So I used to dabble with 3d artwork. My freehand art skills are sucktastic, but I like to think I have a good eye for what works.

Anyway, the expense of trying to keep up with decent software, and the limits of my home machine, meant I pretty much gave up ~10 years ago.

Fast forward to me going 'fuck, I can't afford to buy a bunch of custom artwork for half-assed products I put out, hrm. I wonder what's around nowadays.'

And, well, blow me down.

DAZ 3d is free. Totally free. It comes with a limited but nice handful of scenes, props, and male/female figure. Huh! I think most of the money comes from a managed sales system of modelers, so you can buy various art packs of spiders, weapons, environments, effects, etc. to then use.

It took me all of an hour, after downloading the software, to do the following, and it cost me $0. I am pleased!




The image could really use some blurring, smoke or water dripping or... something, but for a quick dash-it-out image, I'm very heartened.

So, hey, if YOU have Zero Dollars burning a hole in your pocket, some basic tech savvy and composition skill, maybe you too can make cheap art for your own projects!

Quote from: Will;803399DAZ 3d is free. Totally free. It comes with a limited but nice handful of scenes, props, and male/female figure. Huh! I think most of the money comes from a managed sales system of modelers, so you can buy various art packs of spiders, weapons, environments, effects, etc. to then use.

That's entirely their sales model. They do sell some software add-ons for DS, plus some commercial applications like Carrara. DS is a way for them to get you to buy their models. Some are very reasonably priced, others are massive and a bit on the expensive side.

We use DS sometimes, but more so Poser. And even then, its Poser with something else. Neither one of them have fantastic renderers; Poser's can be pretty good though. Put these together with a more muscular renderer or a really good environment and you can come up with some great artwork.

A division of my company gives away several toon models for free - http://www.toonpeople.com/ Go to the Chunk, Norm and Slim tabs there for download info.

Chunk, Slim and Norm are nice on their own, but you can also make your own add-ons for them. Chunk is the underlying "person" for the official Santa Claus of NORAD Tracks Santa (a version of Toon Santa).

Nice, thanks!

I'm just glad I noticed this just BEFORE Christmas, so I can use gift monay.

For the curious, starting a personal project of rendered images telling something like a story.

http://tinyurl.com/kfkv2zs