DAZ 3D Software Give-Away Ends Soon

One of the best 3D software give-aways we’ve ever written about in the past 12 years is going on right now! DAZ 3D, the makers of the award-winning DAZ Studio character illustration and animation software–among other packages–is giving away its pro version of DAZ Studion 4, Bryce 7  and Hexagon 2.5.

Architosh has an interview article with Dan Farr, Co-Founder of DAZ and its Chief Strategy Officer, about why the company is giving away its software this month. You can read that here.

Part of a strategy to bring 3D software tools further down field to non-professional users as well as future professional users, the goal is to expand the use and market for its Genesis character platform.

01 - DAZ 3D's amazing give-away includes DAZ Studio 4 Pro, Bryce 7 and Hexagon 2.5.

And There’s Bryce and Hexagon

In case you are not much into 3D character modeling, illustration or modeling, the company also has Bryce Pro 7 and Hexagon 2.5 tools to give you as well. So let’s take a quite look at why you might want to obtain this software for free right now.

Hexagon 2.5. This program is a fairly sophisticated surface modeling tool with Boolean operations, Gordon surfaces, Coons surfaces in addition to sophisticated vertex modeling commands. You can export and import to many other 3D and CAD file standards, including: OBJ, 3DS, A3D, DXF, DWG and Illustrator (imports) and CAR, A3D, OBJ, 3DS, DXF, DWG and STL (exports).

Hexagon 2.5 also has a construction history that is fully editable. They call it Dynamic Geometry. Many users use this tool to work with DAZ’s other software packages. You can take models from DAZ Studio to Hexagon and back again. And you can work between Carrara and Hexagon as well.

This is just a brief summary of this organic modeler with subdivision surface capabilities and high-level 3D modeling tools. If you are more interested in designing toothpaste bottles or furniture, Hexagon can also assist you very well. Click here to see some movies of it in action.

Bryce Pro 7. This is one of the 3D legends. Bryce has been around for well over a decade and is a premier landscape creation tool. These days many people use Bryce to create scenery for DAZ Studio characters, creating entire worlds for their characters to live in.

Highlight features include its new Instancing Lab, improved Light Lab, sky rendering improvements, a particle emitter, better import and export and the DAZ Studio Bridge.  The Pro version also supports Bryce Lightning Network Rendering. Import and export options include: COLLADA, FBX, DAZ Studio format, 3DS, Lightwave, OBJ, and many others.

You can learn more about DAZ Studio here in the interview feature. While this software is free and there is literally no catch (again see the interview) system requirements include some important notes.

Hexagon 2.5 is currently not compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. This is likely because the program supports PowerPC processors going all the way back to the G4. The G5 processor is actually recommended. If you are Mactel you can run anything from 10.2 up to 10.6 (Snow Leopard, the last version which supported Rosetta).

Bryce too is not yet compatible with Lion. For likely the very same reasons. Bryce supports Mac OS X 10.4 or higher and will run on both Intel and PowerPC.

Finally, for those wondering, DAZ Studio Pro 4 itself supports both 32 and 64-bit Macs (OS X 10.5 or above and this would include Lion).

To download this software go to DAZ online here.