Facegen now on sale...get it!

cdpro_2831bbd990 · February 2017

Wonderland said:

This is still rendering, just a screenshot, but can people tell who this is?

Emma Stone?

outrider42 · February 2017

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

Four minutes! I'm sooo jealous! I am clueless when it comes to Windows PCs. How much would a set up like you have cost? The time I'm wasting waiting for renders may be worth the expense of a new or used PC...

If you aren't afraid to buy used, then maybe not too much. I got my 970 for about $155 from ebay, the 670 I've had for ages, but its only like $100 now (and not worth that given it just has 2gb vram.) I got it from ebay a few years ago. Since my image didn't take up much space, both cards ran full speed and that's why it was so fast. It would have been a few minutes longer without the 670 kicking in to help. Maybe about 35-40% longer, just to guess.

Lets see:

i5-4790k $200, Motherboard was about $140, my newest PSU was $140, 16gb RAM was $75 (at the time, its not anymore,) CPU cooler $30, 2 SSDs about $200, I already had a case and some odds and some other hard drives from my old machine when I put it together. I started with a much smaller $50 600 WATT PSU, which would have been fine, but before I upgraded to the 970, I wanted to use both cards. So I made sure I had plenty of headroom with a 1000 Watt PSU (which might be overkill, but oh well, if I ever upgrade to a real power hungry card, I'm good.) Oh and Windows 8 for $110, which I later upgraded to 10 during the free upgrade. So well over $1000 and growing. But I literally bought these parts one at a time, over the course of a year, watching for sales. Once I had my starting parts, I built it. Actually, I had a ATI 5870 as my GPU from my old PC, the 670 was an upgrade after I built it. Keep in mind, at the time I built this, I had not discovered Daz. I built it to play games, and my older PC was a junker. I would not have bought a 2gb GPU if I had known I would be doing Iray one day. (Seriously, don't buy a 2gb GPU, you will get very angry at how useless it is, lol.)

I would recommend taking a peek at the benchmark thread sickleyield made for speed tests using her little start scene. You can get a good idea of would might be right for you. And something that I have seen in the past couple weeks, some users have bought new GPUs like the 1070 and popped them in very old PCs, like ten years old...and they still get nearly the same results as people who have the same GPU in brand new (and very expensive) machines! Iray is so GPU dependent, that it almost doesn't matter what the rest of PC has, there is no substitute for raw GPU power. So if you are really strapped for cash, you could buy a used machine for cheap assuming it is upgradable, and then pop something like a 1070 in it. A 1070 is about as fast as my two GPUs together, and it has a lot more VRAM. Of course the rest of the machine can matter, for other apps and things. Daz can use a lot of CPU for smoothing and collision detection. And to make things more complicated, AMD is releasing some new CPUs in just a few days, they might be very cost effective if they live up to their hype. That has yet to be proven, but I'd keep a watch on them.

If you haven't used Windows in a long time, I'm honestly not sure how you would take to it. I think 10 is probably the easiest to use Windows in a long time, but you'll also find plenty of people here that hate it with a fiery passion. Some of that hate is rational (auto updates--which can be turned off if you know how,) but some of it isn't so justified, and some comes from people who have not even used it or gave it a chance. But that's another topic. I can't really give a recommendation, you just have to try it out and see. You can always customize it to your liking in just about every way.

Back to FaceGen, indeed, as you use it more, you kind of figure out what certain things will do in the cross over to Daz. I pretty much always use the built in morphs in FG to adjust it before sending it to Daz.

I think FG tells you where the file is located when you export it. But by default, it should be...C>Users>Public (or your Windows profile)>Documents>My Daz 3D Library>data>Daz3D> and then it depends on what the figure is. So for G2F....>Genesis 2>Female>Morphs>FaceGen

If not that, it should be similar. You need to find the right Daz "data" folder, that's where the morphs are located. I multiple Daz data folders, on one the public documents, and then another under my user name, and then one on a second hard drive.

nicstt · February 2017

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

nicstt said:

The first time I've got something I'm sort of happy with. Still having trouble getting the eyes right, so replaced em.

