This is what I was afraid of.
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Just wondering if you could elaborate, that is, point me in the right direction for tutorials or forum-posts that discuss (or teach) what you're talking about. Personally, I'm excited about Gen 8. 4R8 just came out too...so it's been a fun week in my 3d-world. :)
Sculpting on a subdivided mesh is is not how the HD tool works. It needs a low poly morph as a base. If you can't provide that, you can't add detail to it. You can't add detail to something that doesn't exist.
There aren't tutorials that I know of as I just experimented with it. Dynamic subdivision is just a button you toggle on in zbrush. It will give the illusion of a higher poly mesh; make your sculpt from that and import. You'll probably need to use DS's tools in the poly editor to remove the parts that you don't want as part of the morph, such as you don't want all of the body in a head morph. If i remember correctly you go into the polygroup editor (i think vertex mode should be active), select the group that you want to remove from the morph, set the morph dial itself as a favorite (should be a heart icon over the morph dial), right click on the parameters to enter 'edit mode', then right click on the morph dial then select "remove from favorites" (or something like that).. it will remove the polygons from the morph you don't want. Then save that morph.
Those low-poly G3 nipples that look like ice cream cones are an example of what users can't improve by spinning dials (if I'm wrong, please tell me how). I would hope G8 is better but it doesn't seem to be from comments elsewhere (haven't downloaded her yet so don't know).
Same here, I use characters for illustration and find even V3 can still look amazing! So far I don't see any advantage to G8 or V8 (who I find physically unattractive.) Fine I guess for newbies, but if you already have a TON of content and I have like a million added merchant resource morphs for all characters, V4 and up, I really don't need G8 at all...
Then why daz keeps the HD morphs only be available for PA's? Why people here can not buy the complete figure included all the HD stuff?
Oh yeah absolutely agree about eyes importance. I'm not too happy with V8 eyes either, but i don't think this has much to do with simplified geometry. I think it's more down to textures and shaders and maybe lighting too because all the part that were there before are still there, it's just that more stuff is now welded that makes it easier to work with. Like iris ans sclera are now one mesh which makes sense. At least in my experiments I don't see any correlation between eye quality and the new eye geo.
Why are there not such kind of tutorials here in dazshop about about daz vs zbrush and figure creation?
Why not more teach the morph, content creation process? Not everyone want's to become a new PA, but 'm pretty sure some people really would like to learn more about all this.
And the times people only did this with only software like hexagon or silo, are as good as gone since Zbrush was there.
It isn't that the morphs aren't available; Daz3d reserves the technology to make HD morphs that are ultra-crisp, refined, and of small file size to its vendors. If you wanted to you could add skads of detail with modeling, displacement etc... with an increase in rendering time, file size and a loss of portability to other characters. I gather that the tools don't really make anything much easier but make it easier for the artists to add their details to the base without making its file size much much larger.
On the other hand, no matter how good you are at low-poly sculpting, you can't get detail where the vertices aren't in the right place to support it.
Zbrush costs $800 and I really don't care what it can do! For that I can buy lots of pretty characters and click away and someone else bought zbrush and spent their time making them, I just click.
Or you could just use blender for free. But that is a whole different subject.
It appears pretty obvious that since the advent of Genesis 3 that DAZ is pandaring to game developers and the hell with still artists and illustrators. We need high polygon count and natural topology for the mesh for maximum realism. That's the opposite of what a game developer needs, and what DAZ is delivering these days. Game developers need low resource contraints for maximum movement. Movement ease is useless to us as long as Iray is tied to video card RAM count and it takes a week to make one 90 second animation. So, once again, we still artists are screwed.
and why? why do they do this? Aren't we all spent money for our hobby here, if there ever will be a buyable pro version again of the studio software, i expected this to be there available for everyone not?
you can always start in Zbrush core for around $150
but the time you spent in learning the software, and the time in creation content "that part would never change" it takes lot of hours to create something.
the question is, could you waste your life time on it?
You can do the same thing with Hexagon - I think I bought it for $2 at some point years ago, but it's always cheap. Just export the base rez, import into Hex, turn on a level of smoothing (1 for how it shows in DS' viewport, or 2 for the level DS default renders G3 and G8 but that can make Hex crawl) Then do your polygon pushing, or use the sculpt-painting tools. Once you're happy turn the smoothing level down to 0 (it'll look terrible at base rez probably if you did anything significant) and export.
Edit: if you're using symmetry it will take a >long< time to undo (Ctrl-Z) if you mess something up on that high of polycount in a 32 bit program, it will freeze for a while - it hasn't crashed, you just have to wait it out.
why would you still use old hex, if this can be done 100 times faster in ZB today?
