Things I learned From the Aging Morph competition.
nelsonsmith
Posts: 1,337
1 Based on the renders, the aging morphs seem to work better for male figures.
2. It is obviously very difficult to age women to that mature state before they start to really show their age and yet you can tell that they are past their 20s (rather late 30s to 40s).
We still need a gen 3 base figure that is "mature" and attractive, rather than old, or at least has the porportions of a woman that is taking care of herself into middle age, which is actually quite common in this era. PAs, such women do in fact exist.*
*As it stands Mei Lin 7 and Olympia 7 come very close as in many renders they tend to not look like standard Daz models.
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Comments
Im not sure that I agree with you. Ive been experimenting mostly with the female aging morphs and creating mature, attractive females. I do agree that there needs to be more mature charcters for offer in the store. FW Joanie HD, http://www.daz3d.com/fw-joanie-hd for G2F is one of my favorites.
I'd like to add, the aging morphs look best on a skin that has some maturity to it already: Ivan 7, Opal, Leo 7, etc. When the skin looks flawless, as so many of the female figures/characters do, it's hard to get that mature but-not-ancient look. My observation here backs up your request for a "gen 3 base figure that is 'mature' and attractive."
Another problem with maturing a female figure is the breast area. Most women in the modern world wear bras when out in public, especially if their breasts hang as flat and low as Zev0's aging morph creates. As realistic as the morph may look on the nude figure, it distorts the conforming clothing beyond anything realistic; imho, it takes away from the scene. (And I'm a "mature" female. Okay, well beyond mature...) I'd like to see a morph that shows the odd way an old breast sits in a bra. Of course, then we'd need bras that didn't fit like a second skin. There needs to be a gap where the breast "bends" inside the cup. (TMI? Sorry. But it would be more realistic.)
I love Joanie, too.
If we can't get more mature women, maybe someone can come up with a resource to "age" the skin of existing skin textures. When I did the old lady (G2F) in the image linked in my signature, I made extensive changes to the skin textures in Photoshop, including making the skin much lighter and adding age spots.
Personally, I generally avoid the default 'aging face' base. I find things look a lot better if I focus on laugh lines, forehead wrinkles, etc.
YMMV
I also find the Vascularity products add some good elements to an aged character.
I agree Joanie HD is perhaps the best example in the Daz store of the kind of model I'm talking about, and she is Gen 2; she's also rather unique. We've had countless numbers of Vicky clones and cousins, but scant few similar to Joanie, and none at all for Gen 3. Joanie at this point is merely an exception to the rule.
The problems I've had using the aging morphs is that is doesn't take long before a model starts to look too old; it's very difficult to hit that age range that Joanie fits into when trying to age one of the normal models; hence my desire for a base model that starts off in that age range.
Oh yah. I agree completely. Honestly though, I would prefer something like L'Adair suggested. An aging skin recourse kit would be a day one purchase for me.
This is a huge problem for plus sized models as well. A morph package or some product that corrected clothing for other than the typical breast we see in the store would also be a day one purchase for me.
Have you tried Zev0's Fit Control? I have it for the G2 line, but held off buying the G3F version so I could buy the bundle with the G3M version. But the bundle never happened. I've been kicking myself for months for not getting it when Zev0's store had a 60% off flash sale early in the year, but I digress...
I do have Fit Control and I think it works well in most situations. Depending on the model, I do run into occassions where it dosent quite provide the amount of fixes that I need... If that makes any sense.
One thing I learned about using the aging morphs on G3 that I don't remember being true for G2 is that it is harder to get expressions right.
The other thing I found out is that they don't work quite as expected on aliens. :)
I agree that you need aging skins as well as aging morphs if you're going for the full 'old-timer' look. This is one of the many reasons why I'm looking forward to the next version of Skin Builder - our aging skin options as far as Genesis 3 is concerned currently don't seem to go much further than George, Ivan and Opal. However, I think that when used reasonably sparingly with unwrinkled skins, the aging morphs are brilliant for giving younger characters that 'actually seen a bit of life' look that makes them more interesting than the vacant-looking dollies that typically populate the Daz store.
You left out Rune and there are other skins out there, but you do have to look. There's an absolutely amazing set at Rendo called Mother & Daughters for G3f by Anain and AkashaBloodRiver that is one of the few female skins I've seen that does middleage well, and my entries for the contest also used a lot of M4, G1 & G2M skins with Cayman Studios UV system. The big trick in doing women as they age is that most of them cover it up with makeup, so what you see in real life is not exactly the way the skin ages. It's easy for men's skins to gain "character" pretty quickly because their skin get baked with ultraviolet, they don't moisturize and they don't use concealer to hide the dark spots under their eyes. For women, the most obvious tells usually start around the edges of the eyes, but with every year makeup technolgy gets better and women tend to take even better care of themselves, so I think it's fair to say that todays 50 ofen looks better than the 40 of 30 years ago.
Things I learned from the contest is that, even though I found a few things I like about G3, anything with wrinkles in it still looks like too much botox. And if you crank up the SubD, your computer goes AWOL into CrashLand...