Looks great...very pretty. Which hair is that? I like the simplicity of it.

An OOT one; I used VWD to drape the hair naturally.

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

But the FG sliders that show up under actor/head must be in a Daz Studio fIie somewhere... I'll do a search now but I'm such a newbie on Windows. Once created, I don't see why I couldn't copy them to the same folder in DS on my Mac...

Oh, yes...I thought you meant the shaping morphs inside of FG. I've never looked to see where the exported morph is located. I just did a search and couldn't find them, yet.

They are under Head; named the same as what you named them when exporting.

Taoz · February 2017

grinch2901 said:

samurle said:

grinch2901 said:

The challenge of FaceGen, from what I've seen so far, is that it does a decent job on getting the facial geometry more or less lined up properly but the rest of the head can be disproportionate. It seems it works better for men, which is where I did all my testing. But once I started trying to make females, the face shape when seen in, for example, 3/4 profile was way off. Like the side of the head pushed out and forward and so instead of seeing that nice taper of a femenine jaw line I was getting big square faces. Overall effect was that it didn't really look like the female I was trying to create at all. For men this seems less a problem, as well as original characters since you have no preconceived notions on what they should look like.

Are these observations before or after the face is exported to Daz Studio?

Before the export, I think the face looks spot on. After export, the face has changed. So, what you see is not exactly what you get. I think this is because FaceGen uses its own 3D head model, and when it maps that over to DS, some features are lost.

Here's an example. Result in FaceGen looks fntastic. Transfer to G3F is off. Eyes completely different shape, nose different, mouth different. Still looks like a pretty girl, just not the same girl.

That's also the main objection I have. I mean, the main purpose of the program is to create characters that look like the photo, if it can't do that I don't really see the point. I'd rather spend five times as much or more on a program that really can do the job.

BTW, have anyone tried to use BlackSmith3D for this?

Richard Haseltine · February 2017

grinch2901 said:

samurle said:

grinch2901 said:

The challenge of FaceGen, from what I've seen so far, is that it does a decent job on getting the facial geometry more or less lined up properly but the rest of the head can be disproportionate. It seems it works better for men, which is where I did all my testing. But once I started trying to make females, the face shape when seen in, for example, 3/4 profile was way off. Like the side of the head pushed out and forward and so instead of seeing that nice taper of a femenine jaw line I was getting big square faces. Overall effect was that it didn't really look like the female I was trying to create at all. For men this seems less a problem, as well as original characters since you have no preconceived notions on what they should look like.

Are these observations before or after the face is exported to Daz Studio?

Before the export, I think the face looks spot on. After export, the face has changed. So, what you see is not exactly what you get. I think this is because FaceGen uses its own 3D head model, and when it maps that over to DS, some features are lost.

Here's an example. Result in FaceGen looks fntastic. Transfer to G3F is off. Eyes completely different shape, nose different, mouth different. Still looks like a pretty girl, just not the same girl.

It does look as if the camera in FaceGen is using a shorter Focal Length than the camera in DS, which means the shape is more exaggerated in FG's view.

Taoz · February 2017

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

The odds of FaceGen Artist coming to Mac are about as good as being hit by a stray meteor...so not very likely. FG has been around for many years and has never supported Mac in any form. To make it even worse, FG Artist (the Daz Studio version) does not sell as well as the other versions of FaceGen. Its a niche inside a niche. So if they wont make a Mac version for their $300 and $2000 products, the odds of one being made for FG Artist are simply nonexistent.

This industry has passed Mac by. I rendered my 1750x2250 picture in about...maybe 4 minutes. And I don't even have high end hardware. (GTX 970+GTX 670, two older mid range cards.)

As for PA's, I really doubt they have much to fear. As nice as FG is, the textures it creates are still pretty rough, even under the best circumstances. Consider this: Daz Studio has been getting fantastic skin textures and figures for a whole decade. They've been doing 4096 pixel textures that long. V4 and M4 still have some of the most interesting textures (and characters) ever made...and yet we still see new characters on a daily basis, and they seem to be doing well. I think we may eventually reach a saturation point, but it hasn't happened yet. Though if Genesis 4 isn't dramatically better than G3, I think that might be the time starts happening...that's just my opinion.

