>>35409
Thing is if I find this fun and keep doing it for years I will become an expert, and it's just more useful to be an expert in Blender than in Daz. Maybe I want to apply those skills into creating a game character or whatever else in the future, I bet Blender is more suitable for that kind of stuff than Daz.
Also the benefit with using Daz to create something that you then import into Blender is that if you want to change something you can just hit TAB and modify the mesh, useful if you want to make a unique knife or special gag or something.
I just noticed some little things that would drive me nuts in Daz, for example scrolling with the mouse zooms the camera in reverse to how many programs usually do it and moving around in the world feels better in Blender. I realize there's probably an easy way to reverse the scroll wheel but still.

I've got expensive new hardware from 2019 so hopefully rendering times won't drive me nuts. Not top tier stuff but it's not an old laptop or something like that.
Useful info about a .zip being a poser asset if there's only a "runtime" folder btw.

Looks like https://3d-load.net/ is up again!

>>35414
Thanks for the detailed guide, I tried again today and got it working! Only tried Genesis8FemaleStarterEssentials so far but it felt good seeing something show up. The problem was that first of all I thought the Smart Content tab was basically the same as the Content Library tab, only with a different layout, and second of all I didn't think I would need to do a manual refresh.

Successfully able to use custom path(s), different one for daz-format and poser-format as recommended. Removed their "hidden" paths pointing to "C:\Users\Public\Documents\My DAZ 3D Library".

Should I also change the "CMS Cluster Directory" and "Daz Connect Data" paths? Are those important? My backup program doesn't cover the default paths, if they aren't needed in order to restore my project in case my disk fries I don't really care. Got some kind of warning when I tried changing one of them so I left them alone for now.