Are You a shape Shifter??
wolf359
Posts: 3,939
This is sort of an informal poll
I would be interested in seeing what percentage of users
(who are active in the forums),
Never render Stills or animation with 100 percent
Canned/preset Character shapes sold in the Daz store
This excludes Hair and clothing& skin materials, I mean specifically the face and
bodyshapes.
I mean literally Starting with the default Genesis(insert version number here)
and begin moving face and body sliders until you get a fairly unique look and then
add your perferred clothing , hair & skin.
Or perhaps even start with a Character preset like Ivan or George HD
and mixing in some other morphs to get away from the Default look.
I personally have a certain aversion to creating any render with the exact
shape and face as the one in the DAZ promo renders for V8 or whomever.
Are you a shape shifter??
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Comments
I'm more of an interminable tweaker. Never satisfied. Never satisifed with store-bought stuff, always making my own models and textures. As far as figures like G3's, yeah I start with base characters, but constantly morphing and unlocking morphs to extend them. Doing my own poses, tweaking materials, then tweaking renders using GIMP/Photoshop/Nuke, doing stuff in Blender, and on and on. Never satisfied. Ever.
I wouldn't like to say never, but its pretty rare.
I rarely start with a preset character I load the base figure, its one of the reason why the limitations of Sakura are so annoying, you need to load the Sakura preset for the eyes and eybrows to work.
I'm a bit of both - depends on the focus of the render. I'll often use a canned character but if I take more time, or I need something a little different, I'll tweak.
I never leave not-well-enough alone. The canned figure is just a start. I'm a tweaker. I have lots of groups of my guys who look similar but I'm always trying to evolve character shape perfection. And none of them still left in my library of literally thousands of previously saved scenes are stock characters. Only my very first M1 guys or original Poser men were left stock. I very rarely ever load a stock character. I usually start from one of my previous scenes and throw away the props, tweak the poses & expressions, the body & face shapes, change the materials, tinker with new lighting find new hair & clothes (if any) and new props and friends. Then tweak for a few more days, get a few savable renders then start over again. I'm not after render perfection. I only use 3Delight, rarely need postwork, and know how to use standard DAZ lights without any "ubers", or 'irays", or "sss's" and I get quite satisfactory results. Once in a while, perhaps one in a hundred or two, I get something I really like and put it out in the public but TOS rules keep them from being shown here since most of them are au naturel and frisky.
I will admit that I rarely tweak with material settings. I have enough materials that I can find one that fits the personality of the current character in development. I experimented with tinkering with materials but it just wasn't worth the time for me. I can use layers of body hair, variations in lighting, bodyshells & tattoos to make lots of different looks.
Well for me it's 100% custom characters:) I'm a Tweaker, same goes for environments and surfaces, lightning...
I am a shapeshifter, specially with monsters but on human characters also I like to fall in love with a specific official released shape and just give it small retouching of nose, eyes or lips.
I'm about a 50% Shape Shifter. I make two kinds of renders:
One where I've just bought a new character and I'm planning to post a render in a competition or discussion thread (or my focus is actually on a new environment or new clothes set and I'm just using a standard character as a mannequin/clothes-horse). Maybe I would change the body shape a little, but leave the face alone.
Two where I'm creating a story render and I'm interested in my character. Then I almost always start with a base model (mostly a base male/female but sometimes a more suitable starting shape like George, Old Chap, Ivan 7) and apply lots of morphs. I still use a skin out of the box - I'm not skilled enough to create my own - although I may use Skin Builder or add freckles/makeup/dirt from specialised products to do that.
Guess I'm a shapeshifter. Many faces I'll leave alone especially from PA's like Fred Winkler that make some stunning beauties. Some I'll tweak a bit. A few I'll sort of create from scratch, with partial morphs from 2-3 characters or so with some dial spinning and Zbrush touches. The bodies I always tweak to a degree, some quite a bit.
There is the occasional character I bought because they inspired me just the way they are, and they get some renders unaltered for everything else I'm using everything I ahve to make a character I have in mind. so lost of shifting and changing skins and surfaces
I do tend to change faces a lot. A lot of the time I'll shorten legs, shrink busts and widen hips on females and bulk up slightly on the males. If I render any character the way I got it, it's because I really like it or because it's an initial rendering for me to see what it looks like up close.
Laurie
I was never 100% that way but I was probably 99% that way in my M4/V4 days, and something like 95% that way now. There's always been a handful of character makers whose work l liked well enough to use just straight out of the box: mostly Surreality and Phoenix1966 in the old days, sometimes Liquid Rust and Morris as well. Today that's Javier Micheal and DarwinsMishap, mostly.
It depends on my purpose. If I'm experimenting on a technique or workflow, or if the figure isn't the main focus, then I slap in some canned stuff and have at. For images where the figure has meaning, I almost never use an unaltered preset. There are a few characters I've kept as is, but only because they fit one of two critieria. One - I saw the character and said, "That's exactly how I pictured Character X from Story Y", or "Wow, now I know exactly what Character X looks like." Two - there was something about the character that was so interesting I couldn't help but form a story around it. Even then, I sometimes end up doing minor tweaks.