Four minutes! I'm sooo jealous! I am clueless when it comes to Windows PCs. How much would a set up like you have cost? The time I'm wasting waiting for renders may be worth the expense of a new or used PC...

I'm running a GTX 1070 on 7-10 year old hardware, SY's test render takes over 2 hours to complete on that machine with CPU rendering, with GPU rendering it takes about 4 minutes. Capsces is getting similar results on a 10 year old PC. I imagine there are lots of used older machines like that you can get for very little. I'll recommend though that it has at least 16 GB RAM as many scenes do use a lot of RAM even if you do GPU rendering.

Wonderland · February 2017

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

This is still rendering, just a screenshot, but can people tell who this is?

Emma Stone?

Yes! Good, I was wondering if it was obvious enough... I probably should have done postwork before the render rather than after, but this will be an interesting experiment. I think FG is more of a tool than a one click thing. It's probably best to bring the textures into Photoshop and work on them (especially the eyes) BEFORE rendering to get the best results and adding your own higher res resources to the photograph first if you're using a low res image pulled off the Internet.

When I Googled various celebrities, especially iconic and dead ones, I saw many artists were simply taking existing photos and doing digitally artistic things with them or repainting them exactly as is. At least what we are doing is more original, creating views and poses of the celebs that are in different poses so no one can say that we simply altered an existing photograph, we are creating new views of them, similar to what celebrity hologram creators are doing.

Wonderland · February 2017

Taozen said:

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

The odds of FaceGen Artist coming to Mac are about as good as being hit by a stray meteor...so not very likely. FG has been around for many years and has never supported Mac in any form. To make it even worse, FG Artist (the Daz Studio version) does not sell as well as the other versions of FaceGen. Its a niche inside a niche. So if they wont make a Mac version for their $300 and $2000 products, the odds of one being made for FG Artist are simply nonexistent.

This industry has passed Mac by. I rendered my 1750x2250 picture in about...maybe 4 minutes. And I don't even have high end hardware. (GTX 970+GTX 670, two older mid range cards.)

As for PA's, I really doubt they have much to fear. As nice as FG is, the textures it creates are still pretty rough, even under the best circumstances. Consider this: Daz Studio has been getting fantastic skin textures and figures for a whole decade. They've been doing 4096 pixel textures that long. V4 and M4 still have some of the most interesting textures (and characters) ever made...and yet we still see new characters on a daily basis, and they seem to be doing well. I think we may eventually reach a saturation point, but it hasn't happened yet. Though if Genesis 4 isn't dramatically better than G3, I think that might be the time starts happening...that's just my opinion.

Four minutes! I'm sooo jealous! I am clueless when it comes to Windows PCs. How much would a set up like you have cost? The time I'm wasting waiting for renders may be worth the expense of a new or used PC...

I'm running a GTX 1070 on 7-10 year old hardware, SY's test render takes over 2 hours to complete on that machine with CPU rendering, with GPU rendering it takes about 4 minutes. Capsces is getting similar results on a 10 year old PC. I imagine there are lots of used older machines like that you can get for very little. I'll recommend though that it has at least 16 GB RAM as many scenes do use a lot of RAM even if you do GPU rendering.

Thanks. I wish I understood Windows PCs enough to be comfortable knowing which used PCs I could purchase and upgrade and not be screwed over by a clunker.... There are several indie Apple shops around (I bought a used refurbished Apple laptop once from two brilliant geeks who had practically a whole Apple Store in their tiny apartment in Hollywood!) but need to find the equivalent in the Windows world! I don't know if this is a regional thing, but I'm discovering that it seems Macs may be more popular in LA than the rest of the US, at least among creative people...

Wonderland · February 2017

Richard Haseltine said:

grinch2901 said:

samurle said:

grinch2901 said:

The challenge of FaceGen, from what I've seen so far, is that it does a decent job on getting the facial geometry more or less lined up properly but the rest of the head can be disproportionate. It seems it works better for men, which is where I did all my testing. But once I started trying to make females, the face shape when seen in, for example, 3/4 profile was way off. Like the side of the head pushed out and forward and so instead of seeing that nice taper of a femenine jaw line I was getting big square faces. Overall effect was that it didn't really look like the female I was trying to create at all. For men this seems less a problem, as well as original characters since you have no preconceived notions on what they should look like.

