…or playing with digital paper dolls
I dabbled with 3D programs for many years from 1998 on. Bryce was my goto toy for the CGI world. During my grad school days, I had friends playing with Sun Microsystem workstations. They created things whole cloth from their sleep deprived minds. I was just looking to create environments for photos. Photoshop was my playground.
I enjoyed photographing models and creating multiple-exposure-like images in Photoshop. After grad school, I was plain broke and models were an expense that I couldn’t get afford. It would be around 2007, that I would find Daz Studio from Daz 3D. It was a free competitor to Poser. I learned how to pose figures and light them. I was pretty good at it, too. Until recently, Daz Studio was a staple program on my computer.
For a number of reasons, I decided to move on from the program. Not because I suddenly became flush and can afford live models again. Cheifly, I decided that working in Daz felt like playing with paper dolls Everything I worked with in Daz was purchased. I just clicked here and there to choose the look and pose of the figures. I made a lot of manual tweaks, but none of the objects in a scene were mine alone. It stopped being enough. So, this past December, I uninstalled Daz Studio and all of the resources I collected. Below is some of the output from 2008 to present.
