GT D.

I began using this software years ago with release 4.8. The current release is 4.15. I use DAZ as a hobbyist making graphic novels and comics for entertainment. Seeing production time go from a week per issue to nearly 3 months is frustrating as a hobbyist, if I was trying to make a living with this, I would already have been forced to use something better.

This software has been getting worse with every update. There are endless pages of forums dedicated to the problems people have with the software, and they seemingly browse them relentlessly searching for things to make worse.

The first major problem that is well known to the DAZ crew is load times. By determining all the things you shouldn't do, and incorporating them into DS, load times have dramatically increased. The scene I am waiting on right now took 2 hours to load in version 4.15. When I first created it in 4.10, it took 2 minutes to load.

The second major problem is the "duh" moments. For example, I've been waiting 50 minutes now for DS to delete some items from my scene. As it often does, the screen has grayed out, is "Not Responding" and is doing absolutely nothing. This happens ALL. THE. TIME. There is no reason for it. The wait time varies from a minute or so to an hour or more. In resource monitor, you find it is holding onto the RAM, not doing anything (0% CPU usage) and analyzing the wait chain shows 2-3 threads "Waiting for network I/O to finish." The problem? There is no network I/O to finish. Sometimes it helps to shutdown DS and restart it, but then you're possibly hours down the line before you're back to work anyway.

Crashes are frequent, and they have ensured it takes13 acts of Congress and 45 acts of God to submit crash reports so that they can be sure to prevent learning from problems. The frustrating thing is that it is almost always the same two errors, and if they gave a damn, they could likely fix them. These two problems have persisted since 4.10, and there is no sign they intend to ever fix them.

To highlight my biggest issue, and one that is common amongst users as of late:
In 2015 I was averaging 14-30 renders per day. Today, with a computer that is far superior, re-rendering the SAME scenes, I am lucky to manage 3. That was with 2 instances of DAZ running, Hexagon, sometimes Blender, Firefox with 5-12 tabs open, GIMP, and often several other programs running. Right now, DS barely works when it is the only thing open. It often grabs every bit of RAM available for no reason at all, then crashes because there's none left. In version 4.10, the scene I have open right now used 1.2 GB of RAM. It is using 15.225 GB of ram in 4.15. Same scene, only difference is the version of DS. They also forced us to a single instance only, because they knew how helpful that would be in reducing productivity for those who have to get things done. And because, apparently, they don't know how to instantiate the temp files into a per-instance folder, so opening a scene in a second instance could overwrite temp files for the first scene and cause problems. So now you have to run the release and the beta if you want to get things done.

DS has horrid resource management. I've loaded a single asset, and then left the program alone. Starting at 560 MB of RAM, it sat and over 2 hours consumed 28 GIGABYTES of RAM, then forced itself to take over RAM that was in use by the system and crashed the computer. It has done this many times, and DAZ doesn't care. Often times the only way to get your RAM released is to close DS and restart it. Because it seems they forgot to write the part of the code to release memory when it's no longer needed. It also uses postgresql. Exe for some of the content management features (which seldom work), and to do that, it seems it needs 6-18 instances of postgresql. Exe running between 800 MB and 2 GB of RAM each. I think that a supercomputer would struggle with DS at times, and the guys at DAZ want it that way.

And new in version 4.14, and carried through to 4.15, you can quit DS, but you have to open Task Manager and end process to really close it. (You can never leave... bwa ha ha ha ha haaaaaa!)

They format their assets so they can't be used with other 3D programs and rest on that fact to force you to put up with their garbage software. And it is often much more expensive to buy models from DAZ than from other sources ($20-30 for a DAZ asset, $6-10 for the same thing for the other guys).

DS is "free." And it is WAY overpriced.

If Poser made it possible to use DS models, I would happily pay the $250 and use it. I'd be happy to pay for DS! If only it worked. As it is, like many I'm sure, the only reason I'm still bothering with DAZ and DS is that I have a huge and expensive library of models that I can't use with any other software. But I'm getting closer with each release to just calling it a loss and making the switch.

If you're looking to get started, don't let the "free" get you. You will quickly be buried in thousands of dollars of proprietary models and hating DAZ Studio.

P.S.
I started this damned task at 1815, it is now 2111, and I am giving up on it ever deleting my items. I have to now force close it, restart DS and hope this time it will actually delete my items. I might even be done with this crap before tomorrow night. Don't bother with DS. Plant quarters and grow money. You'll have more success and be happier.