short animation how it works and was natively made for Maya.
Well, I'm not a zipper expert, but it's a suggestion if someone is interested in a real rigged zipper for clothings.
maybe that is how they do those mini toasts you have for hors d'oeuvers
well said ...
I'm going to respond to your comment because I don't really want to pick on any specific PA who decided to chime in. But PAs here are no different than those of us who are selling books and comics on other sites. Whether we like it or not, we're competing against free books and free stories and free comics posted across the net, and even given away through the retailers we work with. If we want to stand out and get money for our work, we have to go the extra mile to stand out and convince customers to buy and read our books instead of choosing a free title. A lot of indie authors out there are spending small fortunes to have their books "professionally edited," to have a professional looking book cover made up, to advertise hoping their book gets noticed. At the end of the day, many aren't recouping any of that money. But they do it.
They can like it or not, but the PAs here are competing against free products, and they have to convince us to buy their item instead of grabbing a free item somewhere else. Putting out a product that looks too similar to something I already have doesn't convince me I need the new item. If I have to put in the work to make your product work for me, than I'll save the money by grabbing a similar free item elsewhere and putting the work into that.
There are artists here who create vehicles. And they put in the effort to rig those vehicles. Even the cheap vehicles that end up in the 8/$2.99 PC sale grab bags are rigged with doors that open, dials and wheels that turn and spin, etc. There are also artists here creating some wild and unique characters. And even if they're simply using the transfer utility to rig them according to the G8 or 8.1, they still have to put in the effort to make sure the joints work as they're supposed to. But there are PAs in this thread saying, directly or indirectly, that's it's too hard to rig a tool box cover to open and close.
To pick on the tool set in the OP only because it's the example given, You can find a lot of the tools free somewhere, You can find toolboxes free. Even if you're not picking up free stuff, there are tools you can find in other products that you can use for background clutter. The OP is a decent looking collection of props IMO, but it doesn't stand out. I personally don't think every tool needs to function, but it seems like a given that at the very least, the tool boxes should have been rigged to open and close (if they do, then I'm sorry, I'm going on what other people are posting). I have a free tool box that was rigged, and I used it in a project earlier this year.
I get PAs are trying to make a living off this...a lot of us are trying to make a living off what we do. But if you're not willing to match the work of free or lower priced items, then you can't be surprised when the potential customers spend elsewhere.
Ultimately if PAs cannot - over time - get a erasonable return on their work then they will stop being PAs, either moving on to something else or just making the odd fun-prtoject in their off hours from whatever they do to make money. PAs are not forced to be PAs, or to create content at all.
HiveWire had a bomber jacket with a rigged zipper. But of course, they closed their store, probably because they couldn't turn a profit with all the time it took to run the store and create content at the same time. Making quality items may not be profitable. Maybe that's why there is so much junk in the world, not just 3d items, but everything.
I think there may be some difference between what some of you interpret as "rigged" and what "rigged" actually is.
Rigged means an item has bones that control its movement. There are tricks that can be done with morphs and multiple hidden zipper pulls that simulate a zipper opening and closing, but what is often really happening there is that the zipper teeth are being parted by a morph while multiple zipper pulls are moving in and out of the body to new positions on the article of clothing. That way one item can have zipped, half undone, and unzipped looks, but I doubt that you would be able animate one continuious zipping and unzipping motion with those items.
The reason for this is that the zipper pull is going to be rigged in its location on one part of the body. So while it might be able to travel (via morph) up an down the upper chest, if it strays from that part of the body its motion will still be controlled by that original body part. So if that zipper tab is down at the belly button, and the upper chest moves, the zipper will still move with the upper chest, flying off into space somewhere. This is what all the hiding of multiple tabs is about, the hidden but revealable tabs at the different zipper positions are rigged to those parts of the body.
I really don't see the problem. Daz is primarily a virtual photography program. It has some animation features, but, that is not its main feature, and that is not the main purpose of most of the assets released for it. Maybe the emphasize will move primarily to animation in time, but I have my doubts. There are already other programs more suitable for that purpose.
