Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
But you are still doing the same thing - all content compared vs the standard of one artist with stuff good enough you remember it years later. It's still a comparison of everything vs the best of everything. Of course the best is better.
Now if you think v4 was the golden age my question would be: is Aery Soul's current stuff worse/less creative than their old stuff ? That's a more equal comparison. As someone who really loves their stuff I think there's no comparison. Their old stuff was great and they've improved immensely since.
In particular I love that while their newer stuff can absolutely be used in a pinupy way it doesn't have to be, whereas their earlier stuff was much more straightforwardly pinup. They've also continuously gotten better at making it easier to mix and blend their content with each other, something that directly helps enable the creativity of anyone who uses their stuff. And that easy blending is -as I see it- part of the whole genesis ethos: the ability to easily take and mix clothing, characters, morphs etc. Something that was much harder in the v4 days. which in terms of golden ages for creativity seems like an important metric
Yeah pre autofit was just terrible. I loved steph 4 I did not love trying and failing to get clothes to actually fit her.
...like McGuyver, I got my start in this just after Vicky 4 appeared.
As Calliope23 mentions, my treason for becoming interested in this also stemmed from involvements in RPG gaming (cyber future) for doing illustrations of characters and scenes from the game particularly as worsening arthritis was making it more and more difficult to draw and paint One of the game's related froum sites had a thread where artists linked to various 3D sites like here and galleries like DA and a number of the images I saw were, for that time, incredible. One of the artists who regularly posted links to his works turned me on to Daz, and as the old cliché' goes, well the rest is history. One of the campaign arcs I GM'd years ago ended up becoming the basis for an extended story I plan to illustrate.
I found that a good amount of the "creativity" involved was also on the individual artist's part as well. One of the drawbacks of Gen4 was thye had no teen or child characters (K4 came rather late). I didn't care much for the Gen3 teens as they looked too much like small adults while Mil Kids had very limited support (clothing/hair) and unlike Genesis, you couldn't simply autofit between different figures but needed third party conversion software like Cross Dresser or Wardrobe Wizard (which were often hit or miss). So, along with a couple others back then, I embarked on a project known as "Lil' Vicky" to create a viable teen and child character from tall rather well endowed Vicky 4 which was quite a task. Long story short it took over a year buying characters and morphs that would work as a base, along with various utilities, before I was reasonably satisfied with the results (the release of Steph 4 and the NPMs were a blessing). With the Unimesh concept and "morph follower" in 3.1 clothing fits were also a bit easier to manage. I feel this experience more than anything pushed my skills to, and even past the limits. The Genesis concept almost made things seem too easy.
Today I rarely buy ready made characters, unless they add something unique to the Genesis "gene pool", and instead, snap up morph, shaping, and skin resources as "dial spinning" characters has become sort of second nature to me (which I credit to my experiences with Gen4).
Oh, I still find myself going back to Aiko3 more than occasionally because she's just so cute and can have so many different looks. I still find her excellent for creating fae characters as she is more stylised. I also base fae off of the various toon and stylised characters for Genesis as well.
Just a personal observation: such questions or discussions should almost have two forks - one for content creators, and another for users. The two perspectives are rarely coincident. I am not a PA, have never been a PA and probably never will be. So my perspective on the subject of a "Golden Age" of creativity is probably very different from that of a content creator producing content during various times gone by. As an ordinary user I can only answer the question in terms of what I have seen others doing, going all the way back to the original Victoria and the Poser figures. For a long time the limitations imposed by the technology of the day forced people to be more creative with what they had (again, users not commercial content creators, although they needed to be creative in order to stretch the technology, too). So, in terms of having the solutions provided, rather than needing to devise our own solutions, yes, the old days tended to enforce creative use of the resources moreso than today. As for the quality of the products offered in the store, yes they are more advanced today than they were when the 3D community was much smaller and everybody was still figuring things out. But I also believe that there was more risk-taking then, with not a united focus on more of the same because it sells. That's not creativity, thats just marketing.
...+1
But V4 had @Oskarsson :)
(i think they both do "Weird and surreal" cool stuff )
and The Philosopher's Egg
I don't like using them, but find there are still some nice textures that I convert. I think some of the bends are horrendous
Yes the technology is outdated and awkward, but for example if you would like have clothing that fits end of 19th century scene, the selection and variety for V4 was and is better than what is available for G3/G8 and they didn't look like something meant for adult entertainment...
But you are still doing the same thing - all content compared vs the standard of one artist with stuff good enough you remember it years later. It's still a comparison of everything vs the best of everything. Of course the best is better.
No, I am not.... What it appears to me that you are saying is that I am cherry picking the best of the V3/V4 and comparing it to the breadth of the current G8 series. I am just saying, that looking at both as a whole (and yes, I am looking a crappy V4 assets in the depths of the waybackmachine, I think the V4 is the Golden Age.
