DAZ 3D is about to finish giving away its major software. DAZ Studio 4 Pro, Bryce 7 Pro, and Hexagon 2.5 were all available for free for a month. Plus some very valuable plugins. Why did DAZ give away over $1,000 of software, to what might well have been around 250,000 people?

The headline answer is that software vending provides only about twenty percent of the firm’s annual income. The rest comes from sales of royalty-free content for its popular range of DAZ characters and animals. So the move was a drive to increase sales to that user base. Everyone who got the freebies had to sign up to DAZ’s store first, thus paving the way for future casual sales of content. With Carrara 9 (DAZ Studio’s “big sister”) expected to be released in Q2 2013, with Genesis and Victoria 5 support, DAZ’s new mailing-list is certainly going to come in handy for future promotions.

Behind the scenes there are apparently complicating factors. Some key merchants, such as the leading Sixus1, have publicly declared they can no longer support both the DAZ and Poser platforms. He favored supporting Poser 9 and Poser Pro 2014, in future. DAZ was thus seemingly facing a significant move toward the outstandingly excellent Poser Pro 2014. Poser can, of course, load more or less all the same content as DAZ and visa versa, although some Poser-specific texture types don’t travel well. Some of the other dedicated 3D pro and semi-pro creatives were also talking about making the same move to Poser-only content production. By giving away the DAZ range of software for free, if only for a limited time, DAZ perhaps hopes to claw back some of its key content creation merchants.

The inclusion of robust content production tools in DAZ Studio 4 Pro also means that DAZ might be able to grow its content producing merchants as a result of the giveaway, which could make up for any that decide to produce only for Poser.

The promotion will also leave a long-lasting legacy of inbound links and publicity, scattered around the Web, all driving traffic to DAZ. The promotion has possibly widened its hobbyist user-base to the sort of advanced Photoshop and Corel Painter users who read ImagineFX magazine.

The final reason is no doubt to placate the user-base of DAZ. The launch of Studio 4 was not smooth, and might even be said to have been a long drawn-out series of mistakes. Many advanced users were spurred by this sad saga to look seriously at Poser Pro 2014, and they very much liked what they saw. By giving away the top-of-the-line pro version of DAZ Studio now, including the valuable Decimator and several bridge plugins that give access to ZBrush and Photoshop, DAZ has done a lot to restore its reputation and to draw people back. Personally I dislike Studio 4 and I will be sticking with Studio 3 and iClone, while taking another look at Poser in the form of the excellent Poser Pro 2014.

But, free is good. We should welcome anything that draws newcomers and traditional creatives into the world of 3D renders, especially at a time when 2D and 3D creative practices are converging and merging. As for storytelling animation, I suspect that many hobby animators will in future increasingly go to real-time tools, that are based on videogame engines — such as Lumion, iClone 5, Muvizu, and others that will emerge.

“Some sorts of fans, you really don’t want to make angry…” Above: Sanctum Arts’s The Horde werewolf model for Poser (now, sadly, withdrawn from the market along with his other fabulous RD Phenotype monsters — I hear rumors they’re going to be used for a feature-film…?)