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There is a theory that one should bang one's head into a stone wall as it feels so good when you stop. Believers in this theory should immediately run out and get G8. It is a bit of a challenge figuring out how to use her. I've been spending too much time and money meeting the challenge. The results, if you have time and money to spend, can be good. Still, I find myself wishing for morphs that just aren't available yet for G8, or wishing that autofit worked better, or that old skins hadn't shifted tone, or...
Two things that will make the transition to G8
more paletable(sic) for the majority.
All of ZEV0 products updated
and a functional replacement for GENX2
( or daz purchases it from the estate of the late D3D).
give it some time.
Poses work fine if you use the script from DavidGB to adjust the arm and leg positions, or buy the pose conversion tool that came out the same day. Clothes just need more autofit template choices, but generally work; shoes have always been a problem as has hair. The best option for those is going to be parenting the items in question where they should go. As for body morphs, that will come from someone.
I'll have to disagree; it's actually more compatible with clothing content than G3 was, even though it doesn't have nearly the selection of templates right now that it needs. And I disagree that what we got wasn't a full figure update.
I got the basic VG8 ... Honestly don't see what the big deal is. So she poses a little better but .. except for that aren't we stuck in Groundhog Day. Where we'll see all the new crap to get again .. muscularity, backward compatibility, UV matching... and the cycle continues. Is history really a flat circle?
AMEN to that! I think Genesis is still my favorite generation because I could use the whole slew of morph shapes on either M ot F and clothes the same way.I think to truly find a place of backwards compatibility we need to be able to work with our content with out converters. I have GenX and am tempted to move everything back to Genesis to make that the MOST versatile character ever.
I saved out the GF8 surfaces as shader presets so that I could easily apply them to other figures. Of course ain't going to bother with trying a likely fail like trying to transfer the facial changes back to Genesis 3, Genesis 2, and Genesis (Genesis is where I'd like to really see all or most of the G8 improvements transfered to).
I agree get it all back to Genesis! And I have bought some really great packages for G2 & G3, but feel limited to the Male or Femal version. To mix all fo it together into ONE AWESOME BASE that has the versatility that the original Genesis carried would ROCK IT ALL!
Actually, it was a glitch when I was toying with getting the 3 month PC membership....I put it in my cart a day earlier....and someone said the Pro price dropped so I went over to get that and dropped everything out of my cart and put the propack in and the earlier page still opened showed the lower price but the cart showed the price without the PC membership in the cart.
I'll have to do that. The skin materials aren't half bad. I applied them to G3F earlier and ended up putting together a scene and rendering it. There are two versions, the postwork free version is a good representation of the skin, but could be a better finished image, and the postworked version, which is a bit more dramatic. Drama first:
Blue
Click here to view the gallery page with larger image and full list of products used.
And here's the postwork free version:
Click here to view the larger image.
You cannot do it. The most of beauty of G8 expressions come from HD morphs and they're tied to mesh and base meshes are very different between 1 and 8. It's better to convince some PA with access to HD tool to make a set of HD expressions for Genesis 1. Predatron did it for Genesis 3 and it was cool job :)
Edit: You can get even better expressions with Genesis 1 as it's facial mesh has more details :)
Genesis (1) will likely always be my favorite. When I first started w/ Daz, V3/M3 were the big deals, but I liked A3/H3, and only reluctantly used V3/M3. When M4/V4 came out, I don't think I picked them up until after H4/A4 came out as well. Took me awhile to get around to Genesis once D|S4 came out, but once I did, I couldn't get enough! One of my favorite things about Genesis was how I could use the same clothes for males and females, which was especially handy for uniforms. It was hard (and really annoying) wanting to have males and females dress the same across the board, because men would have these really practical suits of armor or tactical gear, and women would always bare their midriffs (just asking to be gutted) and wear high heels (snap that ankle!). Since I mainly use Daz to illustrate the stories I write, and the majority of my characters are sensible, I was always having to swap out footwear for the same one pair of flat boots, lol.
