Digital Art Zone

Thank you, I still love the Aquatic Genesis, an update or expansion for it would be nice.

When you geo-graft a part, you essentially “replace” the portion of the figure’s mesh that is covered by the grafted item, and the replaced portion becomes invisible.  The reason for that is very simple:  if the replaced portion didn’t become invisible, it might protrude through the grafted-on part.  Consider a mermaid tail—if Genesis’s legs and feet didn’t become invisible when the tail was grated on, they would show—and that would look horrible.  You wouldn’t have a mermaid; you’d have a weird-looking creature with legs AND a fish-tail.

It is not the “same” as Poser’s geometry-swapping, but it is similar.  When you swap “this” part for “that” one, “that” one no longer exists.  In DS, the swapped-out portion is still “there,” but it is invisible.

I don’t have the HFS set, if there a single morph or brief set of morphs using Creature Creator (or one of the other DAZ sets) that will trigger this?

JohnDelaquiox - 19 January 2013 04:16 PM

Thank you, I still love the Aquatic Genesis, an update or expansion for it would be nice.

Well, there won’t be any updates or expansions because the product did not sell well enough to justify them. 

I created the product for two reasons:

1.  It was something I had had in mind for a long time, but couldn’t do until geo-grafting came along—a true “aquatic human,” a human adapted to life in the water, and not a “mermaid,” which is just a human torso with a fish-tail stuck on it in lieu of legs.

2.  It was a great way to learn, and test the limits of, the geo-grafting feature. 

In creating the product, I ran into many problems and snags, partly because documentation for the geo-grafting feature was almost nonexistent.  The project literally took months, because much of what I was doing had to be done by trial-and-error.  Even if the item had been a top seller, it would not have earned enough to be “worth” the amount of time invested in it, and it was very far from being a “top seller.”  It was a “learning experience”—and we all know what *that* means, right?

That’s a bit depressing to hear Blondie. I bought it and enjoy it even though I pretty much had to retexture it (I was making a range of aquatic humans… some had human hands, some had human heads, for example, which means i needed textures for hands and heads).  It was pretty simple to texture that in and always hope that vendors will support their products, and equally disappointed when something i like doesn’t sell well.  I have been wanting finned hands and feet for eons it feels like and I couldn’t resist buying these… i don’t think they were even on sale when I got them, but it was a must-have for a deep sea project.

belovedalia - 19 January 2013 10:18 PM

That’s a bit depressing to hear Blondie. I bought it and enjoy it even though I pretty much had to retexture it (I was making a range of aquatic humans… some had human hands, some had human heads, for example, which means i needed textures for hands and heads).  It was pretty simple to texture that in and always hope that vendors will support their products, and equally disappointed when something i like doesn’t sell well.  I have been wanting finned hands and feet for eons it feels like and I couldn’t resist buying these… i don’t think they were even on sale when I got them, but it was a must-have for a deep sea project.

Ah, don’t be depressed.  I learned a lot from making the thing, and I’m quite proud of it because I did a number of things I wasn’t sure I would be able to do—such as get the individual spines on the crest and ears to work well, or to get the webbing to work well, or to get the textures between Genesis’s body and the grafts to blend well.  It’s one of the few things I’ve ever done that actually looks as good as the “vision” I saw in my head, and that alone is very satisfying—although, by the time I finished it, I was viciously cursing myself for ever having started it.  And I think it’s an excellent “showpiece” demonstrating what can be done with geo-grafting. 

In any case, what I learned enabled me to include a whole section on geo-grafting in my “advanced rigging” manual, which I hope to finish up fairly soon.

I like Aquatic Genesis very much.

For the fun of it I tried to export Aquatic Genesis with the head, hand, feet, and ear craft as .obj over to e-on vue.

I noticed that in addtion to the ususual bump distorations the mesh of Aquatic Genesis turned invisible or had holes in unexpected places.
I tried with other maps attached to the body that yielded the same result.

I then imported the mesh in zbrush and that yield the same holes.

Can someone reproduce this with their version of DS4.5 and an .obj export of Aquatic?

My first idea was that exporting .obj with geocrafted parts in general may cause problems.
Then I tried to export four arms for Genesis and that worked with the same settings without any disappearing mesh parts.

Does anyone have any idea what might be the cause of the issue?