Wow, it's really been almost a year since my last post…  No fanfare, I just want to ask the 3D community a question: Is Daz Studio 4 worth getting?

For those of us who like to create 3D scenes and, in particular, scenes with attractive women as the focus, there's always been three main options: Poser, DAZ Studio, and Everything Else.  The latter consists of the big, expensive software packages like 3DS Max, Maya, Lightwave, C4D, etc.  Since those packages are more general-purpose, they are usually used by professionals more than hobbyists.  The first two are for getting a character set up with a costume, props, set, lighting, and cameras as quickly as possible.  Naturally, this makes for many renders that look very similar, especially to those who don't spend much time customizing things.

That said, I do like the simplicity of setting things up in Poser and DAZ Studio, but I really like the output of renderers like V-Ray and Maxwell, which are used with 3DS Max and Maya.  Yes, I want to pursue a career in this field, so I need to be familiar with these pro-level tools.  If you've browsed my gallery, you might have come across a couple of test renders where I exported a scene from Poser/DAZ Studio into 3DS Max and tried rendering there.  The results were somewhat encouraging, though still a little problematic.  This is something I intend to work on when I've got more time.

But I digress…  My big question right now is whether or not to start using DAZ Studio 4 in place of DS3.  To give this question a bit more context:

My situation right now is that I built a new computer over a year ago with fresh installations of everything.  I saved my "Downloads" folder from my Poser 8 installation before I changed computers so that I could integrated into my new PC, since I have a metric ton of downloaded Daz stuff in there that I do NOT want to spend an entire day re-installing.  I now have Poser Pro 2010 and have put that Downloads folder in there, but haven't really played with it yet.

I also tried re-installing DAZ Studio 3 on this new computer a few months ago.  It works, but having it import all of the old Poser content makes it nearly impossible to navigate.  On top of that, I also know that SOME packages (such as the Victoria 4 stuff) have separate installations just for DS3.  It doesn't seem as easy to copy over a single folder from an earlier DS3 installation and drop it into a newer DS3 installation, as it was with Poser's "Downloads" folder.

Enter DAZ Studio 4.  I have now just "purchased" it (it's free until the end of July), but I've been reading up on its system of using new "Genesis"-based models.  I'm sure I could still use V4 and such with DS4, but the Genesis models seem so much easier to use.  I could have DS4 convert clothing over from V4, but then all the morphs are gone, from what I've seen.

So, yeah, it's a conundrum for me.  There's more things that worry me about DS4 and Genesis, but I think I've hit the major ones.  I'd really like to hear from other fellow DS/Poser users to get there thoughts on this.