And yes, there are way less assets suitable for animation. Such assets do take way more time to create, and the cost of producing many assets would easily triple if they had to be made for animation. Just take that toolbox as an example: it's more than just a few boxes with some joints. Those joints would have to be positioned perfectly to allow for the boxes to move the way you'd expect them to move. And just an opened and closed version would only be the start. They'd have to move the right way, so the creator has to constantly go back and forth, checking every single frame of the animation. That's quite a bit more work than making one that doesn't animate.
And I really don't want to wrap my head around imagining how to even rig that one with cantilever trays. As far as I know, it isn't even possible in Daz Studio.
It would've been nice if the toolboxes came with both an opened and a closed version, but, ah well, it is what it is. I don't see any reason to blame the creators, they didn't say or even imply anywhere that the toolboxes could close, though it would've been a nice surprise, such a feature isn't mentioned anywhere. Not in the description, not in the list of included assets and features, not in the readme, and not in the file list.
Only those suffering from entitlement issues would complain about it.
tl;dr
Don't complain about lacking features on products when those features weren't even advertised in the first place. Make your own stuff instead. Or consider the limitations of time and resources people face when doing things for a living.
There's a reason why a plumber generally won't fix your sewage problem for 3 dollars.
1. he can't fix it in an amount of time that equates 3 dollars or less in value
2. he can't make a living charging only 3 dollars for 2 hours of work
PA's face the exact same problem making assets for Daz Studio.
The thing is, there's a sweet spot of pricing; about $15-30. A product might reasonably be 'worth' a lot more, even, say, $250!
People will buy 10 $25 products, over time. The same people are HIGHLY unlikely to buy one $250 product, even if it includes the same or even more stuff.
So what we have is different scopes of products. There are products that have specific things in great detail (Maclean has a great set of appliances with lots of fiddly detail and capabilities, for example). Then there are products that have a broad scope, like a fully furnished apartment.
Different people have different needs for scenes, so it's not a matter of better or worse, it's a matter of what parameters you want. Do you want many many props or a few props, all at the same price? Well, the first product, those props are almost certainly going to be static.
If you see a $25 product with a hundred props... you can ABSOLUTELY expect they are static.
Also, regarding free products: these are generally a labor of love. For all you know, someone put in so much work into a product that it 'should' be $500. But they've decided to waive the cost.
You can't... really compare a product that someone expects recompense for to a free product, because you have no idea what went into the free product.
I agree with this sentiment. I've seen several brilliant and elaborate creations given away for free or for very little, which should've cost hundreds of dollars. The creators of such products are usually very talented hobbyists, who do have the time to spare on their "product" because they are not limited by any deadlines, nor have to rely on their creation for a living. Often, the items were purpose-build for their own use, but they were so proud of the result they wanted to share. I rarely see these creators release a new such a product on a monthly or weekly basis. More often, only 1-3 times a year, or it's a one-off and they are never heard of again as asset creators. Earning some money from it is just an extra to them, and some of them don't even want to go through the hassle of monetizing it because of tax regulations in their country..
But products like these are why I sometimes browse through the freebie sections on sites and forums, because those gems make it worth the time spent browsing through all the stuff I don't really need.
A slight cheat.
The ice cream is from the Ice Cream Parlor set.
I was doing a separate scene and needed an ice cream, I spotted that prop and pulled it into my scene, only for it to be half the size of my character.
I then read the title of the prop, 'Ice Cream Sign'
Oh, OK. It was funny anyway.
If you want some good ice cream props, look for "Exnem Ice Cream Props for DAZ Studio with IRAY" over at Renderosity. (I'm not allowed to link to it). They are appropriately sized. I used them in a render here.
But that is not how it works in reality. Few people are going to view it this way. Most people are going to directly compare a freebie to a paid product based on how useful that item is to them.