On top of that, it's way easier to make families using Genesis. I can make a daughter look like her dad by using maybe 25% M4 morph on Genesis where he uses 100%. I think that's probably what I miss the most from future Genesis incarnations. If I was using a custom morph for Mother Dearest, like, say, Anabelle, I could just turn that down a bit and add in some appropriate male morphs to make her son resemble her. And, of course, my shapeshifters appreciate the freedom. I mean, I get why they didn't continue with it (in a word: boobs), but things like Fit Control and various smoothers basically made up for that. I wonder: would there be a way to just update the original Genesis so that it has the new morphs and fits the clothes easily? I've been wanting to get GenX (etc.) for a looooooooooooooong time, now, but I never seem to catch it on sale, and whenever I think I'll get it, some other sale is on so that I can get hundreds of dollars worth of stuff for $30...
One hopeful sign is Victoria 8 did not have custom UV mapping so maybe DAZ has decided to drop that except for extreme character shapes.
You wrote "Then again, since NGS Annagenessis 2 came out, I've been interchangeably using Genesis, Genesis 2 and the G3s all side by side and not only is it really hard to tell them apart, I'm actually finding that original Genesis often has the best range of expressions."
Do you think that this is due to the number of polygons/verts (at base resolution) being greater in the earlier genesis versions?
Personally I think people are overly fixated on polygons. I think the critical part is some of the technology that influences how things bend and flex; all the poly in the world isn't going to work if your figure contorts like Gumby.
Wow, big improvement
Actually, I suspect it's more due to the fact that the base Genesis starts from a more neutral position since it has to be both male or female, whereas the G2 and G3s all seem to start with a little bit of an expression to begin with. I can get quite extreme expressions with Genesis that still read as believeable, whereas with the newer figures, especially the G3s, it's much easier to dial past the sweet spot into something that looks a llittle forced and unnatural.
I thought so. It would be nice if DAZ would update the Genesis 3 Female in the Starter Essentials with the same Iray materials as G8F, so we don't have to brew our own. But it doesn't take long, (unless you want to make some permanent changes,) and it's easy enough to save a material preset.
Though I don't suppose many people use the base female in their renders... lol
And thanks. Glad you liked the images.
With NGS Anagenessis and a few other things, I actually find myself drifting back to Genesis. It's not perfect, but it seems to be this nice sweet spot of useful autofit, ability to adapt older content, ability to use newer content...
I didn't recognize her as the base female. Being a base figure has it's benefits I suppose as I thought you dialed a unique set of morphs. I've used base Genesis females probably more than any other figure except Girl 7 / Guy 7 and morphs of those two. The skin lighting, skin tone, and hair heavily influence recognition hence me frustration at not being able to personally easily manipulate lighting in scenes how I expect it to work in the real world. I must of made a half dozen aborted attempts last week to render a G8F lady in dim room lit by candlelight but it was just not looking like candle light as there was the edge cases of hightlight and darkness tonal variations missing. Maybe it's the brain manipulating what the human eyes see. I guess I will need to go to WalMart and buy some candles and experiment what candlelight and lightbulbs actually look like at night in pictures and from memory with humnan eyes and try to apply that to DAZ Studio renders. I want a Point & Shoot Prosumer Camera UI Renderer Tab/Viewport in DS 5 and I want it now!
LOL...
What you need for the candlelight image is Ghost Lights, either from the first Kit sold by KA, or by following the tutorial he made for us first, (here.) The Ghost Light(s) will brighten the image much the same way your eyes adjust to the dark. Here's an old render where I used ghost lights around the campfire, allowing me to dial down the emission to look more like real fire, and still have light bright enough to light the scene, (here.)
The only lighting I used in "Blue" was an HDRI from TerraDome 3. I rotated the dome in increments until I found a light and shadow combination I liked.
Not to mention that there's an insane amount of Gen 4 characters out there at at ridiculous prices... I've literally lost track of how many V4 skins I have at this point since I used to cruise the old Rendrosity prime secton and wait for vendors to run bogo sales... it's hard to resist two complete characters for $3.50. But with NGS2 they look great on all the following generations, and now NGS3 is just around the corner...
Excuse me, why did I break down and buy V8 again? Oh, right, the 95%stcking discounts on all the old Genesis product. :p
Amen to that. I've been using flat planes to light scenes since, well, forever, but Ghost Lights make the process ridculously fast and simple.
I have Ghost Lights. It's like there is this 'appropriate balance' between light and dark that I can't find when I make my renders. :-(
Maybe I need to investigate specularity & glossiness settings more thoroughly.
Yep, I generally have to use a spotlight along with Ghost Lights just to pick out the specularity/gloss which is lost if I only use Ghost Lights.
