DAZ 4.5 and context

jvdesuit1_582de7c548

Good Morning,

This topic is more precisely addressed to DAZ founders and developers.

I'm a beginner with DAZ studio 4.5 and I'm a beginner as far as 3D in general is concerned.

I'm also the kind of guy who although aged 71 is curious and lives with his time i.e thinks that learning should be done until your last day in this world and has always acted so, that's the way you succeed in life, that's the way you have an interesting life.

How did I come to DAZ ?

I use video extensively as a leisure and in particular I edit my travels or hiking videos like the ones I make when I hike in Grand Canyon my favorite location when I come to the USA approximately every 2 years (I total around a 1000 miles on foot there and I'm a French citizen living in Paris . I can tell you there are not so many French guys you meet inside the canyon!lol!).

Lately I decided to edit a video I shot in the ruins of Pompei and Herculaneum. in Italy I wanted to built a sort of a scenario around the movie to make it more original and creative . One is at length bored by the usual "here mum is eating her breakfast, the kids playing football" and so on and so forth!!!!lol! I decided, taking the subject more or less from a French author who wrote in particular the "The mummy" a fantasy novel better known under the French title " Le roman de la momie" (It has been adapted many times to big screen), to set up the action as a victim of the 79 Vesuvius eruption who comes back to life first with the appearance of a skeleton and returns progressively to its human appearance and leads the visitor inside the stunning and fantastic ruins of this city which history stopped in time in a few seconds. Searching for devices for my skeleton and its animation, I stumbled by pure chance on the DAZ site and its free promotions and decided to try it.

In whole I bought some 340 $ in addons the equivalent at the actual exchange rate of 280 Euros. At such a price and even If the addons were free, you're entitled to have a reliable support independent of the forums which I must say are remarkable especially in the way their administrators and users reply quickly and are willing to dedicate time to help you whatever the matter.

What should be this support?

1/ Not only an online help in the software but also a pdf complete updated to the last version of it. This is mandatory and the excuse of the company's size and staff is not acceptable to default on this matter.

Users are not always either familiar or comfortable with online helps. When I use a software I like to have the printed version of the manual besides me and read the particular topic explaining how to use a set of commands although I have two monitors on my desktop and even three as I have my laptop in a network connexion with my desktop.

2/ Many times since the first day (i.e. December 21st) , when I tried to connect to the link either in the program or on the site did I get the following message :

"Adresse introuvable Firefox ne peut trouver le serveur à l'adresse artzone.daz3d.com." which translated in plain Eglish
"Not found address Firefox cannot find the server at the following address artzone.daz3d.com"

This happens not only when you browse outside the software but also many times if not always when you are running the software like this for instance when you click on Help/Online resources/Daz 3D galleries/

We are sorry, but the page you are looking for cannot be found.

If you typed the URL directly, please make sure the spelling is correct.
If you clicked on a link to get here, we must have moved the content.
Please try our store search box above to search for an item.
If you are not sure how you got here, go back to the previous page or return to our store homepage.

I'm sorry but this is totally unacceptable in a commercialized software whether free of not. If It was once or twice you could at least excuse for the bug. Having developed softwares in my forty years on this aspect of my profession as a financial analyst, I know how complicated it is to debug a software but after so many years on the market DAZ software should have at least solved the matter even just by redirecting the user to the help page which is never the case.

3/ When you buy an addon whether free or even costing 5 or 7 $ you're entitled to have a precise compatibility information regarding not only different providers of addons but concerning the different versions of DAZ and not a laconic one like:

"Notes No
Compatible 3D Figures N/A
Compatible 3D Software DAZ Studio, Poser" -------> What means DAZ STUDIO ??? Is it Version 0 1 2 3 4 4.5??? Are we customers
fortune tellers, Crystal balls readers to be able to understand what that means especially when you know that there multiple formats incompatible one with the others and that DAZ itself has changed the format it used with DAZ version 3 the actual DAZ 4.5 .

These examples as well as my reaction which may be found harsh but the result of numerous occasions where I found myself in a sort of nightmare explain my posting this topic.

I write this topic not for the stupid pleasure of criticizing but to help the product and its site to improve because customers deserve from the developers and founders of the company some respect and consideration.

DAZ studio is Free but the addons in their great majority are NOT and we customers are not millionaires who may spend money to find themselves confronted with an eventual "your device is incompatible".

I hope this topic will be considered and not left aside and more not being treated as some kind of aggression to this company and its great softwares.