Digital Art Zone

riftwitch - 07 October 2012 10:11 PM

Some of the pricing does seem odd. She-Freak V4 and V3 both have retail prices of 29.95, but the PC prices are 1.99 for the V4 version and 17.97 for the V3 version. You would think they would be the same price.

Mech Girl for A3 sells for $9.95
Stinger sells for .............$16.95
Mitsu Hair sells for ........$14.95
—————————————————————
Total ................................ $41.85

But DAZ also sells the Anime Star Fighter Bundle, which consists of those 3 items, for $0.00.

K T Ong - 08 October 2012 09:51 AM

Surely if they were still around it would have occured to them to update their item so it could be used for Genesis

There are PAs who aren’t active anymore, but even if they only sell one or two items a month that’s still money in their pocket at the end of the day. But if they aren’t active, then updating for Genesis becomes a much more complex task because there are whole new technologies to learn. Even if someone is active, the anticipated return from modernising a piece of clothing isn’t necessarily going to be the same as creating something new - people have an inbuilt reluctance to buy something they perceive themselves as already owning - so a new outfit may have a much better return on investment.

And there are plenty of people who own one of the clothing converters and could bring the garment over to 4th generation, making it accessible to Genesis - it is not just the Cross-Dresser users, anyone who has bought any of the last several versions of Poser has access to Wardrobe Wizard.

The John Malis stuff is good, it’s still some of the best historical costuming out there, but pricing is an issue. I strongly considered buying either the Vikings pack or one of the role-playing packs during the PA sale (I already have the Fighter-Adventurer one), but in the end decided I couldn’t justify it even at the reduced price. But pricing is the PA’s decision to make.

As for why people work with the older figures, why not? Some of my favourite character morphs are for older figures. This is something I whipped up a month ago with V3 and the quality isn’t obviously different to what I’m getting with Genesis.

The product detail page for that is incorrect.  The Viking pack was M2/M3 ( I have it, use it, and just checked the readme that installed when I installed it many years ago).  They still look quite nice, and mix well with other figures from John Malis’s fantasy and historical sets.  Obviously, some work needs done to get raytraced materials as these were made before Poser had firefly.

They are still wonderful sets.

The Viking Pack can be used for M3?

KageRyu - 09 October 2012 11:12 AM

The product detail page for that is incorrect.  The Viking pack was M2/M3 ( I have it, use it, and just checked the readme that installed when I installed it many years ago).  They still look quite nice, and mix well with other figures from John Malis’s fantasy and historical sets.  Obviously, some work needs done to get raytraced materials as these were made before Poser had firefly.

They are still wonderful sets.

Materials are usually of secondary concern for me…if an item has some nice basic materials, fine.  But more often than not, I tweak the heck out of them any way.

K T Ong - 09 October 2012 11:20 AM

The Viking Pack can be used for M3?

I have used it on M3 (unless John Malis had another Viking set that I am getting mixed up).  Some of the props might need slight adjustment, but I have auto-conformed the clothing.  I can post a render later tonight sometime when I have time of some M3 characters using the Viking Pak for reference.

I actually just did an image using it recently and spent hours setting up 6 different vikings with different face morphs only to have them be too far away with depth of field to really be noticable…
http://www.kageryu.deviantart.com/#/d5gkj3n

Ok, here we go, sorry for the delay.  All of the images that follow use CDI Brom for Michael 3 as the base model.  No magnets, no crossdresser, no Wardrobe Wizard, just loaded the clothes and conformed.  Some of the props needed to be slightly repositioned, and in the case of helmets, slightly rescaled in some cases.

The first image is all Viking Pack with textures from the either the Viking Pack, Saxon Expansion, or Norse Villagers expansion (I mixed and matched textures when I made these guys).  The Axe is from one of Aery Souls kits.

The 2 Spearmen use only items from the Viking Pack and textures from the three mentioned sets.

The final image also uses some armor from 2 other M3 sets (knight Erant being one) and an Axe from Poisen, and the helm from the Valkyrie Pack (rescaled).

There is some minor pokethrough sometimes, but I usually turn off visibility on parts hidden by clothes as a matter of course which alieviates this (the feet are the main issue).  There are no included hand poses for the weapons or shield for M3 (couldn’t find the M2 ones either) and you may need to slightly reposition these props, and things like bracers and helms.  The conforming clothes themselves seem to work just fine though.