DAZ Studio

DAZ 3D Inc. is most known for its popular line of articulated 3D figures and the large, enthusiastic community that has developed around them. They give away a DAZ Studio and generate profit from digital content sold to be used with the software. The primary focus of DAZ’s in-house content development is its line of elaborately articulated 3D human figures. The “Victoria” line of figures is the most well-known and has been in development since 1999. The figures can be loaded into DAZ Studio to be posed or animated and then rendered. In addition, a wide variety of clothing, hair and other accessories are available for purchase which can be applied to the figures to achieve different looks.

The Fat Guy

The cool thing about the figures in DAZ Studio is indicated by the line above .. “articulated 3D figure(s)”. What this means is that the figure can be posed .. clothing added .. and so on. The REALLY cool thing is that the figure can be morphed. I have moved the figure to the left that I call ‘Fat Guy’ so that his arms are over his head .. I thought that he was holding a pole of some sort. I morphed his body just to see that I could (this was a BIG thig) .. turned him from a handsome dude with an athletic body to what you see now – and gave him a shirt and drawers. The idea was to quickly create a figure .. and see if I could export it so that I could upload the file to Shapeways.

I had success! I had to use a couple of programs to fix various errors from the file generation .. Meshlap, NetFabb and AccuTrans 3D. I successfully uploaded the final file to Shapeways.

Shapeways Print

A while back Shapeways applied a $5 starting / handling fee. This applies to either one or a hundred prints. This figure printed in FUD (Frosted Ultra Detail) is $10.76 each. That includes the $5 startup fee. If you print 100 then that startup fee would add only .05¢ to each figure. Even if only 10 were printed then the startup fee would be .50¢ per figure giving a cost per figure of $6.26 each.

If 100 were ordered then the price would drop to about $5.81 each. Even at $6.26 it would be worth it as each would be a custom design. If were to wish to sell these then it would make sense to use the 3D prints as masters and cast the copies in resin.

That’s where I am at this point. I haven’t had one printed as yet to see how they come out. I really need to do that. If everything printed successfully .. then replicating in resin might make sense.