So ultimately that labor of love freebie is absolutely going to compete with paid products. I have a free pose converter from Sharcg that does exactly what I need, so why do I need to buy any pose converter in this store? In order for any paid pose converter to be worth buying, it MUST be better than this freebie. Whether anybody thinks this is fair or not doesn't matter, as long as that freebie exists all similar paid products will get compared to it.
Every form of media must now compete with free or cheap content. This is not uniquely a Daz issue. Not many people buy CDs anymore. CDs were $15 and $20 around 25 years ago, and that is not even adjusting for inflation. Now it is tough to get people to even pay 99¢ for a song, many people stream music from apps. Some people may even just use Youtube to play music for free (with some ads). And right here, Daz Studio revitalized itself by becoming a free program, while the paid Poser program slowly faded.
But it doesn't have to be doom and gloom. Over at Steam, you can find stories where a $15 game went on a featured Steam sale for $1. That game made more money during this short 2 week sale than it ever did during its lifetime. So it is possible to succeed at such steep discounts when people can find you. Steam has a large user base.
This is yet another reason why Daz must expand its user base. With more people using Daz, that opens the door to more buyers, so that a $2 sale can still lead to a decent payday even at such low prices.
The dreadful choice between seeling 0 units for $ 100.- each or 100 units for $ 1.- each. In the case of digital goods, where production costs are the same for 1 or 10,000 sold units becomes even more important.
Some of the best items I've picked up here were Christmas giveaways. Oso called them labors of love, and it shows. That's the kind of work that should go into paid products. Those are the kind of items I want to see. I might have cleared out the room sets from the various PC for a day groupings if I wasn't so disappointed with the room sets I already have. Tons of props that look more like filler than a genuine effort, flipped normals that have to be fixed on my end, newer PAs with out of control poly counts, wire meshes that are disasters. To say vendors don't put the same effort into their paid products as they do the free items is like saying you don't care about your customers.
Someone in the free forum recently celebrated because a pose pack they threw together and offered free on another site just for the heck of it reached 109,000 downloads. I'm sure there are some who had to download multiple times for whatever reason, but otherwise, that's a potential 109,000 customers using DS and looking for content that's DS specific. With the bridges and Daz's attempt to expand their customer base to those using other programs, there's no telling what your potential customer base could end up being. From the customer side of things, it rubs the wrong way when PAs jump into these discussions to tell us they're struggling to sell a few hundred copies of their product, break down their earnings as if they were wage slaves, and use the whole thing to justify diminishing efforts. Many of us who are also in content creation, aren't treating our own work that way. Instead of telling myself I don't want to put the effort into this project because the last one bombed, I look to improve for next time. Instead of complaining that only X-number of people were interested in a project, I want to try to reach the Y-number of potentials I missed. Like I said in an earlier post, many of us on the customer side are in very similar positions as the PAs here, so we understand the struggles you all go through in your businesses...but we're also more in tune with the excuses.
And you want to know what I find really funny about these discussions? It's the vendors who shouldn't have to defend themselves or their work jumping in to defend those that do. All of you? You're the ones getting hurt by the quality issues. You're the ones taking the hit when customers get fed up with the bad and stop spending altogether.
Wait... if that's not accurate scaling... then... the giant ice cream cone outside the ice cream shop isn't real?...
Nooooooo!
My dreams are crushed!
No, it's saying that when you do a commercial product you have to think about return on investment and making your work time cost effective.
If you're working on something that was never supposed to bring money in the first place you can dedicate as much time as you want to "perfect" it and add all the bells and whistles you can think of. All that means is that the freebie will be relased later.
However spending lots of time on a commercial product adding tons of details or functions that won't generate enough extra sales to recoup that time is not a sustainable business strategy. You could have used that time to work on the next product which is likely to generate more income than those few extra sales.
When you depend on that income to pay for rent or food then you can't afford to spend time on things which won't bring enough money, it's that simple. So vendors have to decide when to stop working on a given product and start on the next one, and yes that can mean stopping before they would have done if that product was a freebie they were working on during their spare time.
I think a big part of the problem on this subject is the crazy degree of inconsistency in the store in regard to product pics and descriptions.
