Give a Man a Pole..Teach that Man to Fish..Sell that Man... Your "Custom" Fish.
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Oh man, yeah. The skins.
'Why does that 10 year old boy have razor stubble??'
This made me think of the Genesis female character that came complete with pink nail polish. Just right for the average toddler or medieval peasant girl :)
hormones in farmed meat foods?
And Ironically you see the stubble
on the prettiest of men characters who have otherwise
flawlees airbrushed complexions.
Yet there seem to be very few unshaven skins for the masculine/Alpha male characters like Ivan.
I do most of my characters with dial spinning. At this point, they could not release another base human realistic figure until G4 comes along and I'd be fine.
However, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a counterpart base for a given style - Aiko/Kenji, Guy/Girl being the two primary examples. So far, they've been good about it this generation, and I don't have the usual complaints.
For me, it's always a matter of skins. Enough young skins, enough mid-tone tan skins, enough semi-stylized skins... this is the advantage of a "character package" as you get several characters with skins of the apropriate type.
Inspired to make this, with Growing Up for Genesis.
The skin is the default material for Four Arms, which is specifically designed to be non-gendered (so no stubble), then NGS Anagenessis and, of course, some postwork...
Well, as a newer Daz customer, I do tend to prefer characters and associated items that are G2F base or G3F base, although the recent sales have convinced me to grab some really cheap V3-4 era models and such.
In my mind, this is more of a marketing strategy choice by the various content providers. By designing clothing for a specific non-base model, they are of course expecting you to buy their model. By building a family of characters around a specific non-base model, well you have to buy that 'hub character'.
I'm not sure if we are '4 deep' with any of the characters yet (i.e.say Genesis 3 + Aiko 7 + 'MyGirl 7' needed for 'NewGirl 7', I made those last two names up), but yeah, the deeper into the 'tree' a model is, the less likely I am to buy it. I begrudgingly will occasionally buy a second tier character if there is a third tier character I really like, but then only if I feel like the second tier character is fairly common (like say Vic 7, Girl 7, Aiko 7). I passed on Ophelia, for example, even though she seems like a perfectly fine character, simply because I don't need another family of characters, I have morphs for that.
As for clothes, if they don't say G3F, G2F, or G1F (except for pre Genesis clothes), yeah I'm not really interested in them. Males I currently have no desire to go past Michael or the Freak to be perfectly honest, at least at the moment (my current work focuses more on feminine characters), although that may change in the future as my workload shifts. So for now, yeah G 1-3 M's and the Michaels are all I need at the moment, although I've grabbed a HIro or two for later use, as well as The Freak 4 'cuz he was on sale. Not counting those characters that have been freebies of course, I generally snag those as soon as I see them as long as the usage isn't too restrictive for my needs.
So while the vendors may choose to 'stray' farther and farther away from the Genesis base, I don't have to follow them, and generally won't except maybe for a character, and even that is somewhat rare for me (at that point I'm often looking at skin tones/textures to see if it 'rounds out' my set a bit).
I get that there may be legitimate reasons to build special clothing for certain characters (The Freak/She Freak have radically different proportions than the Genesis base characters, so in their case special clothing may br required to deal with poke through, etc), but yeah if you want to market to me, you'll want to include a Genesis version of your clothes as well as a version for your special character if you've 'strayed off of the Genesis reservation' a bit.
I have enough characters and character morphs now that I have no desire to go '4 deep' on characters (if there are any of those), and 3 deep is very rare for me.
I love the Genesis concept, and my main 'wish list' at the moment involves products that allow you to move clothing between the generations. Especially the 'way back characters from the V1/V2 days. Yeah there is Wear them All, clothing converter, etc., but this area can always use improvement.
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As for the height issue, I suppose that we should keep in mind that most supermodels are tall, and if they are the inspiration for most characters, that might explain why G3's base height is so tall. I tend to prefer shorter characters, so I make use of the height adjustments. BUT, I'll often do these adjustments in each body area individually (mainly in the torso and head area), to get the proportions looking more like I like them. Say if I need the midriff to be a little longer, to nudge the pectorals a little higher. Also, on smaller models, the head may need to be a little larger to 'match' how a really short person may look.
So while I"m more than willing to do this, I'm guesstimating a lot here. Yeah I have some petite morphs that I"ve found in various places, but usually end up doing additional adjustments. I would welcome more Daz adult characters with more common, and shorter, heights. Americans in particular were noted for often towering over their counterparts in the mid century, although not so much today...Apparently people from several other countries are now beggining to tower over the now shrinking Americans (this might tie in with our growing obesity issue).