Are these observations before or after the face is exported to Daz Studio?

Before the export, I think the face looks spot on. After export, the face has changed. So, what you see is not exactly what you get. I think this is because FaceGen uses its own 3D head model, and when it maps that over to DS, some features are lost.

Here's an example. Result in FaceGen looks fntastic. Transfer to G3F is off. Eyes completely different shape, nose different, mouth different. Still looks like a pretty girl, just not the same girl.

It does look as if the camera in FaceGen is using a shorter Focal Length than the camera in DS, which means the shape is more exaggerated in FG's view.

Interesting! What do you think we should change the focus leghth to in DS to make it match? Thanks!

Wonderland · February 2017

ANGELREAPER1972 said:

Wonderland said:

So I'm still trying to render this, it's now 9 hours for a simple portrait on my Windows PC, even slower than my Mac... Does anyone know where the shaping sliders for FG is placed within Daz Studio? I want to see if I can move the files over to my Mac and do the actual rendering there after creating my characters in FG.

I'm really liking the original characters you can create with FG though. Considering all the potential characters you can make, it's well worth the price! I like this Asian girl created with the native textures, I think the textures that come with it are amazing!

very pretty Wonderland, well the morph sliders are located in the shaping tab section - not the my content-shaping but the shaping section where the tabs for parementers are also I find it easier in that section to type in the search box the name I gave it as for me have so many morphs and they're not alphabetical order takes forever to find my morphs

Thanks, but I meant on the computer itself so I could transfer files to my Mac to see if that's any faster. They are under data and several folders under as some others have answered... :)

Kev914 · February 2017

Just wanted to thank everyone who susgested programs that could make bump maps, etc. I do have the N.G.S product and I have been playing with it. I forgot that I also had that nVidea filter. (I don't think I spelled that right.) I don't have the latest version of Photoshop because I wasn't sure I wanted to be a "renter". Before that I upgraded every time since version 4.

nonesuch00 · February 2017

grinch2901 said:

samurle said:

grinch2901 said:

The challenge of FaceGen, from what I've seen so far, is that it does a decent job on getting the facial geometry more or less lined up properly but the rest of the head can be disproportionate. It seems it works better for men, which is where I did all my testing. But once I started trying to make females, the face shape when seen in, for example, 3/4 profile was way off. Like the side of the head pushed out and forward and so instead of seeing that nice taper of a femenine jaw line I was getting big square faces. Overall effect was that it didn't really look like the female I was trying to create at all. For men this seems less a problem, as well as original characters since you have no preconceived notions on what they should look like.

Are these observations before or after the face is exported to Daz Studio?

Before the export, I think the face looks spot on. After export, the face has changed. So, what you see is not exactly what you get. I think this is because FaceGen uses its own 3D head model, and when it maps that over to DS, some features are lost.

Here's an example. Result in FaceGen looks fntastic. Transfer to G3F is off. Eyes completely different shape, nose different, mouth different. Still looks like a pretty girl, just not the same girl.

They differences you site are mostly down to texture and the actual face is reversed from what you are used to seeing in photographs. Pay attentention to the assymetry of her chin for example.

On a side note I went to the Göthe Institut in Düsseldorf when the 2000 World's Fair was in Hannover and they had this contraption that let one see their mirror reflection so that it was not reversed so that it was like how other people saw them rather than how they were used to seeing themselves and it caused some people to run away panicked.

nonesuch00 · February 2017

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

The odds of FaceGen Artist coming to Mac are about as good as being hit by a stray meteor...so not very likely. FG has been around for many years and has never supported Mac in any form. To make it even worse, FG Artist (the Daz Studio version) does not sell as well as the other versions of FaceGen. Its a niche inside a niche. So if they wont make a Mac version for their $300 and $2000 products, the odds of one being made for FG Artist are simply nonexistent.

