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I'm just not liking this idea that just because things are a certain way now that nobody can ever change that, there can never be a different option, we're locked into one vision and one workflow forever because any mention of a different possibility will just be shouted down with relentless negative 'that's not how we do it'.
...+1, particularly on that last statement.
My only rub with the older figures is clothing fits, as even the third party tools available are pretty much hit or miss. This is the main reason why I have moved to the Genesis platform.
..I actually converted Steph 4 to a Tri-X weightmapped figure after the original Genesis came out, but couldn't get any clothing to fit on her.properly.
Genesis 3 I cannot help you but for Genesis 2 and below there is always the option of using another software like Poser or Carrara (or even FBX export to one of the big guys like Max, Maya, C4D etc) and subdivision with sculpting with morph brush in the first and all the pro tools in the later to create subdivided mesh with detals for your own renders, of course this cannont be then used in DAZ studio or shared as becomes a new figure based on DAZ mesh but unlike obj can still be posed in the software of choice.
mind you poor Carrara at least chokes on the highpoly subdivided mesh
just my two cents here.
I think the first problem is peole confusing vertices and polygons.
Vertices are just points, i could easily put a million verts on a line, and have no polygons.
Polygons are collections of vertices, either in triangles(tris) or Quadlaterals(quads).
So even with 1,000,000 verts i could have 250k polys(quads, just quick division, not real numbers as the actual poly count could be higher or lower)
About 3 times as many polys as v4(77k estimated)
The discussion regarding poly counts is also fairly irrelevant, for one simple reason,
You aren't discussing distribution of those polys.
Puttin a high number in the head would be a good idea, the eye, not so much, the shoulder area meh, the collar area definitely.
The size of those poly is also an issue. You don't use the same size poly for a nipple as you would for the leg. it wouldn't make sense.
The next problem will be diminishing returns.
So you've got a super high poly model, How many can you put in a scene before the system gaks on ya?
Also how high poly count do clothes have to be to look as good or even work?
Now figure that a victoria 4 takes about 300mb presently to load(a bit high really for the base mesh) And triple that, so for one character you are already at one GB, without any morph dials, textures, clothes, hair, props, sets etc.3
Now you're looking at several GB or ram just for that. I've actually had scenes like that with over 4gb of ram taken up by the time a render was started. and that was with "low" poly stuff.
I've actually created a custom v4 with around 1k morph dials in it. converted a bunch of the pbmcc/dc stuff over via the version 3 script, as well as using poser to create a few more. That sucker, without any additional polys, takes1.5GB of ram to load.
Take a look at the difference between a base G3f, about 200-300MB base, now add in various character morphs, add on morphs etc, and she quickly balloons to the 1gb level before adding a specific character and skins.
On aveage these days my g2f takes about 1.5-2Gb to load. So even on my 32GB work station, i can only get about 16 total, unclothed and no hair with just the base texture.
In reality i did a smoke test and after 8 g2f, 5 g3f, 3 g1, and one vickie 4, all clothed and with hair, as well as 4 mid poly vehicles, and a set piece, a couple mesh lights i was over 24.5 GB, and basically the graphics card wasn't having none of it past that.
If you did a poly count on that, it's easily over 1million total.
There's a lot more than just poly counts to figure in.
Really the biggest problem is that most users of daz studio don't even have the system to use it well to begin with.
They might have a dual or quad core processor, an average of 8gb of ram and maybe a half descent graphics card(2gb of ram).
I speak from experience on this one.
Used a dual core athlon 3ghz with 6gb ram and a 512mb graphics card for years.
Heck i learned zbrush, 3ds max, keyshot, and a few others on that thing and after a certain point the system would just stall.
Frankly i'll just boil it down to this
If you want an insane poly count figure, then go make it and see if it sells.
Stop whining for somebody else to do it for you, and just do it.
Just quibbling, but that arithmetic is a little unlikely. Consider an all-quad torus - every polygon has four vertices, and every vertex belongs to four polygons; the numbers of polygons and vertices match. A real model will have irregularities of course, with poles (a vertex used by more than four polygons) and odd junctions where a vertex will belong to only three, or possibly even two if there's an open edge, polygons but even so I would expect the polygon and vertex counts to be fairly close.
Thank you all in sharing information and explaining.
I was not aware that the current limitations with the weight mapping on high resolution models go that far.
@ vertices count
The reason I prefer to use the term vertices when speaking about mesh sizes is that polygons could be either quads (4 edge points) or tris ( 3 edge points).