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/07/27/487391773/americans-are-shrinking-while-chinese-and-koreans-sprout-up
The latest trend in South Korea is a massive height spurt. So if the latest South Korean models are following the American trend for tall supermodels, this might explain why we are seeing similarly tall Asian women in Daz.
That being said, the article above notes that the average height of women in Guatemala is only 4' 11"
Heres a more detailed entry concerning heights areound the world. Apparently the peoples of the Germanic countries (Netherlands, Germany, etc) are taller on average than the Americans these days...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_average_human_height_worldwide
This could tie in to income inequality as well. Income inequality in the US has become more pronounced in very recent years, which loosely coincides with the recent dropoff in average height...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality
Note that the western European countries have a much more balanced level of income equality than the US, as does South Korea and Japan. This is a loose association, of course, but I bring this up because at lower income levels, dietary choices are often not as ideal due to budget constraints.
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So yeah, in short, the farther a character is away from the Genesis base, the less likely I am to buy him/her, and yes I agree that we could use a better representation of shorter adult characters. Listing heights in the marketing for a character could be a selling point for me, so content providers take note!
The problem with alot of the content from that era is that the geometry/topology is often quite horrible to be frank.
Because I still have poser 6 installed on my older mac,I still have my original poser4 geometry folder .
I actually shudder when I open up some older vicky or Mike2 clothing geometry meshes in a modeling app particularly now that I am a content developer for The genesis figures.
Business is Business and people
have to eat.
However such a "marketing strategy is a complete subversion of the reason the genesis technology was developed in the first place and I personally refuse to go back to that old paradigm.. no offense to the PA's''
My personal standard for my content is that if I get major poke though as soon as I morph outside the "Northern European Ideal" ,, well that clothing item has FAILED and its back to the modeling app for some vertex pulling.
If not then "autofit" has no credibility
Here is the G2 male with a fairly extreme body shape wearing the "Administrator"
from my private collection.
No major visible poke through.. this is my standard for clothing.
Bear in mind that clothes and hair will almost always work on the base figure as well as Name 7, and that most textures will also work with the base UVs. For Character for Name 7 it's usually only the shape that is needed so if you don't mind adjusting that you don't need Name 7
@ wolf359,
That's why I mentioned that the porting of older outfits to new generation can always use improvement. The jump in node counts between generations certainly makes this not a simple proposition, but the fact is that in a number of cases we won't see newer versions of these clothes, as the content providers for these items may simply have lost interest, are no longer around, etc.
Sure, you can go outside of Daz to try to fix things, or use D-Formers to try to adjust things, or try to make do with scaling, xyz adjustments, rotation/bend/side to side adjustments, or other methods within Daz, but there are other approaches as well, such as improved autofit/more accurate clone shells to better fit the clothes to and such. This is the are of Daz development that I was referring to that can always use innovation and improvement. I don't expect perfect, but if it can get me well into the ballpark, that may be good enough for me.
Yes, you can try to create your own content, but not everyone has a knack for this. And people are attracted to various particular outfits for varying reasons, and simply want to use that if they can make it work fairly easily. Time spent on ajdustments/creation is time that could be used for posing/rendering instead, so anything that can minimize the need for adjustment/creation is welcome in my book.
I do very much appreciate that you take the extra time to make sure that your outfits work well with the base Genesis figure of that generation. As you pointed out, not all content providers put in this extra effort, which of course is their decision.
And I do agree with you that it may be in the best interest of the various content providers to embrace Genesis, hence widening their customer base, as opposed to subverting it by narrowing options, but they'll do what they want. All I can do is point out my personal preferences as a Daz customer that likes the Genesis family, should they want me as one of their customers.
Sure, a 'Genesis addon character' such as Aiko, The Girl, etc. may have a particular texture/proportion set that has what a content developer is looking for as as a baseline, but for me, the more 'buy in' that is required, the lower the likelihood is that I'll buy it. Of course, 'reverse engineering' a character back to the Genesis base could involve a lot of work, plus if you are using modified versions the addon character's textures, yeah there may be a 'permissions' issue there, so I don't expect every character to be Genesis baseline characters, with no additional requirements. But this does increase the amount of 'buy in' required for such tier 3 characters, such as it is.