Because (a) we already have and know how to use Hexagon, and (b) $150 is a nontrivial expense.
I have z-brush, just telling the people who can't afford it that it can be done in a super cheap program.
Blender can do this, but it have a learning curve like most
Any modeling software that lets you work in subd and then go back to base res before sending it back out will do. Silo isn't all that expensive. Nvil isn't expensive either. They'll both do it. Heck, Blender is FREE and it'll do it too ;) Fisty was only noting that Hexagon will do it also, and it's dirt cheap :P. I think I paid 1.88 for it many moons ago LOL
Laurie
My comment has nothing to do with HD, Genesis is a low poly figure and you need the correct tools to make a low poly morph.The original genesis and part of Genesis 2 didn't have any HD, yet morphs and characters were created. Just because you don't have access to HD tools doesn't meen you can't make a morph, which has been asserted in this thread. That's just not true.
I first did genesis morphs with a program called Argile (which is no longer available), then used zbrush. There are many tools available that you can use to make a low poly morph, it's just a shift in how you do things.
That's where items such as normal maps come in. And you could handle changes in bending with low poly jcms and still keep the normal map for the detail.
Earlier in this thread, I showed you don't need high polycount or natual topology. That statement just isn't true. We aren't in the days where you need 200K polys just to make a cheekbone or a nose.
I bought a book to learn more about blender. That's what I'd choose to play with. Daz is what it is though. It would take me countless hours to model a fraction of what I already own. The idea was for everyone to not have to reinvent the wheel everytime they wanted to make a picture. "Let there be one tight mini skirt for all times one is called for!" Not 10,000 people making 10,000 mini skirts to make 10,000 pictures. Well, then they copy righted the miniskirt and if your outfit called for it, you had to make your very own identical mini skirt to sell with your oh so one of a kind top that really sold the whole outfit....but like it had to have a skirt and shoes with to sell right? Daz holding back a feature like that is pretty low. I do buy morph packs for my daz figures, I doubt having the tool would make me stop wanting the benefit from someone else taking the time to provide their morphs already done up for me. I think its cheesy and insulting to withhold tools from worker bees who sell or give away morphs for lazy people like me. You can count on people wanting to save time and effort, you need not lock up the tool shed. Really, like my lawn mower isn't locked up at all, anybody can ride around my yard on it anytime, reasonably uniform result prefered........ Don't ban me Daz, but I think you should set the tools free now. Relax, I'd buy even more morphs....
I think every time there is a discussion about the HD tool, it seems people have the incorrect assumption that you're sculpting magically with a high poly model and that gets imported from that beautifully.
It's not.
You have to know how to make a low poly model. Period. I mean people can raise a fuss, but if you don't know how to make morphs in low poly the tool is absolutely useless to you because it wants a low poly morph to work from. You can't get around it, so instead of asking for a tool you can't use, learn to do what needs to be done to make low poly morphs. If you can't make a morph with only 18K, you have to learn how to do that first.
I've been making morphs with 18K, from the first genesis with different types of adult shapes and young adults. All without any type of HD tool, and using the tools in zbrush. Honestly if you don't have access to zbrush or comparable program, it's not worth asking for the tool either.
If the tool were available, sculpters like the original poster could learn to use it or not. Why not release it? Because someone would be afraid that other place would have more morph packs up for sale? What, it would hurt somebody's bottomline in some way? The point is they pick and choose who has it and that is crappy of them, period. Telling everyone they are doing that because they think everyone but the choosen are too stupid to use it is rude and hardly the truth. If people are too stupid to use it, they don't use it whether it is there or not is never an issue at all ever. There is plenty of stuff in daz studio I am too stupid use yet, what is one more little thing????
I'm going to answer this how I learned it: Google and youtube. Books on sculpting in zbrush. So many PAs didn't have a guide book, but they used the a combination of online references, forums and classes to create the content to import into DS for use. There's also various threads here in the forum that show how to use DS's tools. None of this is hidden, you just have to look. Also not everyone has an aptitute to teach or take time to walk people through things. I know how to research on my own, but I have a VERY low tolerance to walk people through things, especially when I'm working on something myself. I mean when my boyfriend had an issue with his computer, I threw him a computer book and told him to look it up because the helpdesk was closed.
That said, you do have resources available and they are generally a search away.
We really need access to the "high res" mesh and be able to do our own "HD morphs". These are no longer truly high res or HD anymore. They're fairly low poly, even by gaming standards. Yet, we only have access to the base resolution figure when doing morphs. It's really silly.