| Years | Application | Time to complete Render from idea to posting |
| 1999 – 2004 | Poser | Never completed (results too awful) |
| 2005 – 2013 | Carrara | 3 – 5 days |
| 2014 – 2022 | Daz Studio | Eventually around 12 images per week |
| 2022 – Present | Daz / Stable Diffusion | 30 images per day |
History
In 1999 I got a copy of Poser. This was the pre Victoria 4 days and well before Daz was even a thing (originally there was Zygote who sold 3d models for Poser)
After several years playing with Poser I began working in Carrara. Definitely more opportunity to create models but incredibly buggy and frustrating. Some of my really old renders came out of this period but it would be a case of spending two or three days just to create a single image.
Creating in this was painful and the results humiliatingly bad but I saw the potential. I knew that it would be only a matter of time before renders would become photorealistic and a new era of art creation could begin.
Around 2016 I finally gave up on Carrara as my main means of compiling and rendering art and moved to Daz Studio. This saw a good acceleration of production and I went through several iterations of workflow to try and reach that holy grail of consistent photo realism. Sometimes I got close with the odd render but mostly it was disappointment.
By 2018 I had developed a workable process for generating about a dozen consistent images within a week and the sets I made from these were regularly posted on the new defunct onlybootleg blog at Deviant Art.
But the results were not quite right and the time spent from conception to delivery was just not indefinitely sustainable. So I returned to creating short series of stories in the st-stiefel blog and creating assets for Daz 3d, some of which I sell at Renderosity.
By mid 2022 there where discussions around a new online tool called Dalle 2 where you could enter a textual description and get back in less than a minute or two the image (or close to) that you had described. In my mind this was the flash point. The landmark moment when the world would change and never be the same again.
It was really not long after this in September 2022 that I decided I would take the plunge into Artificial Intelligence and I became exposed to Stable Diffusion Auttomatic1111 application.
The rest will be history