The other element of my last post was expressing my desire for more shorter baseline adult characters as well, that pay special attention to how proportions shake out at shorter heights. We have plenty of tall supermodels in the Daz Library already, but the shorter folk are somewhat inder-represented currently.
I should have added clothes to my closing summary too, not just characters. As a Daz customer communicating to the various content providers, let me restate, and edit appropriately for emphasis:
So yeah, in short, the farther a character, clothing item, or character acccesory is away from the Genesis base, the less likely I am to buy him/her/it, and yes I agree that we could use a better representation of shorter adult characters. Listing heights in the marketing for a character could be a selling point for me, so content providers take note!
Is there anything preventing someone using the female skins on the younger male? I'm not on my PC at the moment but I think I bought a product from Slosh that allows one to do that.
The eyebrows. Hardly any female skins come with natural eyebrows.
This is improving, Zev0's brow maker can probably be a good help. And fiber mesh brows may also be a help.
...same here on the modelling skills as Hexagon is the only programme I have that I can actually work with (when it doesn't freeze of crash).
Back when I started in this it V4 had just been introduced, and I spent months working at creating a viable teen character from V4 for myw story using different morph sets and DFormers (I even pushed it as far as creating an 8 year old using proportion and growth charts). The character mixer in 3.1 was an interesting first step towards Genesis, but somewhat of a resource hog as a single character had the "weight" of the two that were used. While I eventually became pretty adept at creating a younger more petite character, the real hang up was clothing fits. I could still only use V4 clothing without either having to resort to a third party conversion tool (which was often hit or miss) or dealing wth the tedious process of manually fitting clothes using DFormers. (V4 skimpwear on a young character just isn't right). Even so, the latter process often textures to stretch unrealistically.
Both Genesis and GenX were godsends as I finally had far more versatility. With GenX I could mix in morphs like the Steph4 NPMs and shapes, like the various Thorne characters I had The bonus was with extra fitting clones that were available, I could use pretty much any clothing I had in my library, so I now had clothes that were more appropriate for the characters I was creating without going through a lot of painstaking manual work.
These days I have a fairly extensive library of different morph resource kits for G2/G3 along with utilities by Zev0 and others to further "fine tune" my custom designed characters. It now comes down to "do I need that latest "cute kid character" from 3D Universe, Or that other young teen character when I have the resources already to just do it myself?
...which is another reason why I find Skin Builder Pro to be indispensable.
..as I recall Steph4 loaded in at around 5' 5" She was truly "petite", especially when using the NPMs. The Genesis/G2 versions of her tended to move away from this. I still user her through GenX/GenX II
You may not have noticed that 3DU's characters tend to have a specific visual style. If I just wanted a younger male character I could use Growing Up or Tween Ryan 7. I was specificly asking for a character in the same style as Amber, Rayn, Skyler, and Haley.
Yes; here's one I just did that's pretty close to what 3D Universe does, all with DAZ/Zev0 morphs.
Another option is to Gen X Skyler over to G3M, dial in Skyler and G3F to 100% and then dial a negative 66% of G3F head to give him a more boyish face. This should now be a boy with the same style as 3DU's female characters.
wolf359 and daywalker03, thank you so much for implying I am a lazy idiot for not making the character I requested myself. I am curious why you copied and pasted my request in this thread instead of responding in the original thread?
I believe that there are several legitimate reasons for requesting that 3D Universe consider creating the character I requested.
1 - Morph: I like the style of 3DU's characters. I could probably come up with something which would be adequate, but if the original PA would be willing to create it, why should I?
2 - Texture: The character would come with a unique skin texture. As has been mentioned in this thread, there are very few skin textures that are appropriate for G3M child characters, so another unique texture would be welcome.
3 - Hair: Each of the characters(Amber, Haley, Rayn, and Skyler) have come with original hair styles. While I have a good selection of female hair styles, a male hair style would be very welcome.
4 - Clothes: The character would probably come with a unique outfit. While it is not as hard to find appropriate clothes for boys as it is for girls, more variety in clothing would be useful.
Finally, 3D Universe has made male figures to go with several of their female figures: Sam for Sadie, Jason for Jasmin, and Matt for Megan. It seems to me that 3D Universe might be open to creating a single male figure to go with the four female figures with the same style, so it doesn't hurt to ask. If 3D Universe does not want to make the character, that is fine and I will eventually work on making my own.
