Daz 3D empowers digital creators & cuts cloud costs with Google Cloud

The 3D industry has traditionally been costly and time consuming for interested people to explore and begin their creative journeys. However, extensive software licenses and technical skills are no longer necessary thanks to Daz 3D. 

A leader in 3D technology since 2000, Daz 3D empowers digital creators like 3D artists and designers with a free, comprehensive software suite and a massive 3D marketplace with over five million inter-compatible assets for Daz Studio and other 3D applications. Daz 3D offers the necessary tools for both hobbyists and professionals to create high-quality 3D renders and animations featuring customizable content that can be exported anywhere.

Daz 3D operates with a unique and artist-friendly approach, paying over $100 million to its global network of contributing artists. This international community of digital designers and 3D modelers creates over 20 million images and animations annually using Daz 3D. The company manages one of the largest 3D asset libraries in the industry–everything from imaginative environments and detailed props to stunningly lifelike human and avatar figures.  

Business challenge

As CTO of Daz 3D, Jon Middleton is responsible for the development of Daz 3D’s software and overseeing its global marketplace and overall scalability. When the company began to experience rapid growth, their hosting provider and e-commerce platform started to experience downtime, which led to lost revenue. 

“As we added more load and capacity, we were hitting bottlenecks that we just couldn’t work through,” says Middleton. “At some point we realized that it would be unsustainable and would severely cripple the business.”

Middleton desired a solution that would not require increased headcount and could operate as lightweight as possible with serverless services. He wanted his engineers to spend their time building new and innovative technology rather than keeping infrastructure up and running. 

Solution

After extensive research, Daz 3D’s technology team determined Google Cloud’s App Engine was the best fit to build upon. “I really liked their pay-for-use model,” says Middleton. “Best of all, if any problems were to occur, Google Cloud’s engineers would be on top of it because they are likely the most knowledgeable workforce in the world when it concerns hosting applications in the cloud.”

As their business continued to grow, Daz 3D realized they needed more outside support for optimizing their Google Cloud consumption. That’s when Google Cloud introduced Daz 3D to SADA, a Google Cloud premier partner. Middleton fully leveraged SADA’s Professional Services, including Customer Success Management, Technical Account Management, and Enterprise Support Services, to take Daz 3D to the next level.

“In the beginning, we relied on SADA for technical questions, advice on best practices, and the most effective way to get our data into BigQuery,” says Middleton. “Now we work with SADA to automate and optimize our processes, and they’re helping us onboard machine learning solutions.”

Jon Middleton | CTO at Daz 3D

With that additional help, Daz 3D was able to migrate all its brands, e-commerce platform, and larger main site in three stages to Google Cloud.  

Results

As a result of working with Google Cloud and SADA, Daz 3D has been able to achieve substantial improvements in its site stability and reliability as well as increase overall customer satisfaction. “So much has changed for the better with our software running on Google Cloud,” says Middleton. “The serverless solutions and managed services have been a godsend in controlling costs and allowing our employees to focus on what is important to our company: continued growth and development.”

After switching to GCP, Daz 3D benefited from a large drop in opex on the backend.

“We saw our cloud cost cut by about 40% immediately when we switched to Google Cloud,” says Middleton. “And that is just for usage expenses–not counting the cost savings for how much time we saved fixing, rebooting, and solving problems with the previous service.”

Jon Middleton | CTO at Daz 3D

To improve the user experience on the frontend, Daz 3D ports all its data into BigQuery. “We basically create a snapshot of tables so that we can run analytics and report off of them,” says Middleton. “Our internal data team can see once a customer has downloaded our 3D software exactly how they are using it, learn how to engage them, and determine if there are any roadblocks that we can remove to serve our end users better.”

Looking ahead, Daz 3D has a clear path in the cloud with Google Cloud and SADA. Migrating from its legacy on-premises provider to GCP has opened a whole new dimension of opportunities for Daz 3D. Overall, SADA helped Daz 3D:

• Move its entire infrastructure to GCP and add services from the Google Cloud Marketplace
• Create a data pipeline between Daz’s document library (Datastore) and its data warehouse (BigQuery)
• Reduced cloud costs by 40% plus time savings from fixing, rebooting, and solving problems
• Increase data reliability and availability in its data warehouse while reducing time     to insight