Any chance of seeing NEW characters for G3? G2?
Drogo Nazhur
Posts: 1,033
in The Commons
I know that everyone wants the latest and greatest. I'm heavily invested in G8 but I still like my G3's and G2's especially for faster renderings and space considerations. Can we see some new characters and products for those Genesis'es or are they pretty much considered dead as far as new things being introduced?
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sadly I think it might be DAZ policy to only release content for the latest figures, which is a shame as I still use Genesis 1 a lot
G3 or G2 mesh would not render faster than G8 (to any noticable degree)
It is how they are textured and what shaders are used. Even if something new was made for g3, and it uses the newest industry standard shaders and textures, then it will render at the same speeds, so it wont give you any real benefit. All you would get is the loss of the better rigging and all the new developments that went into making the new figures. I cant see any product maker wanting to step back and lose functionality to their products, it would make no sense.
they work with Carrara and Poser 9,10,11 DSON
but I know most PAs don't care about that
There have been products for older figures released after a new one is there. Granted, it's usually as "XXX for older and newer figure", not "XXX for older figure only".
The thing is that most customers tend to switch to the new generation after a while, so the potential market for content for older figures is quite small and it's not cost effective anymore for vendors to produce content for the old ones.
Both Cararra and Poser have not been updated to any viable degree in a decade or so....beyond the point of making sense to support directly
At least for G3 you can always try these:
https://www.daz3d.com/character-converter-from-genesis-8-female-to-genesis-3-female
https://www.daz3d.com/character-converter-from-genesis-8-male-to-genesis-3-male
Not exactly what you want but it's a workaround.
I understand that but, But, BUT there are dozens of developers releasing things for the new characters. So those procducts are competing with dozens or even hundreds of comparable products. But with very few people releasing things for the older stuff, there is less competition for their products. So even with less demand, they might sell better because of less competition.
And even with that competition they sell better than ones for older figures.
Actually it seems like G8 is a step back to me, due to "Beauty Fingers and Toes" for Genesis 3 Females.
https://www.daz3d.com/beauty-fingers-and-toes
Genesis 8 ladies:
As a content creator, my priority is to create products compatible with the latest technologies, it's an obvious marketing matter.
And when I can affirm that my product is compatible with older characters, I know that my product is also likely to appeal to people nostalgic for the beginnings of Daz Studio.
...anther issue, is if you are on a limited budget (and I'm sure I'm not the only one here). The "advancements" of G8 over G3 were not as significant as those between 2 and 3 (primarily moving from a proprietary weight mapping to one that is more standard and improved bending) or 1 & 2 (going from a a single androgynous figure to separate M & F ones) for myself to justify the cost of fully retooling to the new generation after only 2 years. I did purchase a few G8 characters (the ones that were more "unique") but also have both the female and male character 8 ➨ 3 converters. The one good feature is that both generations share the same UV so unless textures use hierarchical materials, they can be transferred to the G3 versions. True, you don't get the separate eyelashes and mesh brows but there are G3 based utilities to deal with the latter.
I've totally avoided 8.1 as I don't do portraits very much as the PBR skins tend to be more suitable for closeups. Unfortunately, so far, I understand that characters that are singly based on 8.1 do not transfer with the conversion scripts and there are a couple I would like to have.
Since G4 I've been into creating my own custom designed characters and have a large library of additional morphing, shaping, and "vendor resource" content.
Don't forget, a NEW G2 or G3 Item is also competing with EVERY G2 or G3 item- already in the store- and those items are usually at super discount.
A 2022 bath robe, for instance, is going to do what in a market against all six other bath robes? - that somehow, the long time Daz user never grabbed one to fill the void.
So the dream is that they buy the NEW G2/G3 bath robe over the many available and even forgo auto-fitting the newest G8 version or use a G8 dForce robe....
That's a lot of hope in that strategy.
Somewhere, there is a store that is still releasing G3 figures and clothing. I think it's the 'hub' one.
You could always look there.
I use various Autofit methods a lot so certainly can cope but I am buying less and less of each generation also, most my library is actually V4 and M4
I keep buying more of the older stuff also particulary stuff for Aiko3 and M3 and V3 believe it or not
I still own a lot of G8 though admittedly but some of the later improvements that are strictly DAZ studio only and cause issues exporting annoy me though I realise people who only use DAZ studio want them
geoshells I miss exporting something as FBX drive me nuts I can usually fix it if I catch it using LIE
I missed this one. Looks quite useful!
Sometimes there are new characters for older figures; but that's on other sites and often as freebies. For better or worse, latest-greatest will get most of the love. Older stuff will fall by the wayside. It's really sort of a wonder that DS still loads and works with some of the older figures.
If your problem with G8 is that those characters waste VRAM and are slow to render, maybe products like https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray and https://www.daz3d.com/mmx-resource-saver-shaders-collection-2-for-iray would address those problems.
It's not really difficult to modify existing characters. With a library of existing characters and with most characters having various options, one can always kitbash many new characters out of existing figures.
...the other difference is that G1, G2, and G3 had a runs of only 2 years each while G8 has been active almost 5 years (and counting). Even though we now have 8.1, G8 characters and content are still being released as well..