Kyoto Kid, I have seen enough of your posts to realize you are just trying to be helpful, and I truly appreciate it. The same with most of the rest of the people posting in this thread. It just seems to me that there are a few people who try to belittle every request for items they are not personally interested in.
Edit: I may have overreacted to daywalker03's post. I am used to seeing him slap down requests, both mine and other peoples, so I assumed that was what he was doing here. If not, then I apologize.
Oops, I certainly hope I was not adding to any critism. I happen to agree with you that a 3DU boy character would be useful for all the reasons you stated, but I do recall the PA stating that their female morphs outsold their male ones by some margin, and so in certain cases one has to make compromises for an other gender equivalent, and use the shapes available.
No worries, your post was quite helpful and may be the route I will follow. I was also considering getting 3DU's Matt and combining his morphs with Growing Up morphs. Also. I was typing when you posted, so I hadn't seen your post until now. It is understandable if 3D Universe does not want to make a male version, since the males don't sell as well, and a custonized toonish male would probably sell even worse. The thing I disliked was being ridiculed for even asking.
Edit: It was also helpful that you stated the steps you used to get the image you posted. Just posting an image and saying "I was able to do this" really doesn't help much, lol.
It's not you in particular, just a trend of some users who seem to think that 'working on art' should require no effort
But why should it? Why should there not be some people who's only skill level is a "one click" solution? Why should they not be able to create as well as an expert? Is their art any less worthy of praise than the person who is an expert in programming and has access to expensive, professional 3D modeling programs? Why must making something that one thinks is beautiful require; for lack of a better analogy; going out quarrying the stone, transporting it back to a studio you built yourself, and hand carving a statue with tools you have also made entirely on your own?
I understand where people are coming from wanting premade items so that art can be made. And I also understand the desire to make for oneself. I'm attempting to learn modeling myself, and it's not easy. However, not everyone has the skill to do the things that are required to make all of ones own content. And it seems unfortunate and frankly unfair that some seem to believe that the only way to be a true "artist" is to make it all yourself.
There is a reason capitalism exists, those who cannot do buy from those who can, and they are no less for it.
If you are uninterested in putting any effort in, in actually developing any skill?
Then yes, your art and the respect you are due is less.
There's a big excluded middle, and yeah, I've repeatedly pointed out that people shouldn't be expected to code their own stuff or have millions of dollars in equipment and software.
But being -angry- when vendors don't make everything one click bright buttons, when the notion of a five minute adjustment in any image editor is some massive unreasonable hurdle by obviously deficient PAs?
It's art. You're going to have to put SOME effort in.
Well, there goes my chances of being the next Jackson Pollock.
...I have to disagree.
Having a creative outlet no matter the level of your "artistic ability" is important. Not everyeone can be a Stonemason or AlphaChannel.. Many here have "other" lives and cannot devote the amount of time some of us do to customising their work. It doesn't mean their work is any more "inferior" if they get enjoyment and a sense of accomplishment out of what they are doing.
Yeah, I know said I can do without the latest 3DU cute kid & such but then, that is me, who spent a great deal of time to create teen and child characters from buxom lanky supermodel Vicky 4 and in so doing, learned quite a bit about how morphs and DFormers work. At the time I had no other choice as there was no child or teen figure for Gen 4 (until K4 was introduced just before everything went Genesis). Necessity was the driving force back then. Had I not come into this until just recently, I never would have bothered struggling trying to turn an adult figure into a teen or child like I did and just purchased the figures characters I needed. In the end, the result would have been pretty much the same.
If the tools exist, why not use them to your advantage? Ths is the bone I have to pick with pros who claim if you didn't build all your meshes from scratch, your work is worthless. Yeah adjusting morph sliders is simpler than modelling, but not everyone has the mindset to do 3D modelling. Some just want to create pictures that satisfy their creative muse If it means having a library of different characters to choose from and making a few adjustments rather than creating your own character from the base Genesis/G2/G3 figure mesh, all the more power to you.
The idea is this should be an enjoyable pastime for all, no matter how much time and effort one puts into it.
...here are a couple pics of my story character Leela as a child. The frst one was created from Vicky 4 and Thorne's Tommi Character with a lot of proportioning of individual limbs and body regions.
The second is using G2F a couple body/face morph resource kits, and Zev0's Growing Up morphs.
Well for morphs yes, but if someone is wanting a matching male skin, that's not really something a user can just dial up.