The number displayed by default in zbrush is points = vertices.
Richard allready explained how the vertices and polygon numbers are related.
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@ the 4'357'308 vertices remark
The reason why I mention 4'357'308 vertices that often is because that would be the next reasonable quality jump that also does fit into VRAM by using 1888 MB for geometry.
Currently most high resolution morph products in the DAZ store may have been sculpted at 1'090'700 vertices.
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@ why did I start this thread?
Every year I spend some weeks to catch up with new workflows in Zbrush.
I figured out that I can use the "project all" button to transfer any kind of detail from one mesh to the other.
The key is to mask those areas that should not be affected by the projection in order to prevent some random distortions.
What I now wanted to do is bring those details at 4'357'308 vertices back as morphs so I could animate them and use them for other figures as well.
But when I clicked GoZ I realized that only the details captured at the lowest subdivision level of 17'418 vertices is brought back.
Using maps is not a solution when trying to animate.
I also wanted to save the morphs so I can dial them in fully or only partially for other Genesis 3 figures.
Therefore I was looking for another way to transfer the high resolution details of the morphs back into DAZ Studio.
That is when the question started: Why not work with more high resolution figures so you can bring morphs back at the original resolution level?
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With the now available information I realize that at the current point in time with the available technology high vertice count figures will not solve enough issues to be considered an alternative.
The situation as a whole remains frustrating for those users who do have access to Zbrush and would like to use other more versatile workflows.
Hopefully in a not so far away future some new technologies will it make possible that we can work in more flexible ways with the licensed DAZ3D content in a DAZ Studio to Zbrush workflow.
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I think the thing that also confuses people about HD is that you are still working with the low poly figure, and those details are added to the figure at render time... just like if you were using normal and displacement maps. When you render a frame for animation, all your maps, including the detail, will be displayed as the final render in the frame. Same thing happens with HD, which is why I say you still need to learn how to learn low poly sculping techniques. You have to have the low poly morph and the HD works in conjunction with that. Also using HD requires knowldege of another DAZ technology.. projection morphs. HD does not project into cloth so you need to learn how to make those morphs to work in conjunction. It's not just make a HD morph and you're set. You have to learn to use both, which is another reason why this tool isn't in the wild.
Excellent info on the HD tool Male-M3dia! The HD details would only show up at render time so if I render outside of DS in Octane I wouldnt get the benfits of the HD morphs anyway? Just curious because I bought the HD morphs for my characters. I can't seem to get my Normal or Displacements to show up in Octane for some reason. Bump maps show up just fine.
Thanks!
I limitation of octane unfortunately, is that you cannot use bump maps on the same node as a normal map, the normal map will take priority over the bump map. You can do a mix node with a bump on one, and a normal on the other, but the results are...well, depends I guess. I rely too a lot on the HD morphs to get that extra detail when using octane. Perhaps I should just sculpt my own normals and displacements for characters, and get rid of bump maps entirely, since they're not even good bump maps to begin with.
If the plugin is set up correctly, the HD detail should be passed to the renderer in octane. As far as displacements, you probably would have to increase subdivisions for your details to show in octane as well as the render doesn't subdivde like 3delight or firefly does. You have to increase subdivisions for iray and i believe luxrender as well.
Also you can preview the HD morph by setting the subdivision level on the figure, but that will slow your display to a crawl. I mentioned several times that you have to create your low poly morph first then do the details because of the morph projection issue. If you go straight to the high def morph and not do a lowpoly morph to help out, no clothes would fit as the clothing would go to the morph that can project to clothing. For example, if I didn't do a low poly base for my Jesse body shape, clothing would conform to the G3M base, making the clothing fit inside the area of the shape not on it because jesse is wider and shorter. The projection morph would give the rest of the information on how to fit that shape into clothing.
I export with a SubD level of 2 out of DS and I add another SubD level in Octane. I don't use the DS Octane plugin just the standalone. I tested the normal map and displacement map using just a gloss or diffuse material and it shows up. Since I use a specular material for my skin shader seems like only that material doesnt work correctly. On another note I find adding detail like laugh lines to the face of G3 with just morphing the low rez polys in Zbrush you have to really exaggerate the morphs and get used to bringing polys closer together to make a deeper cut morph so it looks correct....takes a bit of getting used to. Using dynamic SubD in Zbrush helps you get a better idea of what a low rez morph will look like.