I sometimes use, heaven forbid, default G8F when the whim suits me as they are quite nice characters. I find G8F especially nice for the Jane Doe as average look and the same with G8M although not nearly as much as G8F. When I do realism in DAZ it is just a learning exercise in how to use DAZ and I don't really care too much except to use the elements of DAZ Studio and the DAZ models to exercise the activities needed to learn what I'm trying to learn about DAZ Studio. I have no plans for realism for DAZ Studio outside of an occasional learning post in the DAZ gallery.
If they suited my whim in a game or animation I wouldn't hesitate to use any of the DAZ or PA characters unmorphed. That's what they were created for after all and wouldn't distract from the story telling or game play at all. It would be just a question of how prevalent that DAZ/PA look is in actually successful games and/or animations and well I've yet to see one that has been a big success so I am more comfortable using DAZ/Poser style in games or animations than other styles that are much more prevalent in successful games and animations.
Ultimately though, I am doing 3D toon style animation and games so the Jane & John Doe look or any other realistic DAZ / PA model look is not that important except as a helpful guide to caricature. For that I am still waivering as to the style I'll use at publishing time as I want it to look good but to be original because for all the complaints about all DAZ models looking alike you've not seen nothing yet until you go compare all the game apps out there and their art style. Lucky that DAZ and/or Poser models makes last minute replacement of a style quite easy.
I actually have been mostly using canned figures right out of the box or maybe picking one of the predefined characters. This thread reminds me that I need to spend some quality time learning how to use all the tools I have available to me and experimenting more than I have been. Not that there's anything wrong with the defaults, but it would be nice to get some additional variety. Where there are a few instances when I have considered sitting down and trying to make a dramatic new character from all the morphs, it is far harder than it sounds and I haven't had any overwhelming reason to spend the time yet, since the characters themselves are not usually the primary focus of what I do and haven't yet had an absolute need to do so.
My Main characters are dialed my extras tend to be out of the box, although I tend to dial down the females chests and add definition to the men or hd.
Yes.
I never use a character out of the box except to show off that character.
Count me in also as I never use the body morph that comes with any character I purchase and rarely use the face morph without blending other morphs in with it.I enjoy creating characters for my scenes, been doing it since V4. It makes things more uniqeue and I feel I am doing more of the work rather than just clicking a few files. I get soo much use out of the Simtenero Randomizer it is not even funny. I can spend a complete afternoon creating random face and body morphs I like for future scenes with it.
I rarely leave a character alone. The almost uniform height and age of Daz characters annoys me. Nearly always change height and age. I'll interchange textures. Swap heads and bodies. Mess with parameters. Anything is up for grabs. Once and a while, I'll find a character I like enough to use out of the box.
I totally shapeshift. I generally start with base Genesis then dial in parts of full characters then use my morph packages to tweak bodies and faces.
I've been a dedicated morph mixer ever since the release of Genesis 1. I'll usually start with a mix of two or three characters, then tweak with other morphs until it looks right. I don't think I've ever used a simple out-of-the-box character.
It's very rare for me to use a figure or model as they come from the creator. Part of it is because the majority of characters sold here tend to be just a bit too good looking and statuesque in a supermodel type way, and I like my characters to feel a bit more like the average person... and the other half is that I want my characters to be unique enough that they don't look exactly like the characters in anybody else's work. So, at the very least, I'll dial in a little of Zev0's Growing Up or Aging morphs, mix in a little bit of of a second character, adjust the fitness and muscularity and tweak the skin with NGS2, Beautiful Skins or some other skin shader. That said, the more I do this, the more I tend to buy a lot of premade characters to use as starting points rather than starting completely from scratch.
I never use a purchased character as is. There are maybe a handful of characters that I use all or most of the face morph but I always make my own body. I always start with the generic character and add sliders. Except Sakura, I clicked her in fully, then did morphs after. I have almost all the extra PA merchant resource morphs and love to play with them or combine characters or Daz morphs. Now I'm finding I'm playing with skin settings too. The whole fun is creating characters!
The least I do is shorten the character, either the legs or the torso, als most of them are too super-model-tall.
I'm defitiely a shapeshifter. I rarely use the stock character except for test renders and I don't save those. I generally do them to test colouring etc. Since I prefer more mature characters I'm always tweaking using a combination of mixed morphs and dials
I often mix about 250 different morphs in order to obtain exactly the char I need... And I'm still collecting more!
So, definetely a shape shifter, yes...
I don't actually use Genesis, as I have (until very recently) used an older version of Poser. My Avatar is V4, with dial spun morphs, the base morph is a dial spun version of V4 to make Granny Weatherwax, and then I tweakled it a little more myslef, it uses Morphs++.. I do really enjoy spinning dials to get something just that little different.
The only time I use an unmodified base figure is if I'm doing a render for a forum post to show what the figure looks like un-modified ..... but even then it's hard for me to not modify things. I had to check my gallery to make sure, because I thought I might have used one or two unmodified charaters. But no, I'm definitely a shape shifter, not one unmodified figure in my gallery. I'm also a shader tweaker as well. The vendors do a great job, but there is always some things that I just "need" to change. It's not because the original figure/character isn't great, but I just need to add my "vision" to their work.
I'm an extreme shapeshifter, it's why I have a glut of morphs for all generations, the more morph packages the better...I'm really looking forward to Zev0's new rigging scripts as it will make my Zbrushed/cross gen morphs a lot easier to implement!
Here's an old V3 render of mine