Skip to main content

DAZ 3D gives away their Pro software for free

In an unusual (or panic?) move, 3D software developer DAZ 3D gives away its three major content creation and rendering software for free for a limited time (29th of February 2012). These are unlimited and complete software applications, which used to be commercial before. All software is available for Windows and OSX.

Check http://www.daz3d.com


Which programs are available?

DAZ Studio Pro 4 (used to be $430)

This is a program to load, pose, animate and render 3D characters. You can load models (free and non-free content is available). One of the novel features is the "Genesis" character model, which can be adapted parametrically, so a single basic model can be tweaked and reshaped in different variations.

Character modeling is beyond the reach of the average 3D modeler, so being able to use a dedicated software might make it more feasible.

What's the catch? Well, most models, accessories, poses and bundles will not be free. E.g. the Victoria 5 bundle is about $150. Just to give you an idea.

Bryce Pro 7 (used to be $250)

Bryce has been an original, albeit alternative, program to create mostly fantasy landscapes. It changed ownership a few times, but is still around.

What's the catch? Additional content, materials, rendering options are not free.

Hexagon 2.5 (used to be $150)

This is a modeling application which can be used to create models, sculpt them into finer detail, set up the texturing layout and prepare them for rendering (which has to be done in external software).

What's the catch? Only till 29/2/2012.

So this is a good deal, but you have to take advantage of it quite soon.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Improve usage of BIM during early design phases

When I was collecting ideas for a book chapter on BIM (that seemed to never have emerged after that), I collected 10 ideas, which I believe still reflect good recommendations to improve the usage of BIM during the early design phases. These ideas are related to BIM software, but you can apply them in any flavor, as long as you can model with Building Elements, Spaces and have control over representation. Introduction This article gives an overview of several recommendations and tips, to better apply BIM applications and BIM methodologies, in the context of the early design phases. Many of these tips are applicable in any BIM application and they are based on experience gathered from teaching, researching and using BIM software. Sometimes they could help software developers to improve the workflow of their particular BIM implementation. Tip 1 : Gradually increase the amount of information In the early design phases, the architect makes assumptions and lays out the main design in...

Getting BIM data into Unity (Part 0 - Introduction)

This post reflects on work that I carried out, elaborated during my guidance of a few Master thesis students, to better integrate BIM models into Unity. This will be a multi-part post. This makes each article a bit shorter to read, but allows more in-depth information overall. Hope you like it. Please comment with feedback and further improvements. Basic methodology Unity can import geometry from FBX and Collada (DAE) files primarily. There are a few other formats, but these are the preferred ones. When integrating CAD or BIM files into a realtime environment, you have to convert the geometry. During my Unity teaching and the writing of the book Unity for Architectural Visualization ( buy from Packt ), I’ve come up with a basic diagram explaining geometry exchange between CAD and BIM software and Unity. Throughout these posts, we’ll go more into detail. We start with ArchiCAD, but will tackle Revit in a follow-up post. Promised!

PythonOCC : Open Source interactive CAD shell (and how to run it on OSX)

What is PythonOCC? PythonOCC is an Open Source (LGPL) Python-wrapper for OpenCASCADE. So what is OpenCASCADE (OCC)? This is an advanced Open Source (custom license) modeling kernel, comparable to commercial engines, such as ACIS or Parasolid, which are used in quite some commercial CAD programs. When you want to develop CAD software, you could use OCC and write programs in C++. And why using Python? With this wrapper, you can create CAD and geometry scripts in Python, which is an interpreted Object-oriented scripting language. You can write almost "on-the-fly" and seriously reduce the implementation effort, by skipping the compiling-phase. You can even interact with a running program in the Python interpreter. Want to read more about this? The OpenCASCADE official website  (currently Linux and Windows are officially supported) The PythonOCC website/blog  (beware that the core of the actions happen in the development repositories). So far so good. Now the nasty, techn...