For example: the products Blaze High Seas and Corsican Raider were both released on the same day. Blaze shows only two rather poor promo pics and very minimal info in the product description. Corsican has ten extremely detailed pics and a much more detailed product desciption. Here's the kicker--both are DAZ originals, so who's to blame? My guess is that whoever was handling Blaze hit a deadline crunch and fell short. Regardless, I'm interested in both products but have my doubts about Blaze just due to the lack of effort that went into the store presentation.
I just recently purchased Skalde for G8, but also ran into problems with the store info. I was purchasing it specifically for the beard and its morphs, but there were no examples of such in the product pics. I posted a thread in the Commons asking if anyone who owned it could provide some pics--I got crickets. My takeaway is that not a whole lot of folks bought the product (or I'm just not well liked on the forums-ouch!). I took a chance and bought the item and fortunately I was pleased with it. But I could easily have gone the other way, and to the point--how many other potential purchases were lost for the same reasons?
Does the lack of detail and clarity in many product pages generally disguise poor quality in a product? The answer can be both yes and no, which only muddies the water further and hence threads like this are created.
When something is 100% off, the base price could be essentially anywhere from $1 to $1000. The fact that the price you are looking at is $0 is not meaningful when comparing it to products that aren't free.
I mean, the return of value of all free things is going to be some form of infinity (unless you start calculating things like the cost in downloading and installing)
When I said labor of love, I did not mean vendors don't care about their sold product. It's that there is no sense of return or scope for a freebie because someone is doing it purely because it amuses them.
I can only comment about this from the customer side, but at least for me PAs that do not put a certain amount of details and workability into their products aren't really that probable to get much from my limited funds. So stopping to put work into a product before it reaches that point where price equals use value will just lead to me not even taking a longer look at that next product, which probably is also lacking in value for me.
Then there's also the problem that PAs and customers sometimes seem to have a totally view of what useability is. Which was what made me start this thread: sometimes products get made to only look good as background clutter, while some customers would love to have tools, boxes and whatnots with moving parts or at least with different options in the opened/closed department, so they can be used, if not in animations, but at least in a row of pictures following each other that describe a timespan (= like the several panels of a graphical novel).
Add to that the different views about a certain thing (creature, piece of clothes or armour, weaponry or whatever...) is "supposed to look" that PAs and customers might have, and you got a shipload of more reasons for a product failing on the market.
Usually a feedback from the customers or even from people who didn't become customers, because the item lacked the appeal to buy for them enough to buy it for various reasons, is probably a great help to make the design choices for further products. Too bad that this isn't an option here in the shop and also not really in this forum, as it isn't seen as a base of communication between PAs and customers, but only as... well, sometimes it looks as a tool to pet some egos.
You are so right.
I for one really appreciate the work done by all the PAs here.
Some do not catch my fancy, but I know a lot of knowledge and experience went into them.
I am interested in static images and not animation, perhaps due to my love of photography, which goes back almost 60 years. Still, I am delighted to see some animations done with resources like DS.
I always saw DS as a "photography studio" in your computer.
The PAs need to make enough for a decent living. Amen.
I also appreciate a freebe big time. And you are right, they are often a labour of love. Example, look at the many exquisit digital models of Star Trek ships, and just recently I saw a free model of the Battlestar Galactica..... all very detailed, and shared out of love for the subject, and generosity. I appreciate that very much, and I am grateful to those people completely.
Those good people who make items for a living, I am amazed at your skill also, and buy what I can. I want you to have a good life, and to continue doing this great work.
Sadly that is usually the case. Even the most benign criticism, whether constructive or otherwise, is typically met with a Mod or a PA explaining to you why you are wrong. I have noticed this more through observation than participation, and it is the primary reason I rarely engage (been here since 2004 and still have less than a few hundred posts). Providing honest customer feedback shouldn't always have to lead to endless debates and arguments over who's right and who's wrong. As a customer, I'm neither right nor wrong. I'm just trying to tell you how to better take my money from me. If you're not interested in meeting my particular needs, fine. No hard feelings.