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I was still using Genesis 3 until an artist created a character from a recently released video game. Then "things happened", and I started using Genesis 8. I still feel like I'm trying to catch up with my Genesis 8 Library.
Had that character not been released, I'd still be working with Genesis 3.
My PC is (just about) coping with G8. Any radical changes if/when Genesis 9 comes out, will probably see it off... ^^'
Heh! I'd still be working primarily with Genesis 1 if Ollie hadn't been 99.5% exactly what I wanted for one of my continuing characters.
...still use G1 for a number of toon characters that were retooled for it.
As for me, I find myself still using Genesis 3 more, for four reasons:
1) Fibermesh eyebrows are a good idea badly executed. Of course, we wanted to be able to change eyebrow color. The eyebrows are usually too heavy and placed too low, sometimes down on the eyelid. You can try to adjust this using shaping or posing sliders, but the results aren't usually satisfactory. I never wanted to see Tom Selleck's mustache placed over the eye of an apparently perpetually angry female character as an option. And the "hair" too often ends up looking like steel wool.
2) While autofit usually works well, I generally prefer to use conventionally conforming clothes on their native generation figures. I find dForce to be genuinely useful with some clothing and hair, but time-consuming. Since so much of the G8 clothing was created for dForce, I usually prefer G3 outfits and, therefore, to put them on G3 figures.
3) Many G8 characters have heads which are disproportionately small, requiring rescaling. Fairly easy, but why go through that step if you can get equal results without that step?
4) The rate at which the generations replace each other is faster than artists can come up with artistically compelling ideas. Many times, we are just presented with reiterations of characters, outfits, and hairstyles already sold to us before, now with spats or a sombrero (with dForce!) included as a "bonus".
For me, IRAY was the leap forward, and that came at the end-of-Genesis 2/early Genesis 3 product phase. So Genesis 8 is useful (especially the poly count difference and the A-pose) but is, in some ways, a progress backwards, and I suspect that G8, like Genesis, will be a generation of content that I largely skip, or buy only at near-giveaway prices.
Are you saying that any clothing I have for G2 will fit G8 with no problems?
Yes, G1 to G8. Few clothing may require minor adjustment.
It very much depends on how the clothes models are constructed; I have a lot of older stuff that converts quite well. But parameter dials will only transfer to body parts that exist on G8, so for anything that has extra body parts to aid posing, e.g. hair with braid sections, or long skirts with body handles, the parameters might not work in the converted version. Although there are ways round this, involving manual conversion or buying conversion utilities. The automatic conversion has improved with each Genesis generation, so you'll just have to try each item and see how well it works.
...for hair, I just manually fit and parent it to the figure without converting. This preserves all the morphs and movements. Clothing can be more tricky as sometimes it doesn't follow poses correctly even when manually fit and parented.
Sorry, but that's simply not true. There's a good reason why a whole sub-industry has popped up of artists creating after the fact converesion morphs, corrections and fixes for every figure since Auto-fit was introduced, and while there are many cases where auto-fit does work well, one frequently loses many of the adjustment parameters and bones that were originally built in. And that's not even taking into account the fact that both auto-fit and the transfer utility still can't convert footwear with any kind of reliability.
Auto fit peserves all the morphs and movements (it used to delete the morphs, but that was fixed years ago).
What Auto-fit does not perserve is any additional bones in the hair. Normally not a problem for shorter hair, but a lot of longer hairs have additonal bones.
As far as the original posted question goes... I find that Genesis 8 is better in some respects but not as good in others, with one of the main issues being how large a percentage of Genesis 8 clothing depends upon dForce, with a lot of the product out there (at other sites) not working without dforce at all, while other items tend to drape like hollow plastic shapes withithout it. The thing is, Dforce is a nice option to have, but if I'm doing a scene with a dozen figures, having to add all those simulations adds a huge chunk of time onto the project. Meanwhile, for all the ballyhoo about the increased number of facial bones, a lot of us found that the expressions made for the earlier G8 figures tended to bend less naturally than the more morph driven facial poses of the earlier generations, resulting in uncanny valley effects like the "joker" smiles. What I do like better about the G8s is the larger selection of mature and older figure bases, and I find that the G8 female is also easier to make into a believable teen.
...exactly, ponytails and braids in particular.
Similarly, it also has an annoying habit of eating the helper bones for dresses, capes, long sleeves, etc., and turning things that are supposed to be rigid, like collars, to limp mush.
