Base Character Actually Needed?

Stryder87

In my current scene I ran into a need for an asian male character.  Since I rarely run into that, I've never bought the Lee 6 base character.  However, yesterday morning I did pick up the FW Hachiro for Lee 6 since it was on sale for $3.99, with the idea that I'd pick up Lee 6 later.  I put Lee 6 into my wishlist as I don't want to spend $32 (even with 30% off) for a character I'm rarely going to use.  I'll wait until one of those huge sales rolls around where he may go on sale for 80% off or so.

Sitting there wondering if I could use all the morphs I have (which are a lot) to make my own 'Lee 6', I decided to try loading Hachiro and see what kind of errors I get and go from there.  It did error out with a message of not having Lee 6.  However, it did load a G2M with asian features very similar to Hachiro, the eyebrows, eyes, nose and others.  So my question is... how much of the 'base' character is really needed?  I got a G2M that looks pretty close to Hachiro without Lee 6 with just the add-on character.  What things would be missing without Lee 6 on my system?  UV?  Certain morphs?  I still had a huge amount of morphs available, including the aging ones I was specifically needing.  Granted, I didn't have time to do any kind of test render so I haven't seen how he's going to look, but it seems like it should be fine.

Very curious.

 

MelanieL

I use several characters without owning the right bases. Some work better than others. Most of these characters will load (with a few error messages for missing files) without owning the base, they just won't look IDENTICAL to the promos if you don't have that base.

Hachiro apparently uses the M5 UV Maps which come with the (free) Genesis 2 Male Essentials, so you should have no problem with his textures.

The store page says that Hachiro has a head "custom-sculpted in Zbrush", so that's probably why he looks reasonably OK without owning Lee 6. I guess his body uses the Lee 6 body shape, so that won't be quite like the promos, but you can add in morphs from your collection to get something you're happy with. And no doubt Lee 6 will turn up in a sale before too long

Stryder87

MelanieL said:

I use several characters without owning the right bases. Some work better than others. Most of these characters will load (with a few error messages for missing files) without owning the base, they just won't look IDENTICAL to the promos if you don't have that base.

Hachiro apparently uses the M5 UV Maps which come with the (free) Genesis 2 Male Essentials, so you should have no problem with his textures.

The store page says that Hachiro has a head "custom-sculpted in Zbrush", so that's probably why he looks reasonably OK without owning Lee 6. I guess his body uses the Lee 6 body shape, so that won't be quite like the promos, but you can add in morphs from your collection to get something you're happy with. And no doubt Lee 6 will turn up in a sale before too long

I was wondering if this was something that you could do, or if I had just happened to fluke-out and get a character that just happened to work without the base.  In this instance it works just fine as all the aging morphs I used have changed the base body shape enough that it didn't really matter that I didn't have Lee 6 yet.  Nice!

 

MelanieL

Acutally one previso: more of the Genesis figures used the UV Maps for their bases (M5, V5, S5 etc) than the Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 ones do - more PA's use the (free) Base Female and Base Male UVs in Genesis 2 and 3 than they used to in Genesis "1" days. So if you're tempted by a Genesis character it's wise to check before you buy. Somewhere in the Forums there was a thread listing figure and UV's used - sorry I don't have a link.

mjc1016

That's always a question...how much of the 'base' is really used?

For some characters it is a lot and what you end up with looks nothing like intended.  Others you'll get a decent looking character that could a brother/cousin to the intended charcter, and then there are those that leave you scratching your head wondering what exactly was used from the 'base' because there isn't any apparent difference, at all.

I'd say if what you end up with is something close to what you need, especially if you were intending to modify it to begin with, then don't worry too much about what is 'missing'.  Just save out a character preset for the 'custom' Hachiro and be done with it.

barbult

I rendered an image of Hachiro without Lee (on the left) and Hachiro with Lee (on the right).

 

BlueIrene

Hachiro on G2M with a few modifications to morphs has been my go-to Asian male figure for ages. For the Asian females, I typically use Sumiko on G2F with a few adjustments.

mjc1016

Cheekbones and muscle definition seem to be the most noticeable differences...