When enough is enough?

kyoto kid

...I have Mrs. Hedgehog as she will be great for my stories.  Yeah not into horror that much either,

I rarely use any of the original base figures anymore to the point I felt it a waste of money to keep buying them again generation after generation.  With G8 the only base one I have is Vicky and that's because she was free on a loyalty banner. Unlike previous generations I feel G8 has been much more diverse in character offerings likely due to it's "longevity". I believe only V4.1/4.2 had a longer run.

 

Noah LGP

It will be enough when the published artists will decide that's enough.

It's difficult to stop when your favorite artists keep on releasing amazing products.

outrider42

BlueFingers said:

@outrider42: I agree some people would stay dedicated to Daz, but if a influx on new users would be drying up it would be a start of the end. And yes the hardware requirements for the process you are describing are steep, but will they still be in two more years for folks who just want to get into making pretty pictures? Besides there are other AI programs that can upscale images without those VRAM requirements like Topaz Labs Gigapixel. And if you do the calculations, is buying a Nvidia card with 24GB of VRAM (I just checked, I can get a new Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 24G for € 1595)  just to use AI really more expensive than getting into Daz?

@paulawp (marahzen): Yes that used to by my argument as well, the lack of control, the crazy fingers, but those issues have been resolved with the development with ControlNet, ComfyUI and AINodes it seems, and we are only at the start of this.

Now, I'm not a fan of AI, that is not a secret. I dislike the enviromental impactt,  the ignoring of artists wishes when AI models are trained, the likely slow down of artistic development in grahpical arts. And getting the light just right or stubling upon a great composition in Daz is one of the best feelings ever IMO, but I do worry for the Daz ecosystem which I love. This does make me wonder sometimes (and increasingly so) if "enough is enough" concering my purchases, and does make me very picky. I very much hope Daz will find a way to prosper the coming years, but I think there are major challenges ahead.

I don't see AI requirements ever going down for local machines. They require large amounts of data to produce good results. It is only because there are 5.8 billion images in the training data that any of these image generators started to become passable. The downloads of the models can be several gigbytes in size, the larger, the better. Unlike Daz, a low res AI generation will look significantly worse than generating the same prompt at a higher resolution.

Try it. Generate a person a 512 px, and then generate the exact same prompt at 2048 px. I have personally done this. When you generate a human face in AI, the only times the face looks good is when the face has a lot of pixels to work with...specifically a portrait shot where the face takes up most of the frame. The instant you pull away and start doing a pic with a full body in the frame, or multiple people, the quality of the faces goes down dramatically. When you see the mangled pictures of faces with AI, I bet most of those are people not close to the camera. The fellow that fooled people into thinking he was a photographer had all these pics that were basically close ups of faces. None of them were distant from the camera...for this reason.

Upscaling is not point in favor of rendering AI. Daz can render 720p pics in Iray to save memory, too, and we can upscale them in Gigapixel the same way. And unlike the AI pic, the faces will look better because they start with a image. Gigapixel has a cool face enhancer, but the problem is the result may not be the face you wanted! If you are trying to upscale a specific person with the face enhancer, it might produce a completely different person!

None of this even gets into the legal questions that AI has to battle, which are very much uncertain at this time. There is every possibility that copyright lawsuits against the AI win, and if that happens, boom, a lot of this AI generation dies. It could also go the other way, it is really hard to say, but with this kind of dark cloud overhead, I would not be that keen to predict AI killing Daz off so easily. At least with Daz, your copyright issues are far more straightforward.

Midjourney is pretty cool, but you must work with their rules. They will ban people who do not.

Besides all of this, the Genesis model has a growing following with people who make machinima from game engines. In this group of people there are still a number that use extremely old modeling apps like XNA/Lara or MikuMiku Dance. XNA/Lara is based on the original Lara Croft from Tomb Raider...a game from 1996. The original XNA dates back to the late 90s. That is why it is called XNA/Lara, it was originally just an app for posing the Lara character, then it grew from that. MikuMiku Dance dates back to 2008, which is pretty ancient by software standards. XNA hasn't been updated in years. Many moved on to Blender, or Daz, or both and use Genesis. They like the modularity. You can rest assured that people like this will still be finding use for Genesis long after Daz3D is dead and gone.

And that doesn't even mention the people like we see in these forums. Content is still being produced for Victoria 4 if you look for it, long after her expiration date. Genesis 8 is so popular that I bet it will still be getting content from places like Renderosity for years to come even if Daz itself stopped selling G8 content. I think we could be getting new G8 content as far as 2030 (again, probably not in the Daz store, but somewhere else.) IMO, G8 is the new V4. For that matter, I personally feel that G9 is the new G1, LOL. But that is a different topic.

ArtAngel

Drogo Nazhur said:

Unless you are independely wealthy, you can't buy every package that comes out. At what point do you decided that you have enough characters, clothing, footwear, hair styles, etc.

It depends on what one excels in. How many close up shots include feet? I write but I also have multiple unpublished songs (one per book, hubby was a lead guitarist in band) plus others, and trailers that need to hit the market so feet are important for me. My first hubby (been married to hubby #7 for 19+ years!) was a teacher who later got hired as a tv news broadcaster. To make old news fresh they recycled it . . . just rewrote it from a different angle. I see this happening here at Daz. But we do have some artists thinking outside the box, creating something innovative and new. Lately I say no if it "looks familiar" or "feels like a rerun" (and there have been a lot of those lately). I recently reduced my wishlist from 533 dumped for aborted carts to 90 I am considering as future purchases. But I am open to a cart slam dunk, when someone creates something irresistable. Something I have to have. Not to hoard but to use. I have a list of all current and future projects I hyper-focus on, and if I can't see it being utilized in one of those, or if it has an editorial license, it's a BIG no for me (unless I absolutely love it and think I will find a use for this come hell or high water.) There are some things I still need but are not available, so I recently bought, and am studying, three blender master courses (hours and hours, weeks long each) from Udemy to make them myself, if I have to. I'd rather use the time to write (I write different ficticious genres under pseudonyms), so buying is a smarter preferable option for me providing I have a legit use for the product.

ArtAngel

Because I owned flowershops for decades I accept inventory control and stock count as a necessary evil. For Daz, I work with three Excel Books with multiple worksheets. One has every order ever purchased, and consists of 14 columns (bundled items are shown as one item),  almost 12 thousand rows, and has dozens of associated sheets.  My second excel workbook has every item, every sku, every product owned, and is longer than 12k rows and reflects every item in my product library. I also have several 4 TB SSD drives for the zip manual downloads, DIM auto downloads, the screen shots, amd readme pdfs, associated with the bought products. in a custom folder setup where I can find hats or earings or makeup and the original zips for this plug in or Daz verion of whatever. I also cross reference and have a "! in other folders" for an outfit that has hats or jewellry. Then I have a by event bunch of folders for, you guessed it event related product. So each time I buy something it reflects a ton of work and because of that I stopped buying 1.99 or 3.99 just because its on sale. It was something I started back when I joined Daz and have kept up religiously in between power shopping. Here is a screen shot of one of those ext drives. It's a truckload of work but saves so much confusion and headache in the long run.