I often use autofit without any problem. Some or most footwear are difficult to fit. However you are a lot more experienced person than me, you know better.
Attached image figure is Genesis 8 all clothing Genesis 2 without any adjustment, Genesis 2 Pose applied with minor adjustment.
There are three things I avoid when trying to autofit to G8.
Long dresses/skirts. The good ones pretty much all have bones to aid in the posing of the skirt. Autofit removes them so any pose that isn't standing straight is a mess.
Shoes. Just don't do it.
Long hair. Same as long skirts. The bones are gone so it is stuck in the default pose which is rarely what I'm after.
But other than that I've had a lot of succes using autofit.
...as I mentioned manually fitting clothing can be simple or a tedious chore depending on a number of factors (like layered clothing and accessories).
For example, when autofitting the V4 Bunny Dazed sweater and skirt to Gen 3, I get two annoying issues. On the sweater, the bottom hem gets an odd upward notch in the middle of it, while for the skirt, the handles become useless and the texture of the middle section distorts badly. Neither was difficult outfit to manually though I had to use different footwear as Gen4 always had the feet pointed downward (what I call the "crucifixion pose") so the boots that came with the dress could not be fitted properly. Getting the skirt to follow poses was not an issue thanks to the handles. Other dresses that do not have separate poses/movements or handles are more problematic.
Footwear has been the bane of autofit ever since Genesis."classic."
I've almost given up on conforming clothing now that proper draping is possible. I've even managed to convert a few older G3,2 &1 garments into dForce but I have to say that I have more failures than positive results - lots of explosions. I have very few (if any) non-dForce clothes for G8 and I managed to auto-fit the tight fitting garments from G3F to G8F without too much trouble. I really can't see why anyone would buy a dress that looks like it is made of tin rather than one that drapes like the cloth it is meant to be.
The issue is time. I'm not making one off pieces for my own pleasure but making VN's. If I use a dForce garment, and I have, then every scene I make has to simulated along with the posing, getting the lighting right and setting the camera angle. Setting up a seated character in a dForce garment requires doing an animation timeline with just the figure and the chair, running the sim and then merging the results in the rest of the scene, repeated for every character in the scene with dForce garments/hair. The results look better but scene setup goes from something like a half hour each to an hour or more. Which means I produce half as many scenes in my available time to work on it.
It might no be so bad for me if I could setup the simulations and have them run in a batch something like how I can run renderqueue overnight/while I'm at work. But with how frequently things explode in simulations I can't see that beeing much better.
For a full length gown or dress, dForce (or other dynamic cloth sim system) is definitely preferable. For other kinds of clothing, though, the benefits of dynamic cloth are more variable, especially with fabrics that are naturally stiffer, like denim, wool, chain mail and leather, and when you're doing large scenes with multiple characters with a tight deadline, conforming cloth can be a lot faster to work with. Time = $$$. IIRC, Disney and Pixar didn't start using dynamic cloth for the majority of their characters' clothing until Frozen and Brave, respectively, for exactly that reason.
This is a very under mentioned feature. It's the first figure generation, as far as I know, that allows autofitting out of the box (without additional purchases) of all previous Genesis version's hair and clothing - G1, G2F, G2M, G3F, G3M, and G8M content all useable on G8F is hugely helpful in keeping a lot of older content relevant and useful.
There are several "under the hood" improvements from G3 to G8 but my favorite is the awesome facial rigging. Being able to create realistic and natural facial expressions on the fly via the PowerPose tool its fantastic! Also being able to add some slight asymmetry to the face via the PowerPose tool is a big help in achieving more realism. The facial rigging alone is, imo, worth the upgrade to G8. I sometimes use older figures in my scenes but every single time I do I REALLY miss the PowerPose tool and advanced facial rigging. The improved bends and muscle contraction is also really nice. G8 has spoiled me for sure. lol It makes it easier to set up scenes the way I want with as much realism as I can achieve - and when I know I can dip into my G1, G2, and G3 closet as well, it's freeing and opens up a lot more scene creation options.
...and in the case of Merida, they had to build custom hardware and programme proprietary software, particularly for the hair dynamics.
I can appreciate why they needed a gigantic warehouse sized render farm, as when I did a version of the character in Daz using two instances of Bolina Hair to get the thickness I wanted, a 5 frame motion blur it took sixteen and a half hours to render in 3DL.
...don't have the horsepower or patience for dForce. As a fair percentage of new clothing tends to be dForce based, I see little point in getting much in the way G8 female clothing.