This industry has passed Mac by. I rendered my 1750x2250 picture in about...maybe 4 minutes. And I don't even have high end hardware. (GTX 970+GTX 670, two older mid range cards.)

As for PA's, I really doubt they have much to fear. As nice as FG is, the textures it creates are still pretty rough, even under the best circumstances. Consider this: Daz Studio has been getting fantastic skin textures and figures for a whole decade. They've been doing 4096 pixel textures that long. V4 and M4 still have some of the most interesting textures (and characters) ever made...and yet we still see new characters on a daily basis, and they seem to be doing well. I think we may eventually reach a saturation point, but it hasn't happened yet. Though if Genesis 4 isn't dramatically better than G3, I think that might be the time starts happening...that's just my opinion.

Four minutes! I'm sooo jealous! I am clueless when it comes to Windows PCs. How much would a set up like you have cost? The time I'm wasting waiting for renders may be worth the expense of a new or used PC...

Well a setup like his would likely cost you more than a newer desktp setup but with only 1 nVidia 1070 instead of two nVidia cards. Look on Amazon for the "Top Seller" or is it "Best Seller" Acer PC that has the intel 7th Gen CPU and a free slot for a video card. You would need to buy the 1070 video card ($375) and either 16GBm one stick 16GB, ($110) or 32GB, two sticks 16GB each, RAM ($200) to upgrade the 8GB RAM that ships with the PC. The PC costs $449 with free shipping and is easily the best value available today in a Desktop PC.

So using Amazon & today's prices:

a) Acer PC, 16GB RAM

$449 free shipping

b) Acer PC with nividia GTX 1070, 24GB RAM

$449 + $379 + $109 = $937

c) Acer PC with nvidia GTX 1070, 32 GB RAM

$449 + $379 + $200 = $1028

I'm pretty sure you won't be able to build a cheaper new PC than what the Acer costs.

If you want the nVidia GTX 1080 instead then that costs $569 cheapest I saw so add $190 to the cost of b) or c).

The main thing is as you see the cost of the video card itself costs about the same as a brand new with new tech PC and 16GB RAM.

For me the big disappointment is that these nVidia cards only have 8GB RAM and I've already a few saved scenes that have exceeded 13GB RAM on my current CPU render laptop. If they even created a 16GB nVidia video card I'm buying if it is priced like the nVidia GTX 1080 at about $550.

Or maybe not, since Unity is going to make the Octane renderer available for free and the Octane renderer can render in AMD or nVidia video cards I will wait to see what AMD's latest video card can do and what it will cost. I think AMD will be competing against nVidia with their new video card via price as they did against Intel in pricing their Ryzen CPU.

Likewise, it might be a good ideal to wait to see what a consumer level AMD Ryzen PC will cost. It will have twice the cores (4 cores vs 8 cores) of the Acer PC I mentioned and if it's for the same costs and the PC can be upgraded to 32GB or more RAM that is the PC to buy. I don't think I would wait longer than September though to wait for such availability. I mean taking about a potential savings of $500 and having a better rendering PC as a result is worth the wait to see what is available from AMD with it's Ryzen and video cards.

Wonderland · February 2017

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

The odds of FaceGen Artist coming to Mac are about as good as being hit by a stray meteor...so not very likely. FG has been around for many years and has never supported Mac in any form. To make it even worse, FG Artist (the Daz Studio version) does not sell as well as the other versions of FaceGen. Its a niche inside a niche. So if they wont make a Mac version for their $300 and $2000 products, the odds of one being made for FG Artist are simply nonexistent.

This industry has passed Mac by. I rendered my 1750x2250 picture in about...maybe 4 minutes. And I don't even have high end hardware. (GTX 970+GTX 670, two older mid range cards.)

As for PA's, I really doubt they have much to fear. As nice as FG is, the textures it creates are still pretty rough, even under the best circumstances. Consider this: Daz Studio has been getting fantastic skin textures and figures for a whole decade. They've been doing 4096 pixel textures that long. V4 and M4 still have some of the most interesting textures (and characters) ever made...and yet we still see new characters on a daily basis, and they seem to be doing well. I think we may eventually reach a saturation point, but it hasn't happened yet. Though if Genesis 4 isn't dramatically better than G3, I think that might be the time starts happening...that's just my opinion.

