If Genesis is supposed to be step above Michael/Victoria, why then are they still making new vrsions

Comments

• Scavenger Posts: 2,674

  April 2016

  Michael and Victoria 6 are characters for Genesis 2.

  7 is for Genesis 3

  5 is Genesis.

  Michael and Victoria  4 are technically characters of 4th Generation, but went by M4 and v4 rather than a b lanket name like Genesis.
• Vhardamis Posts: 576

  April 2016

  Yeah its Mike 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, it gets a bit confusing becuase of both generation and Genesis starting with a G. Mike 1-4 are the generations, then Genesis = Generation 5, Genesis 2 = Generation 6,  and Genesis 3 is the equiveilant of generation 7.

  As to WHY Mike and Vicky are still around its because they are the 2 flag ships of the line so to speak. unless something drastically changes there will always be that pair. The other named characters are a 'maybe' when they roll over to the new lines.
• Karibou Posts: 1,325

  April 2016

  Genesis was a "step up" from V4/M4 because of the introduction of SubD and a single, unisex mesh for simplicity's sake.  Since then, the newer generations each have brought significant improvements -- separate male & female meshes allow for more natural body shapes in the Genesis2/3 characters, newer meshes and rigging arguably have more natural bends and proportions, and the Genesis 3 figures utilize significantly improved technology and include bones in the face for better creation of expressions.
• nokoteb99 Posts: 931

  April 2016

  Thanks all for the info
• grinch2901 Posts: 1,247

  April 2016 edited April 2016

  For history's sake, Michael through M4 and Victoria through V4 were standalone figues that had some morphs you could use to shape them into different characters but not too extreme ususally. They had poser style rigging and with each generation got more polys and better bends, etc but were still the same basic technology. Because it was poser rigging, the mesh was cut up into segments and that made it tough to give it really extreme body morphs because it was hard to make them across bundaries of the body zones.  Then came Genesis , a fairly androgynous character with a new rigging style that gave "better" bends (less sharp) and was fairly low poly but was all one mesh so it was easy to morph it like crazy.  As a reult you could morph it up into all sorts of creatures and, perhaps more importantly, into new versions of the base characters Michael and Victoria. From Genesis on, Mihacel and Victoria are no longer seperate models, they are just morphs of a particular genesis mesh.  Benefit: ecause it was all one mesh with one rigging set up, all of those crazy morphed characters (men, women, kids, monsters, aliens, etc) could use the same clothes natively, no conversion required.  With SubD the lower res meshes still look good when rendered, though some will say the reduction in polys in various places made some poses poor and content creation awkward.  Especially gender specific stuff like breasts. Hence the move back to seperate male and female meshes with the Genesis 2 line and now 3. Each is an incremental improvement over what we got with Genesis but some will say the loss of the single mesh for both male and female was a step backwards. For example, sharing clothes across models is now harder and needs some 3rd party stuff or you have to do some work to create a "clone".  Also animators that want to morhp characters in an animation had it easy with Genesis since it could be anything. Options are more limited with G3F/G3M, for example.

  It all depends on what you want to do. I do still renders so I don't need the extreme morohing of Genesis and am quite happy with Genesis 2 / 3 models. On the other hand plenty of people still use V4 and M4 exclusively. Heck plenty of people are still loving Aiko 3!

  Post edited by grinch2901 on April 2016