I am certainly not making the argument that the individual quality was better, I would hope that with the 10 year(?) divide and with all the technological advances that the G8 would and should be more polished and avanced, but that isn't what claims of a "Golden Age" are about. Some posters have already stated in various ways that they feel that PAs in the V4 era probably put their effort in to making what they wanted to make, with the hopes that it sold.
Now if you think v4 was the golden age my question would be: is Aery Soul's current stuff worse/less creative than their old stuff ? That's a more equal comparison. As someone who really loves their stuff I think there's no comparison. Their old stuff was great and they've improved immensely since.
In particular I love that while their newer stuff can absolutely be used in a pinupy way it doesn't have to be, whereas their earlier stuff was much more straightforwardly pinup. They've also continuously gotten better at making it easier to mix and blend their content with each other, something that directly helps enable the creativity of anyone who uses their stuff. And that easy blending is -as I see it- part of the whole genesis ethos: the ability to easily take and mix clothing, characters, morphs etc. Something that was much harder in the v4 days. which in terms of golden ages for creativity seems like an important metric
Aeon Soul is an interesting case indeed, and I shouldn't let you bait me into a discussion about a particular PA (and this one is my absolute favorite). I'd say that to anyone comparing the V4 era to the G8 era would certainly have Aery Soul/Aeon Soul in the "Best" columns of both Eras.
But still, open up the Daz shop search Aeon Soul and then filter by G8. One page of stuff, scan it... then filter for G3... scan it, then G2. If we only had easy access to the Aeon/Aery/Awful Soul/As Shanim/Alfaseed Catalogs to compare... tsk tsk....
In the exercise above, you can certainly see a progression and theme to most of it. Equisite Ornaments is very neat... but it is obviously is the grand child of Fantasy Ornaments. And you can see the lineage of A LOT of AS's stuff if you look back far enough.... - probably to the V4 era :)
That being said, I would hope that all PAs that have been working with Daz assets for a decade+ have improved. We know the tools to express the creativity certainly have improved. Like someone already stated, the advancements have caused a lot of PAs to focus on different things, things that they probably didn't have to worry about 10+ years ago. Part of that is the realism movement, part of it is probably because creating a steady income from one's art plays a significant role, and makes one risk adverse. I dunno. I am still sticking with the V3/V4 era being the Golden Age... and if it isn't, what is?
I think "golden age" is something without really defined meaning. So it gets confusing, when different people mean different things behind these words.
Like, for example, if we talk videogames (sorry i dont know if participants of this discussion are aware with history of them or not), many people call 1980-1995 as "golden age", which is more like "times when it was not as much commercialized, and studios were smaller" in a way also, and a bit of "peak of pre-pre-genres", because that era was all about roots of what later became based on that through the years...
Bordering OT, I think the situation is somewhat similar with games... Previously you had variety and broader selection of games, until Wolfenstein came and made everybody concentrate on making first person shooters, the bloodier the better, just because they sell the most...
Gone are the Monkey Islands, gentlemen in Leisure Suits, Space Quests, etc...
I thought that was just me and AFAIK I didn't knock it, just basically said it is something I cannot do
Not sure if specifically agree, but "catching your drift" and can see some parallels. And nowodays game industry is more like a weird mix between huge (greedy?) corporations (who aim to get as many copies as possible even if you need to blindly follow trends or remove things for which fans loved this or that series) that release the same thing over and over, and very small "indie" enthusiasts/small studios (some of which were trying to give new life to "extincted" genres like adventures as well).
Do we have an "official offtopic" thread for that?
Yeah, with the short life cycle of g1,2 and 3... people fell into a habit of rehashing ideas for every generation. When a generation lasts, people have to think outside the box to keep generating new content.
As someone who came into the DAZ/Poser world during the Days of V3 and Poser 5, my observation isn't that the level of creativity has dropped, so much as that the figures themselves grew less limited with each generation and that meant that there was less need to work around or hide their most glaring faults. You also have to take into account that what we see here in the DAZ store has to pass through through a DAZ filter first, as they do reject a lot of submitted products for a variety of reasons. So, it's not so much that there's less potential creativity, but more a matter of a lot of the more esoteric stuff tending to be on other stores or sold independently via DevArt, ShareCG and the like.
Ha! Thank you kindly
Another factor is that the gen4 era was pre-weightmapping. Everything was legacy rigging. Which meant that you could use most things, particularly clothing, seamlessly in either Studio or Poser. On the other hand, you couldn't always make a character sit down in it. A *lot* of full lenght skirts were not rigged (or in those days, more typically morphed) to sit.
That's part of the reason for the preponcerance of skimpware. Rigging a skirt took real effort. Shoulders and sleeves, also. I swear it sometimes seemed like 2/3 of V4's wardrobe consisted of innumerable iterations of a strapless minidress with a hole in it somewhere.
That said, yes there was a lot of gorgeous content for V4. Which continued to relatively recent time, since V4 was still the main figure used in Poser (and may still be) well after Poser adopted Superfly and its own weightmapping system.
