Daz Studio is an amazing 3D application. It's even more amazing because its free!

It's basically a free (but supposedly less powerful) replacement and/or addition for Poser. I first found out about it a couple of years ago after purchasing Poser to try my hand at creating comics with it. I noticed people creating these incredible renderings with a 3D model named “Victoria”. People would purchase Victoria and load her up in Poser to create these fantastic images. So, I decided to take a closer look at the company that created the Victoria model.

It turns out Daz Productions was a company that produces high quality 3D Content. In essence, they create 3D models that are usable in 3D software such as Poser. I was impressed with the quality of their 3D models – I thought they were much better than the 3D figures that came bundled with Poser.

They were also creating a free 3D application called Daz Studio to go along with their 3D Content. This has now matured into a really amazing piece of software. Daz Studio's user interface is much more accessible than Poser's. Daz Productions has expanded to be a company that produces both 3D Content and Software. They have an interesting business model – give Daz Studio away for free and sell high quality 3D content to go along with it.

As I mentioned earlier, my original intent for purchasing Poser was to try my hand at creating comics with it. It seemed like it would be possible to use Poser to create panels for these comics by loading up these 3D figures and posing them into a scene. Then I would use another application like Adobe Photoshop Elements to place word balloons in the scenes and string together the scenes into a little comic strip or book. It seemed like this could be a fun hobby to explore.

Unfortunately, because of lack of time and energy, I never got serious enough to create any artwork. And I also found Poser's user interface to be an intimating hill to climb in my attempts at using it.

Now, I'm making another effort at this. This time I'm going to try and use Daz Studio as my main tool because its user interface is more accessible to me. I was able to load and pose 3D characters, some background objects, and arrange the camera and lighting to produce a scene. With Poser, I remember getting frustrated with not being able to do things and not understanding how things worked. I will still continue to have Poser in my toolbox (in fact, I recently purchased Poser 7) to use as I get more experience with 3D software.

My plan is to first get familiar with Daz Studio by trying to render a scene a day. Below is one of my first creations. It uses the free Dsytopia City Blocks #11-20 model for the city background. Other models used were Michael 3, Michael 3 Body Suit, Eyewear Pack 1.3 Trilogy, Zena's M-Capes, and TreadZ boots.