Separate texture sets are getting ridiculous
hfilb
Posts: 64
in The Commons
It's getting to the point where common hair colors (Black, Brown) are being removed from the base product and moved into the addon texture product that's released at the same time. Didn't there used to be a time when addon sets were released a while after the base product and added additional very different textures/functionality without comprimising the original?
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^Sometimes its a case of textures being done by a different PA. Great modellers aren't always great texturers and vice-versa.
Sometimes (as in the case of PC+ hair) it's to keep the price of the base down for those who only need a couple of choices (or use a hair shader solution).
I haven't had to buy a hair texture expansion since I bought this porduct last year:
https://www.daz3d.com/colorwerks-hair-shaders-for-iray
Sometimes a bit more fiddly than buying an expansion specifically made for a particular hair, but I've found it to be extremely useful and a great money saver.
I've noticed a trend to have just blonde/brunette/ginger colors in the base set, but didn't realize there were sets with less. Possibly because I use mostly G3 and older.
Colorwerks is in my wishlist--was sold with the plushie freebie.
Even for costumes they've become a mess.
Older clothes normally had multiple materials. These days you get one, often not even the most flexible or generally useful one.
I find third party texture sets the loveliest, addons by the original artist tend to be more of the same in different colours and I often wonder why they bothered, most of those could be done by the end user with a bit more effort than click and load, often being single shades a diffuse colour could suffice for rather than a plain coloured map.
Or at best tiled textures they just baked to a map.
Whereas texture artists bring their own interpretation to the outfit adding details that follow the UV mapping, the many some sadly now gone MFD textures were examples of this, a single dress with so many varied looks thanks to the skills of the texture artists including awesome freebies Chohole made.
I'm specifically referring to the case where the original PA strips the base (required) product of common colors to sell in an addon made by that same PA. This hair is just the latest in a long line of similar dirty practices: https://www.daz3d.com/greer-hair-for-genesis-8-females
Of course the same goes for Materials options for outfits. Often times with the new DAZ original sets you only have 1 choice of colors while an addon will give ~3 more. This isn't a cost-saving measure for the consumer's sake; the sum of the addon and the original products is higher than older hairs/outfits with much more functionality.
Obligatory
I know what you mean. It never bothered me that much because I usually convert my hair to black, don't need any addons for that!
What's always bothered me is Platinum Club addons for non Platinum Club products. "Buy this cool upgrade for only $2.99! Of course the base set is 30 bucks, but whatever!"
That is a PC item, so the PA didn't make the decion. The base gives you colours which could be tinted, or as others have said there are plenty of hair-shader sets around - if they included more colours in the base then it might well move to a higher price point.
PC hair has always been like that.. so no 'dirty decision' was made to strip anything out.. it wasn't a conscious decision.
I could have sworn I had some older PC+ hairs with more than the base colors. I guess they were either a higher PC+ price point, or possibly PA products that I got on a PC+ for a Day or Flash promo
Thanks for clarifying, Richard & Jack..
Glad I saw this! Right now the greer hair and its texture pack together are less than 6$$ together!
I think Jack is broadly right, but there may be a few exceptions (especially with "Newly PC" items which were Daz buyouts of PA items). However, if you go right back then items usually released without any textures at all, or possibly a functional map such as a transparency map for the Morphing Fantasy Dress - it was only later that we started to get a map set or two with the base models.
Outfits I certainly can understand, I remember base coloured clothing and textures as an additional buy,
hair though it is often more a case of the same map with a different hue, as I said easy enough for the end user to do with diffuse or in an image editor if the base map is pale,
the trick here is to sell the black hair as the base so one needs to buy the texture addon
and give it a contorted UV so substitution not as easy 
realistically most hairs can use diffuse images from other hairs if the scalp is a separate map, ones that are atlased on the same map with the scalp trickier but again editable so you need not buy the texture addons unless you want to pay for one click convenience using smart content as some do.