Four minutes! I'm sooo jealous! I am clueless when it comes to Windows PCs. How much would a set up like you have cost? The time I'm wasting waiting for renders may be worth the expense of a new or used PC...

Well a setup like his would likely cost you more than a newer desktp setup but with only 1 nVidia 1070 instead of two nVidia cards. Look on Amazon for the "Top Seller" or is it "Best Seller" Acer PC that has the intel 7th Gen CPU and a free slot for a video card. You would need to buy the 1070 video card ($375) and either 16GBm one stick 16GB, ($110) or 32GB, two sticks 16GB each, RAM ($200) to upgrade the 8GB RAM that ships with the PC. The PC costs $449 with free shipping and is easily the best value available today in a Desktop PC.

Thanks, I guess I can't really get anything under $1,000 then... Looks like I'm going to have to take the slow road for quite a while. I should just skip March Madness entirely and save up. I already have so many products I can't even use with either my Mac or Windows Laptop without taking over 32 hours to render...

Wonderland · February 2017

Thanks to Richard Haseltine's advice, I tried lowering the focal leghth from 105 to 60 (lower looked kind of fish-eyed) and I think it looks a slight bit more like Emma Stone... Although weirdly, I see a bit of Debra Messing too... And don't worry, I'm not going to use poor Emma for pornography, I would NEVER do that to anyone's likeness and hope others aren't either.

nonesuch00 · February 2017

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

The odds of FaceGen Artist coming to Mac are about as good as being hit by a stray meteor...so not very likely. FG has been around for many years and has never supported Mac in any form. To make it even worse, FG Artist (the Daz Studio version) does not sell as well as the other versions of FaceGen. Its a niche inside a niche. So if they wont make a Mac version for their $300 and $2000 products, the odds of one being made for FG Artist are simply nonexistent.

This industry has passed Mac by. I rendered my 1750x2250 picture in about...maybe 4 minutes. And I don't even have high end hardware. (GTX 970+GTX 670, two older mid range cards.)

As for PA's, I really doubt they have much to fear. As nice as FG is, the textures it creates are still pretty rough, even under the best circumstances. Consider this: Daz Studio has been getting fantastic skin textures and figures for a whole decade. They've been doing 4096 pixel textures that long. V4 and M4 still have some of the most interesting textures (and characters) ever made...and yet we still see new characters on a daily basis, and they seem to be doing well. I think we may eventually reach a saturation point, but it hasn't happened yet. Though if Genesis 4 isn't dramatically better than G3, I think that might be the time starts happening...that's just my opinion.

Four minutes! I'm sooo jealous! I am clueless when it comes to Windows PCs. How much would a set up like you have cost? The time I'm wasting waiting for renders may be worth the expense of a new or used PC...

Well a setup like his would likely cost you more than a newer desktp setup but with only 1 nVidia 1070 instead of two nVidia cards. Look on Amazon for the "Top Seller" or is it "Best Seller" Acer PC that has the intel 7th Gen CPU and a free slot for a video card. You would need to buy the 1070 video card ($375) and either 16GBm one stick 16GB, ($110) or 32GB, two sticks 16GB each, RAM ($200) to upgrade the 8GB RAM that ships with the PC. The PC costs $449 with free shipping and is easily the best value available today in a Desktop PC.

Thanks, I guess I can't really get anything under $1,000 then... Looks like I'm going to have to take the slow road for quite a while. I should just skip March Madness entirely and save up. I already have so many products I can't even use with either my Mac or Windows Laptop without taking over 32 hours to render...

