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I met the old staff at Siggraph when Dan Farr was the head. He was sooo nice and even got me a free pass to Siggraph one year and invited me to a DAZ staff private dinner there. I think a few PAs were there too.. I ran into Dan often at Comic-Con and Siggraph and he went on to start Salt Lake City Comic-Con. I miss the old days when the staff was much more accessible. They used to actually have a phone number where you could talk to a tech support person!
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Makes me think of parents when they say "this is why we can't have nice things".... We used to be able to to see previews of coming products until foru users decided to post the info in competitor forums; i suspect direct support requires that customers don't abuse it.
I dunno... The Blender dev team gives a complete and total view of their development process, all the way down to weekly developer notes on what they did the past week, and they seem to be doing "OK" with regard to the competition.
There are oodles of people on the Daz3D Linkedin page, but some of them are PAs, and I suspect that many are either part of Tafi, or no longer associated with Daz3D. A lot of them are shy and are only listed as "LinkedIn Member".
The Daz 3D Blog occasionally profiles employees.
Blender is in a different commercial place than Daz3d... it isn't run exactly as a commercial entity since it is a nonprofit. I am not sure what financial competition they might have as a nonprofit. A better model would be Samsung and Apple who don't give detailed roadmaps of upcoming products.
Back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, when I employed others at a physical shop, I hired both employees and contracted with others for services rendered, (for deliveries etc). Then when I got into Real Estate & Development, I learned about subcontracting. Hiring subs = no employee deductions. As an employer I had to match certain pay deductions and pay unemployment insurance & workers comp etc. I assume hiring a sub-contractor is similar to hiring a fiver person. When I hired 3D Universe to turn my 2D character into a 3D character, he simply did a fantastic job and I paid him. I suspect Daz often hires others who are not employees per se. I also suspect Daz is a crazy house when it come to people they pay for jobs done (an external job), which is not the same as paying people hired as employees and given internal jobs.
Is Blender in a different space than DS? They are both free and they both generate demand for associated product, which are not free. This seems like the cousin of the 30-year old instinct to cling to your IP in the face of other options like the GPL.
To this day, I have not heard a rational argument for why DAZ is holding on to dForce SBH hair and HD as if anyone would stop buying the great products from hyper-talented PAs, if they did. Other than the same thing it always is: Jut like the saying "No one has ever gotten fired for choosing Oracle", no one has ever gotten fired for not guarding the IP.
But we still must admit that there is ample evidence that an open dev model is viable, other companies will not plunder your IP because of the legal protec tions already in place, and the main effects are that your development accelerates and you become a leader in your field.
My new fantasy dream is Blender Application Templates.
Image a Blender that groks Genesis completely, but looks and feels like DAZ Studio.
Just open source then whole darned thing and let an adequately resourced and growing team work on core development, while the handful of DAZ developers take on the task of making it seamless.
"Is Blender in a different space than DS?" Not so much in a different space but they are different kinds of entities. As a rule, commercial entities work differently than nonprofits.
I don't understand this comment. Are you saying people abused tech support? Posted what in competitor's forums? I don't understand how this relates to what I wrote.
Wonderland said:
I don't understand this comment. Are you saying people abused tech support? Posted what in competitor's forums? I don't understand how this relates to what I wrote.
People have done both of those things. It relates to your post because Daz3d has partially changed because its customers have changed too. As someone who has been here since the beginning, there were some elements that were very homey but didn't scale well with more customers. It was nice when the creators were more accesible and the customers were more knowledgeable but a phone line where you have to just recite the read-me to a post-literate customer or field abuse gets stale very quickly. A perk used to be that Daz3d would show products as they were working on them for what eventually turned into the platinum club but very quickly people would copy and paste the sneek peeks in Renderosity's forums for example so Daz3d had to stop, many freebie's quickly ended up on warez sites etc... I do miss the days when it was more intimate and polite and shudder to think home many of the other stores were driven out of business.
I don't think any of those differences, even if I posit that some should exist, would be relevant to a discussion about the openness of their development model. What would be different from Blender being open about their future products, and DAZ being open about theirs? I don't see the non-profit/for-profit axis being a factor. I've never heard a good argument, or rather any argument at all, beyond just the assertion itself.
I think it's a fundamental difference in the attitudes of Blender and Daz3D that might (or might not) have something to do with the profit/not-profit divide. Blender feels happy to offer road maps, share in-progress work, and keep the whole library of earlier versions available for download. Daz3D says no to all that. It makes Blender more open and welcoming, I think.
to me its just DAZ holding its products to its chest and the separation of company and customers. At the beginning all of it was more like a family. Bryces, Poser, then DAZ. Ray Dream Studio/Carrara. The forums were more open, more intimate. The developers were people that you talked to in the forums. It was all a new thing. Over the years that close relationship faded away. Even Rendo is a long ways from its origins. The early people were the originators but like the web, it all turned into making money. Then things changed. Its why the forums are moderated as they are, to keep disagreements from dividing up people, losing customers, etc.. Keeping things at an even keel. Competition created the need to avoid talking about each different marketplace to avoid losing business. If the old timers remember, the cooperation between DAZ and Rendo, RDNA, etc through the fact everyone at the beginning was using Poser, created a completely different dynamic. anyway. I would like it if the staff were on the forums more. Maybe a deal where each month one of the developers, customers ervice reps, or whatever could be highlighted and we could get to know them more. Create a family feel again.
There are two problems with that - the frist is simply the press of time, but the second is that there have always beena few people who overstep the bounds and there is a limit to how many times people can be upbraided before the experience begins to pall.
Sounds really discouraging. Business sometimes is inhuman.