DAZ Productions DAZ Studio 3 Advanced

Advanced 3D Art and Animation   * High-quality editing tools   * Extended export capabilities   * Greater compatibility with 'Carrara'   * NEW render engine   * NEW aniMate Lite Platform: Windows or Macintosh

With DAZ Studio 3 Advanced you can enter a higher level of 3D art and animation.

Packed with must-have features for the serious 3D artist, this brand-new edition of DAZ Studio provides high-end tools and features with extended export capabilities and greater compatibility with its big brother, Carrara.

Features:

Not only does the free DAZ Studio 3 core application contain everything that DAZ Studio 2.3 did, its also been updated with several important new features and a vast number of bug fixes. DAZ Studio 3 Advanced takes everything you love about the free DAZ Studio core and adds in a healthy serving of speed and sophistication that any serious 3D artist not only wants, but needs.

• NEW and Improved Render Engine
  DAZ Studio is now compatible with version 8.5 of the powerful 3Delight render engine. Improved performance and memory management reduce render times and handle heavy, complex scenes like never before.
• NEW aniMate Lite
  aniMate Lite takes a "building block" approach to animation. Pre-created animations are broken down into portable and editable chunks (aniBlocks) that can be arranged together into complete animation sequences. You can create complex animations by dragging and stacking aniBlocks into a timeline. You can then re-arrange, add or delete the aniBlocks until the sequence is just right.
• NEW Visual Cues for Cameras, Lights, and Bounding Boxes
  Tired of seeing bounding box lines all across your workspace? Wish you could more easily see exactly where the limits of you camera's depth of field were in relation to your subject? Want a better visual cue for the spread angle and falloff of your spotlights? All of this is now a reality in DAZ Studio 3.
• NEW COLLADA Import/Export
  This is truly a revolutionary step towards full interoperability between Carrara and DAZ Studio. Now you can export figures, conforming clothing, morphs and scenes from DAZ Studio into Carrara. A key new ingredient to this cross-functionality is support for "sparse morph" data. This allows you to transfer large amounts of morph data within smaller files for greater speed. DAZ 3D pioneered this technology for the COLLADA file format and DAZ Studio is the first application to use this new technique.
  
  Dynamic clothing can also now be exported as part of a COLLADA file using the new "Freeze Simulation" feature. Available as part of the Dynamic Clothing plugin, Freeze Simulation is used to convert dynamic clothing simulations into static morph data. The same data can then be imported into your Carrara scenes.

Features exclusive to DAZ Studio 3 Advanced:

• Figure Mixer
  Now you can blend between different figures to create your own unique figures. This tool will not only blend two or more shapes together, but it will also provide a working joint rig and preserve the original morphs of the figure you started from. Mixed figures can be blended via dials/slider as a percentage of each figure loaded. The new figures can then be frozen and saved as part of a DAZ Studio scene file, or exported as a new CR2 file (via CR2 Exporter, sold separately).
• Morph Follower
  This feature allows you to add support for new figures in old clothing. For example, suppose you have Michael 4 fitting nicely into a suit, but want to dial in "the Freak 4" body morph. If the suit wasn't created with necessary supporting morph targets, then it will not fit around "the Freak 4" morph. But if you use Morph Follower, then the suit can be updated with new morphs automatically fit the unsupported shape.
• Advanced Shaders and Effects
  Additional Shaders - HDRI, IBL, Ambient Occlusion, Area Lights, Volumetrics, Velvet, Indirect Lighting, Translucency, Layered Anisotropic Specularity and Sub-Surface Scattering are all included.
• Shader Mixer
  Develop your own custom shaders by combining shader building blocks or "bricks". Shader Mixer allows you to create custom lights, cameras and surfaces using pre-defined bricks that you combine within a simple node network. Over 90 different bricks are provided including a range of basic bricks such as displacement, diffuse color, noise, random, lighting models, as well as many advanced bricks, such as caustics, occlusion, final gathering, sub-surface scattering, and area lights.
• Shader Builder
  Shader Builder is built for advanced artists who need a deeper level of control and want to create shaders from scratch. By visually connecting predefined blocks (which coincide with the RenderMan^® Interface Specification) and/or custom function/macro blocks that you can build yourself, shader developers can construct custom shaders that take advantage of what the shading language and a RenderMan compliant rendering engine have to offer.
  Shader Builder puts an interface around a process that is otherwise manually intensive, so those who are currently creating shaders will find this much easier and faster to get the results they want.
• Animation Keyframe Editor
  Now you can easily see where your keyframes are. Add, delete, copy, paste and/or move your keyframes around with great visual feedback. All your edits can be saved out into an "aniBlock". You can create aniBlocks from DAZ Studio 3 keyframes as well as bake aniTimelines to DAZ Studio 3 keyframes. 
• Map Transfer
  This allows you to convert a texture from one figure's UV's so that they can be used on another figure's UV's. Now you can use different UV sets on the same figure and/or convert the texture for the new set.
• Shader Baker
  Shader Baker allows you to bake surface shaders, bump maps, displacement maps and textures into a single image-based texture as if they were already rendered. Create content that will look more accurate in the viewport without the need to render to see its full effect. This tool is especially useful when preparing content to have a final-render look straight out of the box that you can then share or sell to other users who may not have the same advanced shaders you use to make it look its best.
• Scripted Renderer
  Gain full control of the rendering process. This will allow you to customize your rendering for DAZ Studio scenes. If you're into scripting and are familiar with the RenderMan API, you're going to love this new feature.
• 64-bit for Windows
  This is huge for those who have large scene files and have had problems rendering in the past. 64-bit not only makes things go faster, it expands memory support, and allows large scenes to be arranged and rendered much faster. Many scenes that exceeded the limits of DAZ Studio 2 will now render in very quick time without crashing or hanging.

Minimum System Requirements

Macintosh

Power Macintosh or Intel Macintosh
1.25 GHz (1.8 GHz or faster recommended)
Mac OS X 10.4 or above
1 GB RAM minimum (2GB recommended)
200MB free hard drive space for installation (500 MB recommended)
OpenGL 1.3 compatible graphics card with at least 128 MB RAM (Hardware accelerated OpenGL 2.2, or higher, compatible recommended with 256MB+ RAM)

* NOTE: DAZ Studio will not function installed on a UNIX partition under Mac OS X *

Windows 32-bit

Pentium 4
1.3 GHz (2 GHz dual core or faster recommended)
Windows XP (XP or Vista recommended)
1 GB RAM min (2GB recommended)
200MB free hard drive space for installation (500 MB recommended)
OpenGL 1.3 compatible graphics card with at least 128 MB RAM (Hardware accelerated OpenGL 2.2, or higher, compatible recommended with 512MB RAM)}
DirectX 9 (DirectX 10 recommended)

Windows 64-bit

WHQL-64 certified
Windows XP x64 sp2 (Vista 64 sp1)
1 GB RAM min (3GB recommended)
200MB free hard drive space for installation (500 MB recommended)
Hardware accelerated OpenGl 1.3 compatible (OpenGL 2.2, or higher, compatible recommended)
DirectX 9 (DirectX 10 recommended)