It depends on if you are willing to learn Unity and DAZ well enough after Unity finishes adding the Octane renderer to do your renders regarding waiting for the new AMD video cards. If you are sticking to DAZ Studio period then nVidia is your only choice however it might be worth investigating how much your CPU renders would speed up using 8 cores of AMDs Ryzen vs 4 core of Intel Gen 7 CPUs. You'd guess, offhand, it's be twice as fast and with DAZ's / iRay's recent rendering speed-ups and Windows 10 then you are talking CPU render speed ups that might make the buying of a Ryzen PC the most sensible thing to do. Nothing compared to using a new nVidia card to render in DAZ Studio but certainly much faster than my 6 year old 2 core Intel CPU renders.

Wonderland · February 2017

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

The odds of FaceGen Artist coming to Mac are about as good as being hit by a stray meteor...so not very likely. FG has been around for many years and has never supported Mac in any form. To make it even worse, FG Artist (the Daz Studio version) does not sell as well as the other versions of FaceGen. Its a niche inside a niche. So if they wont make a Mac version for their $300 and $2000 products, the odds of one being made for FG Artist are simply nonexistent.

This industry has passed Mac by. I rendered my 1750x2250 picture in about...maybe 4 minutes. And I don't even have high end hardware. (GTX 970+GTX 670, two older mid range cards.)

As for PA's, I really doubt they have much to fear. As nice as FG is, the textures it creates are still pretty rough, even under the best circumstances. Consider this: Daz Studio has been getting fantastic skin textures and figures for a whole decade. They've been doing 4096 pixel textures that long. V4 and M4 still have some of the most interesting textures (and characters) ever made...and yet we still see new characters on a daily basis, and they seem to be doing well. I think we may eventually reach a saturation point, but it hasn't happened yet. Though if Genesis 4 isn't dramatically better than G3, I think that might be the time starts happening...that's just my opinion.

Four minutes! I'm sooo jealous! I am clueless when it comes to Windows PCs. How much would a set up like you have cost? The time I'm wasting waiting for renders may be worth the expense of a new or used PC...

Well a setup like his would likely cost you more than a newer desktp setup but with only 1 nVidia 1070 instead of two nVidia cards. Look on Amazon for the "Top Seller" or is it "Best Seller" Acer PC that has the intel 7th Gen CPU and a free slot for a video card. You would need to buy the 1070 video card ($375) and either 16GBm one stick 16GB, ($110) or 32GB, two sticks 16GB each, RAM ($200) to upgrade the 8GB RAM that ships with the PC. The PC costs $449 with free shipping and is easily the best value available today in a Desktop PC.

Thanks, I guess I can't really get anything under $1,000 then... Looks like I'm going to have to take the slow road for quite a while. I should just skip March Madness entirely and save up. I already have so many products I can't even use with either my Mac or Windows Laptop without taking over 32 hours to render...

It depends on if you are willing to learn Unity and DAZ well enough after Unity finishes adding the Octane renderer to do your renders regarding waiting for the new AMD video cards. If you are sticking to DAZ Studio period then nVidia is your only choice however it might be worth investigating how much your CPU renders would speed up using 8 cores of AMDs Ryzen vs 4 core of Intel Gen 7 CPUs. You'd guess, offhand, it's be twice as fast and with DAZ's / iRay's recent rendering speed-ups and Windows 10 then you are talking CPU render speed ups that might make the buying of a Ryzen PC the most sensible thing to do. Nothing compared to using a new nVidia card to render in DAZ Studio but certainly much faster than my 6 year old 2 core Intel CPU renders.

By the time I can afford anything in $1000 and up range, I'm sure even more new cards will be available... I was hoping my two year-old Windows laptop could take an NVIDIA card, but apparently not. Somebody directed me to a site where there is a way to add an external NVIDIA card to a Mac, but that was around $900 too. Everything is way out of my price range right now.

nonesuch00 · February 2017

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

The odds of FaceGen Artist coming to Mac are about as good as being hit by a stray meteor...so not very likely. FG has been around for many years and has never supported Mac in any form. To make it even worse, FG Artist (the Daz Studio version) does not sell as well as the other versions of FaceGen. Its a niche inside a niche. So if they wont make a Mac version for their $300 and $2000 products, the odds of one being made for FG Artist are simply nonexistent.

This industry has passed Mac by. I rendered my 1750x2250 picture in about...maybe 4 minutes. And I don't even have high end hardware. (GTX 970+GTX 670, two older mid range cards.)

