3D RENDERING ON THE CHEAP WITH DAZ STUDIO

Many people probably already know this stuff but I figured it wouldn't hurt to mention it in case some people haven't.

STEP 1: GO DOWNLOAD DAZ STUDIO FOR FREE

Basically if you want to try some of this 3D Rendering stuff out for yourself, a really cheap and quick way to get started doing it is with Daz Studio, which you can get totally free of charge. So Daz is a great way to get started playing around with this stuff for free. Later if you find yourself getting more and more into it and you want a richer feature set, you can go ahead and buy Poser. But I think a good first step is to just download Daz Studio for free and play around with it

You can get it at http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/software/studio/-/download?

I think they make you enter an email address to register with, but you don't have to pay any money for daz - its free

STEP 2: GO GET SOME FREE CONTENT TO USE FOR YOUR SCENES

Daz Studio is for the most part completely compatible with any content that would work in Poser. So what's nice about that is that there is a vast variety of free content out there to hunt down and play with in your scenes.

Here are some places to go download free content:

- Get the 3D Bridge Starter Pack at DAZ for free. You should be able to find it at [link] and if you don't find it there just go to http://www.daz3d.com and search for 3D Bridge Starter Pack. it should be free of charge. it has lots of content in it to play with, including the Aiko 3 model as well as a bunch of other stuff.

- Freebies section of renderosity.com. Again you may have to register there with an email address, but you don't have to pay any money. Go into the freebies section there and look around. All the content that is listed as Poser or DAZ should work fine in Daz Studio and there is a vast amount of stuff there. In particular you may want to look for the Ultimate Breasts freebie injectors by WillDial if you want to pump up the breasts of your models

- You can find a bunch of sci fi related freebie content at [link] If you fish around there they have a lot of Star Trek and Star Wars stuff

- You can find some free hair at http://digitalbabes2.com/ so that your models won't all be bald

- Other than that you can just go treasure hunting across the net for Poser freebies. There is a vast, vast amount of free content out there and its kind of fun (and addictive...) to hunt it down

STEP 3: MAKE SOME RENDERS!

Play around with Daz Studio and just get comfortable making simple renders

WHERE TO GO FROM THERE

So with the steps above you can get Daz Studio for free and some free content to put into it to play with.

If you've caught the 3D bug at that point and want to go further there are a few things you can do.

One is that you can get some of the higher resolution models to work with.

Currently one of the highest fidelity models is Victoria 4 that you can get from daz3d.com. Actually I think her latest version is Victoria 4.2. I use her in a lot of my renders, and you can crank her muscles up quite a bit

Another thing you can do is get Poser rather than Daz. Poser costs money but it does have some nice features in it. One is that it has a Walk Designer that you can use to make your characters walk if you are doing animation (and a Talk Designer that you can use to make their lips move for dialog)

For myself I actually mostly use Daz even though I have Poser (I do go into Poser for a few things, mainly related to animation). But Poser does have a lot of features that Daz Studio doesn't have.

If you really want to go upscale you can move on from Poser/Daz and go use Cinema4D or Maya but those packages cost a lot of money.

Anyway it is a lot of fun to play around with this stuff and with Daz Studio and the tons of free content for Poser/Daz that exist out there, the onramp to trying it is pretty low cost (actually its free!)