You actually can see the Hd morphs in studio pre render (and I imagine export them this way as well) by seting the figures viewport resolution up to 2 or 3 (in the parameters tab under mesh resolution) but it tends to make the viewport slow way down at least on my computer.
Exaggerating morphs is one of the low poly tricks for detail since subdivisions will smooth out detail so you have to pull out mesh a bit more. You can check the parameter dial for a HD morph to see what subd level it was created at. Some HD morphs are a 1 and some are at 3.
Here is a quick 3 minute render of foot morphs I did using only the low rez G3 figure. I used only a bump map and the major details are modeled in Zbrush using the Dynamic SubD to help guide me. If you notice the big toe has a fold line and in order to achieve this I had to bring polys close together and use the pinch brush. To get the ripples of the instep of feet you would need to use normal or displacement map as there is not enough polys to pull that off. I can do a decent job with V4 on that kind of detail but she would still need a normal map or displacement map. Messing with laugh lines now.
Part of the issue seems to be that HD morphs seem only suitable for fine details, but if the mesh is too light to support a proper base morph then the HD aren't much use. I can get decently visible forehead wrinkles on Genesis and Genesis 2, but the only forehead wrinkle morph for G3F is an HD one with no base morph to give it any real visibility. (Even after turning up subdivision to the highest for both preview and rendering it's barely noticeable. Though oddly doesn't slow my display much at all. A little but not a crawl. Maybe there's a setting I'm missing?)
Good point I will have to check that to see if all HD morphs show up. I usually dial in SubD level 2, but I can move that up to 3 and see. Once I get the Normal and Displacement map figured out in Octane I should be on my way. Problem is I like using bump maps for fine detail like skin scales and pores and Normal/Displacement for better details that are not possible to model. In Octane you cannot use a combo only 1 map at a time (bump, normal map, displacement map).
Wow SubD level 3 and boy do you see some detail...... 8 million + polys baby! Time to upgrade the vid card because a GTX 980 with 4 gigs is not going to cut it.
Yeah, I usually do SubD1 for long shots and 3 for anything where HD morphs are relevant close up.
I don't do IRay but I do know that Luxrender requires SubD 3 to show HD details. However, the Render Subdivision parameter seems to have no effect so I leave that at 1 (although it sometimes increses automatically if I up the first Subdivision parameter). Interestingly, I don't see much of an increase in render times for my Reality/Lux renders with Subd at level 3 but it is something I can only switch on at the last moment before render otherwise the DS viewport slows to snail pace.
I am now doing SubD 3 on export out of DAZ and maybe SubD 1 in Octane....that is over 8 million polys and I see detail now in addition to my own.
Great info! I don't know what I was thinking, but I thought there was a SubD level 2 limit in DS. I guess I was wrong because you can simply change that to higher SubD levels. The HD morphs out there look pretty good at the higher SubD levels in both DS and Octane. I usually use bump maps for small pore detail etc. In Octane you can only use 1 map (bump, normal, or displacement maps) at a time. I think the DS to Octane plugin may have gotten around that. The HD morph ability obviously has its own limits and challenges so there is no perfect fix for getting the end result....physcially correct characters with details down to the pore and skin scale level to create ultra realistic digital people. One day low poly figures with 8k or 16k resolution displacement maps scanned from real life may rule the day....until then the battle goes on.
Just an interesting note......maybe not a fair comparison or becuase I am biased towards DAZ and DAZ characters. Here is what I would consider a very well done rigged figure:
http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/rigged-female-max/669560
The price tag is $999.00 and in my opinion my G3 female is every bit as beautiful and realistic for a fraction of the cost! Look at the poly count....when all body parts are counted its just shy of 20,000 polys
Just as a warning... taking Genesis figures up to sub-D level 5 by accident is a BAD idea... never again...
With your system, 3D Coat should do 15 million triangles easily in DX Cuda mode.
She's probably not using the 64 bit version. With 64 bit ZBrush and 16 gb I get about 22 million. 64gb Ram and the 64 bit ZBrush should handle more than 60mil to 80 mil polys.
I did that once by accident... It wasn't fun. Praise Task Manager
Yeah, my machine didn't like that. :) Nothing quite like having the polys so small that the subdivided wireframe is no longer visible in a closeup...
oh it's very unlikely, say dang near impossible.
Thought about it later, when i was actually doing some modeling and started wondering what orifice i pulled that rabbit out of.