For me, the biggest reason not to move to G8 is, that it's still so new that it seems a step backwards. I already have all the Zev0 products and ultimate V7 bending morphs, so I think my V7 actually poses better than G8. Daz and PAs just made G3 too good, and now they don't have enough resources to really take it to the next level ( soft body dynamics etc. ). Maybe it's just me, but G8 feels more like G3.1 or something like that, and I'm not willing to buy everything again for so little gains.
When it comes to Ghost Lights, that's a product which purchase I don't regret a second. It has made creating lighting so much easier for Iray environments. I have also noticed that you lose skin specularity/gloss details, and skin looks kind of "bland" with just Ghost Lights, but I usually add IES emission profile from IG's Architectural lights set for my main mesh light. That seems to fix it without increasing render times.
Have you've tried G8 to tell? From what I've seen, G8 needs less of those additional pose correction add ons.
Gumby?
I agree that the important issue is flexability/bendability. Human skin is extremely flexible and maleable which allows very subtle changes in shape. Our brains are trained from birth to recognise those subtle changes, especially in the face. So the trick to being able to get realistic expressions is having a flexible surface. Polygons are rigid and flat, they bend only at the joints between them. Imagine a head made up of 20 polygons (a d20 for you Dungeons and Dragons fans), no matter how hard you try you are not going to make much of a human expression with a 20 polygon polyhedral. However, the more ploygons there are the potentially more flexible the surface can be. With an infinite number of polygons (each of zero size, obviously), you would have a perfectly flexible surface that could adopt any "real" shape.
The question is, how many polygons are necessary in a "head" to enable it to have realistic shapes that will be subtle enough to fool our brains into recognising a "realistic expression"? G3 and G8 have enough to do that, but clearly the more polygons there are the more realistic the expression could be. I don't know where the limits are but some people are observing that the earlier generations of DAZ figures had more polys and gave better expressions.
I know that in DS the number of polys is increased by subdivision of the base to allow for the creation of more realistic expressions (leaving aside for the moment the tools that are used to help in that process, such as facial animation rigs). However, for most people using DAZ Genesis figures, morphing of a face shape has to be done in base resolution and this makes the process of getting subtle expressions more difficult. I know that deformation maps can be used to add subtle details but that requires a separate skill set than simple mesh manipulation (sculpting).
I understand that number of polygons is not the only factor in obtaining realistic expressions and beautiful faces, but for many the task would be easier if the number of polygons was increased.
Interesting. So are you saying that adding an IES profile changes the nature of the mesh light so that it brings out the specularity? If so, would any IES profile do that - for example from a site such as this?
https://light-up.co.uk/index.php?t=ies&vc=US&c=USD
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/56938/ies-profiles-for-use-in-iray
Yes, of course I have tried. I even compared it against base G3F model to be fair ( I don't own V8, so can't compare V7 vs V8 ), and still there's very little difference. Mainly shoulders, if you raise character's hand all the way up. That I admit looks much better on G8F compared to G3F, but it's pretty much the same otherwise.
Mostly G8F still has the same problem areas. For example bend G3 or G8 shin or forearm to max, and tell me how great that looks. How about pelvis and abdomen to max? I really can't see any difference there. G8F still even has that same "explosion effect" in her bottom area that G3F has ( just bend, rotate and twist her thigh to max values ). I just don't see as much improvement as early adapters claim, but I really hope that G8F needs less of those correction morphs, because let's be honest, there's none around.
That's why I said, it's still too early, and currently it's still a step backwards when compared to fully decked V7. When all the nice bling bling is finally available after a year or so, I'm sure G8 is going to be better than G3, but then you only have 1 year left before the next new shiny thing arrives. I think I'll skip this version entirely, since I'm still perfectly happy with G3, and see what G9 has to offer next. Well, of course I need to leave a loophole here, because Daz_Steve said that they are planning something to blow our minds at the second half of the year, so you never know...
I have to admit that I'm no expert in that area, so can't really answer that, but I assume so. I just know, that when I tried with pure Ghost Light setup, render speed was really good, but character's skin looked really bland.Then I added IG's architectural light in the scene, and I got much nicer skin. That unfortunately slowed render speed to crawl, so I replaced that IG's light with low-poly mesh light, and just added IG's IES profile to it, and then it worked nicely again
EDIT: I had to go back and take a quick test with this, and really couldn't see much difference on the skin depending on IES profile. The difference must have been that new light I added. Sorry about the confusion.