Don't forget that all the morphs you used on the character, had to be recreated for the clothes, which normally came with just a few character morphs (Stephanie, Aiko, etc) and of course the mandatory "melon" morph.
Eventually (after a number of years) you ran out of ideas what to do with the naked figure, which you couldn't use unmorphed due to looking too much like Julia Roberts and being way too tall.
Some people convert favorite V4 characters to Genesis and upper, but imho often those convertations dont provide 1:1 shapes...
Since Oskarsson still creates regularly for the Genesis figures, I don't think that's much of an argument. Now if you want to talk about PAs like Uzilite and Orion1167, who stopped relasing during Geneis 2 and Genesis, respectively, or some of the more esoteric Japanese creators who specialized in Aiko 3, like BATLAB, then that's a better counterpoint. That said, though, I still have to agree with those who argue that while a LOT more stuff has simply been made... and is still being made... for V4, while the vast majority of the less memorable stuff has been elimnated via Renderosity's old clearance system and the number of older artists who have left the DAZ store.
...G8 seems to be heading the way of Gen4 in the respect of longevity (technically it is "Genesis 4" but the number was changed so that the base Genesis figure and characters created for it share the same numbering convention). It has been around longer than any of the other Genesis generations (just over three years as of this past June [2017] with only speculation about a successor so far) while each previous version back to "Genesis Classic" had about a 2 year "shelf life".
A lot of people seem to like G8 and personally, I do like the greater diversity of characters (including more "average looking" ones), I just couldn't justify the expense of retooling for a new figure all over again on a limited income. The changes from G3 were not as "major" as from G1 - G2 (when the genders were split because of mesh and morphing issues), and later G2 to G3 (when dual quaternion weight mapping system replaced Tri-Ax and joint bending was improved).
Gen4 (represented first by Vicky 4 in December of 2006) was around for just over four and a half years (going through two updates) before Genesis was introduced and Gen 3 (represented first by Vicky3 in December of 2002) was around for 4 years before Gen4.
I don't want to say V4 was the "Golden Age of Creativity," although I have many happy memories of that time, because it makes the future of 3D art seem bleak. I don't want to look back and say that was the most creative PA's are ever going to get. I'd like to think there is plenty of creativity now and room for more in the future as artists continue to hone their skills, and like Kyoto Kid mentioned, create a "diversity of characters." I was so thrilled when Alexandra 8 debuted and suddenly here was a core character much older than the average supermodel, althought there were some older characters and ways to age characters before then. There is also more racial diversity in characters, in my opinion, and progress on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. I don't want to start a political discussion, just saying with a greater diversity of characters comes even more avenues for creativity.
Also morphs like these, speaking of improved morphing technology:
https://www.daz3d.com/fsl-everyday-people-shapes
...I wonder if those can be transferred via the G8 > G3 figure conversion script. Wish something like this was available for G3 to break away from the hunk/supermodel look.
maybe it would be better to call it the DAZ renaissance
Time for me to drop in as a contrarian. I think there are a few differences between the heyday of the Gen 4 Millenium characters and the Genesis 8 characters. The first and most important difference is that there are fewer stores around for products. I think the period of Victoria and Michael 1 through 3 was pretty comparable to now with both highs and lows in terms of quality. During the great V4/M4 period, the numbers of stores blossomed which allowed for more niche products. One example is the wonderful AS people whose products I have collected off and on through the various name changes. Though i still have and enjoy their V3/M3 output, it was nowhere near as sophisticated as their V4 stuff and they continue to improve to this day. However, I am old enough to remember when many of the vendors had their own stores as well as selling at Daz3d, Renderosity, Content Paradise, RuntimeDna, PoserPros, PoserAddicts, etc... Thus, there were niches for those people looking for half animal/half human Vickies, naughty Vickies, etc... The second thing that changed was the growing divide between Poser and Daz Studio. We went from a community of numerous hobbyists, semi-pros, and pros, as content makers who shared the same skilll sets to pros who either specialize in Daz Studio or Poser. Thus, there are less makers and those who do are under more pressure to make a profit. Next, people guard their IP much more now so there is less of that knockoff stuff. There was a lot of crap made in the past that is now forgotten.
The thing is, new V4 products have never stopped being made as it became the default figure for Poser users and it's only been in the last few years that there haven't been at least as many new V4 releases as there were for whatever the latest flavor of Genesis was. For that matter, it really wasn't until Genesis 3 that a Genesis figure became widely supported at the other stores, and even then the support was almost entirely for G3F alone. At this point it does look like La Femme/Le Homme might finally be the ones to end the V4 generation's reign, but even if they are, there's still been a whopping 14 years worth of content made for Gen 4 versus 3 years worth of Genesis 8, and I sincerely doubt that any figure series will ever again get the chance to be half as thoroughly mined through as many possible market niches.
As a pinup artist I found the V4 generation (and some later V3) much more interesting. Lots of rediculous outfits and just-noit-quite-compyright-voilation outfits. And a lot more stores to choose from.