Greetings!

Welcome to Scifi-Meshes.com! Click one of these buttons to join in on the fun.

DAZ Studio, Hexagon, Bryce 7 Free.

HundredHundred268 Posts: 1,021Member
edited March 2012 in General Discussion #1
They're giving them away if anyone's interested. http://www.daz3d.com/
Post edited by Hundred on

Posts

  • BlueCatShipBlueCatShip0 Posts: 0Member
    Newbie here, 2nd post. Experienced elsewhere, but brand new to 3D.

    A friend recommended the DAZ3D products, said they're free right now. I've wished for them for many years, but never tried them.

    I had trouble registering, then getting the confirmation / activation email, and then found Contact Info (email) was available only to registered users...but I hadn't received the email. I went through, checked for typos in my email address, and tried "I forgot my password," in order to have it resend an email. That also got no results, or so I thought.

    (Relax, I'm not going on a rant, there's a point and a better outcome.)

    I was mystified as a designer, why a company with a long reputation and good products would not have an email address in plain sight for every visitor to contact their company. I'll admit I still don't understand that; it's poor design, IMHO.

    I did manage to get to a block, "If you still have problems, Contact Us." But that link goes to a 404 Not Found page with a dorky but cute flightless bird. I'm trying not to think of it being a dodo bird and trying not to take that personally. It's just a cute bird for humor value. At least they did better than boring business as usual. But again, heading to contact info by another route and not getting anything but a "not found" is NOT what their company should want to happen.

    I nearly gave up on getting the free stuff. I had planned to buy one of the starter packages too.

    Then when I told the friends who'd recommended the free products, one said she'd had the same problem, but had gotten an email a day or two later.

    OK, the company has industry-recognized products going back years and years. I'm motivated and want to try them. This is too good to pass up. I figured I could wait a day or two. -- And I was starting to picture some poor secretary, intern, or gopher frantically going through registrations by hand and approving, which got my sympathy going. (Surely that's not what they're doing? But maybe so....)

    I looked over the next two days. No email forthcoming. I gave up for now.

    This morning, I look in my email inbox, and lo and behold, there are two emails from the company. -- But dated *Wednesday?* Whaaaa? I looked Wed. night, Thu., Thu. night, and they were most definitely not there and not in my Spam folder either. I checked. I'm not that much of a newbie.

    (See, toldja there's a better outcome and it's not really a rant!)

    OK, well, that's great, let's go get the cool stuff and begin trying it out. -- Plunk the freebies into the cart, item by item. Plunk in a bundle of 3D models, unbeatable pricing, so I can say I *bought* from them, and so I can later write an email to customer service saying how I really was almost a dissatisfied (non-) customer, because of how their site's doing things.

    Hah, curious how the sale and receipt email went through immediately. No problem getting that to my inbox. (Sorry, snide of me.)

    The available products page then shows for all platforms (Win and Mac) in a long list. -- Wow, that means I got more than I thought, and for free except the one bundle. That's fantastic. But their presentation of it is confusing. There are also two date columns, which threw me until I saw why: One is the date the software was last updated. The other is when I purchased it. That shouldn't have confused me, but the header wasn't initially visible (the page came up viewing in the middle, not at the top, strange).


    The moral is -- YES, go register and get the free stuff and try it out! -- But be prepared to wait two or more days to get your registration confirmation, and then wade through getting the products themselves. -- Just be patient, it'll happen.

    The moral is also -- I hope they'll improve their site design. They very nearly lost me before I'd had a chance to be a customer, and I was a motivated buyer. -- Bluntly, this doesn't give me a great feeling about future experiences with their company. Given that their products are standards out there with good reputations afaik, I hate to criticize, but my purpose is not to be mean, but to say, hey, guys and girls over there, you have a problem in design and in customer satisfaction that you really should solve, to meet your customers' expectations.

    I hope this isn't a sign of why they're putting their programs on for free. I'm presuming they're doing that to get a stampede of new customers and ultimately boost other sales. (Yes, I did notice the model bundles are at price, but those are decently priced.)

    So....

    Potential users wanting to try out their stuff, go over and register, but know it won't be instant gratification. It'll take a few days. Hope for better, y'all.

    To anyone from DAZ3D who might be reading this: Dear sir or madam, your company's site needs to make some adjustments so potential customers can get to your reps and your products easily and quickly. If you have some poor guy or girl as the only one wading through registration approvals, then have a few more people take some time out of their workday, or do more to automate it so your people can do more productive things. I wouldn't want that poor gopher diverted from either getting pizza and coffee, tea, and sodas, or you know, actual hands-on work on the next versions of the stuff. ;) My complaint isn't meant as a rant or a negative, but as constructive criticism. I'd like to see DAZ3D improve and have affordable software, so you have more (and more satisfied) customers and visitors.

    Just my opinion, my nickel. :)
  • evil_genius_180evil_genius_1804256 Posts: 11,034Member
    Thanks a lot, Hundred. I ordered and started downloading everything earlier. Fortunately, I've downloaded the non-pro versions of Bryce 7 and Daz 4 before, (for free) so I already had an account, so I had none of the issues BlueCatShip had. It only took me 3 tries to remember my password. ;) I'm still working on downloading everything, (I had to leave for a while and I shut down the PC while I was gone) but I'm looking forward to trying these, especially Hexagon. :)
Sign In or Register to comment.