The other issue is that just about all G8 clothing and many hair items are now dForce rather than conforming, which if you have older hardware, is a pain to deal with.
True.
There is still a wealth of g8 conforming clothing. And G3 clothing works well on G8 characters (and vice versa) with relatively little effort.
I just wanted to let the OP know they are not alone :-D
I primarily use G1 (for a variety of considerations), and am still happily buying everything I can to retrofit to that generation. As a result, I don't buy anything that isn't G3 compatible or lower for clothing, because I can almost always make G3 fit, and cross-gender as well. The new hairs seem to grind my poor computer, so I'd rather buy older ones that extend the breadth of my collection and render painlessly. I find shopping at other stores is almost like having 'new' offerings, because they have wonderful things I haven't seen before. Here at Daz, I have over 500 items on my wishlist, so I still have lots of shopping potential if I am inclined. As sales are always geared towards the new figures, that just happens less all the time, so I saved money by dropping my Daz+ membership and spent the savings somewhere else :-)
My only sadness is that hands are still so weird looking. V4 had some nice add-on hand morphs for knuckles and things... I haven't found anything equivalent for genesis, and nothing in the later generations seemed to improve the situation (though the Beauty Fingers & Toes did help, but it didn't seemd to have much variation, not enough to entice me to switch to G3).
I have never found the various products that claim to convert clothing between generations as effective as I would have hoped - and I have quite a selection of those converters. So I tend to dress G8 in G8 clothes with an occasional G3 item which is not too complex to follow Sickleyield's excellent tutorial:
I don't really care about shapes unless they are extreme (like an old hag, for example) because I like to dial-in my own shapes from morph packs. So it doesn't matter which generation so long as I have enough morphs. I have very little for G2 so most of my characters tend to be G8 with a few G3 additions (skins and clothing). All the previous generation clothing in my library, from V3 onwars, hardly gets an airing because fitting and posing using the old stuff is a pain.
I don't even use G8.1 because I am not confident that I understand exactly what will work from G8 (or G3) on a G8.1 character so I don't buy them. If G9 were to appear in the store tomorrow it would probably be two years before I would consider starting to stock up on characters, morphs and clothing again.
Another thing to consider is that if a Daz user hasn't spent the money to upgrade their hardware, they may not be someone who spends a lot of money on assets.
...I tend to pass on certain genre and styles (like skimp) so my G8 collection is not all that large. I do have some dForce clothing because of styles that were never released before, but I do my best to stay with conforming as much as possible.
...that too.
I rarely have a cart that exceeds even 25$ and almost never buy bundles which is why most of the "buy one (or more) new releases to get an extra 5 or 10%" deals don't go anywhere for me. As for the planned upgrade (primarily due to the abandoning of W7), I'll be purchasing the components one at a time as I can afford them.
I simply prefer the slightly less realistic and more stylized design of G3 over most G8 and G8.1 figures. I have mostly all the G3 figures I could ever want, but would welcome addons, like shoes (never have enough shoes!) clothing (both dForce and conforming), brows and hair to fit them off-the-shelf instead of having to put them through some tools which may or may not convert them properly. Especially shoes remain a hassle in conversion.
There's just a bit too much emphasize on realistic detail with most recent figures for my tastes, which often clashes with the more stylized (sci-fi) environments I use. I can imagine that people not using environments but working more with lighting, blank backdrops, photographed backdrops and HDRI's and/or backgrounds in post would prefer ultra realistic figures. But for stuff like spaceship corridors and loading bays with low poly futuristic crates, the Genesis 3 figures are perfect, and I imagine it's similar for renders in fantasy environments.
There are products in store which helping you to use G8 wardrobe on earlier genesis family . For character and morph you better find it in another place and even in freestuff site like Sharecg
DAZ products mostly shipped with hi rez textures, so maybe you can doing manual batch resizing or using some script like Scene optimizer ,if the render time caused the problem
TBH unless for toon render - I tend to render my scene in Blender right now . It takes time to learn it but I believe thats worth your time rather than fight with your hardware limitation when using IRAY
One thing if looking for "newer" content for G1, G2 or G3 then would have to look at other 3D content sites, as there are still a few creators out there that still create new content for G1, G2 and G3.. Heck you can still buy newer content for Victoria and Michael 4..
I guess it's highly underrated! It's a must, IMO.
can you please message me some links?
Or, if they're not creating it, they're putting up things made in the past that are technically on par with anything else made for those figures, since many were sold here at DAZ or other sites that have gone under. Renderosity, in particular, used to have a policy of dropping items that dropped below a certain number of items sold per quarter, but they reversed that a while back and a lot of creators promptly re-listed many of their older items (though many still show in the clearance section), and that's where a huge number of DAZ's former vendors have ended up. Which is nice, as I still prefer the Genesis 3 figures for a lot of purposes as they're rarely affected by the creepy smile syndrome that the 8s and Pointies are so often cursed with, and the original Ironman13's pose packs are still the best that I've used.
On the other hand, a product I had pinned at 'Rocity that I was thinking of buying.,.. went Unavailable, with the buy button greyed out on me recently. 0o