devandvan – Ana
- RazielKanos
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Buying Characters for DAZ Studio is always some kind of tricky. You never really know where you step into, and how much the promo images have been "enhanced" with the power of Photoshop, filters and AI.
So buckle in for a Character review. Let me please know in the comments if such reviews help you in your shopping process. They take a lot of time and testing, and I really would hate to waste my time for nothing 🙂
Disclaimer
I bought the character with my own money, this review is NOT sponsored in any way.
What you get
For the not so very cheap price of $29 you get a full body skin and a character, based on Genesis 8.
Textures
The textures are 4096 x 4096, and you also get a normal map but just for the face. The face texture comes with a light makeup for the eyes and drawn eyebrows. The eyebrows are NOT part of the normal map, so they feel very flat when you render.
The folder structure is fine. Every character gets it's own subfolder, so you can easily find the files, if you want to tinker with them.
Morphes
You get a Character based on Genesis 8. There are no morphs in the package. The Character is a single Dial, that also works on Genesis 8.1, but you have to look it up manually in the dial selection.
The morph itself is pretty high quality, since you can still recognize the actress even if you are using a different texture.
The left texture is the opriginal, the right is GG Amazon by guhzcoituz
Shopping Experiance
You can get all the artist's character morphs on his own website. That's a move I totally support. I have no clue how much money DAZ is taking off to justify their dog-shit website, broken shop and buggy features... *rolleyes*
Talking of dog shit, unfortunately this webshop it is too. You can only pay with PayPal, so if your country doesn't support it, you're out! You only get 3 downloads, and the time to download your purchases is pretty short, so you better grab your stuff immediately! I bought Ana on the 2nd August, and today - just 6 days later - all my download links are expired already!
You also don't have any account on the website, so you can't look up your purchases. I suggest you keep your PayPal email confirmation very well secured, just in case something might happen, and you have to redownload your products again.
Dude, if you are reading this - I told you I can help you, I'm a professionasl - just hit me up, man!
Support
The Support is outstanding! I had 2 times some issues and got my help the same day. The guy, Devan, is really a nice person, and very helpful. If you consider this is a one-person show, and DAZ often takes up to a week to answer a support ticket... sheesh!
Personal Verdict
The morph really is outstanding, but there are some things that annoy me. For the price, you can consider it quite as a premium product. Most Mousso Characters at DAZ are about 10 bucks cheaper! With them, you get iRay and PBR shaders for the skin, different eye colors and makeup options.
What I am missing here is a "no brow" skin option. Painted on eyebrows look like ass! Also, a normal map for the body would be quite cool, and the biggest annoyance is that you only get ONE dial for the character, no separation between head and body morph.
Considering this is just an issue of 10 minutes to make, I really don't understand why we don't get separated morphs or the no brow option.
As a marketing and web guy, I really HOPE that he's going to improve his webshop. Sure, he's fast responding to emails, but there are so many things you can just automate or offer differently that don't need human interaction.
If you have a character, with a stunning skin shader you can use on this character morph, I really can recommend this product. The price is high - yeah, but hopefully the products will get a bit more in the future.
Demo Renders
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