As for PA's, I really doubt they have much to fear. As nice as FG is, the textures it creates are still pretty rough, even under the best circumstances. Consider this: Daz Studio has been getting fantastic skin textures and figures for a whole decade. They've been doing 4096 pixel textures that long. V4 and M4 still have some of the most interesting textures (and characters) ever made...and yet we still see new characters on a daily basis, and they seem to be doing well. I think we may eventually reach a saturation point, but it hasn't happened yet. Though if Genesis 4 isn't dramatically better than G3, I think that might be the time starts happening...that's just my opinion.

Four minutes! I'm sooo jealous! I am clueless when it comes to Windows PCs. How much would a set up like you have cost? The time I'm wasting waiting for renders may be worth the expense of a new or used PC...

Well a setup like his would likely cost you more than a newer desktp setup but with only 1 nVidia 1070 instead of two nVidia cards. Look on Amazon for the "Top Seller" or is it "Best Seller" Acer PC that has the intel 7th Gen CPU and a free slot for a video card. You would need to buy the 1070 video card ($375) and either 16GBm one stick 16GB, ($110) or 32GB, two sticks 16GB each, RAM ($200) to upgrade the 8GB RAM that ships with the PC. The PC costs $449 with free shipping and is easily the best value available today in a Desktop PC.

Thanks, I guess I can't really get anything under $1,000 then... Looks like I'm going to have to take the slow road for quite a while. I should just skip March Madness entirely and save up. I already have so many products I can't even use with either my Mac or Windows Laptop without taking over 32 hours to render...

It depends on if you are willing to learn Unity and DAZ well enough after Unity finishes adding the Octane renderer to do your renders regarding waiting for the new AMD video cards. If you are sticking to DAZ Studio period then nVidia is your only choice however it might be worth investigating how much your CPU renders would speed up using 8 cores of AMDs Ryzen vs 4 core of Intel Gen 7 CPUs. You'd guess, offhand, it's be twice as fast and with DAZ's / iRay's recent rendering speed-ups and Windows 10 then you are talking CPU render speed ups that might make the buying of a Ryzen PC the most sensible thing to do. Nothing compared to using a new nVidia card to render in DAZ Studio but certainly much faster than my 6 year old 2 core Intel CPU renders.

By the time I can afford anything in $1000 and up range, I'm sure even more new cards will be available... I was hoping my two year-old Windows laptop could take an NVIDIA card, but apparently not. Somebody directed me to a site where there is a way to add an external NVIDIA card to a Mac, but that was around $900 too. Everything is way out of my price range right now.

Basically to avoid paying out $1000 every 2 years you have to buy a desktop. I have a 6 year old laptop I paid $125 and upgraded the RAM to 16GB but it was just a stopgap solution. I will this summer pay the $449 for the Acer PC or if it's competitively priced with the Acer, the AMD Ryzen powered PC, that alone will increase my CPU render speeds from 2 times to 4 times faster. I will upgrade the RAM to 32GB too, like you however, I am very hestitant to fork out another $375 - $600 for a video card, be it nVidia or AMD, so I'll have to wait and see.

Wonderland · February 2017

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

The odds of FaceGen Artist coming to Mac are about as good as being hit by a stray meteor...so not very likely. FG has been around for many years and has never supported Mac in any form. To make it even worse, FG Artist (the Daz Studio version) does not sell as well as the other versions of FaceGen. Its a niche inside a niche. So if they wont make a Mac version for their $300 and $2000 products, the odds of one being made for FG Artist are simply nonexistent.

This industry has passed Mac by. I rendered my 1750x2250 picture in about...maybe 4 minutes. And I don't even have high end hardware. (GTX 970+GTX 670, two older mid range cards.)

As for PA's, I really doubt they have much to fear. As nice as FG is, the textures it creates are still pretty rough, even under the best circumstances. Consider this: Daz Studio has been getting fantastic skin textures and figures for a whole decade. They've been doing 4096 pixel textures that long. V4 and M4 still have some of the most interesting textures (and characters) ever made...and yet we still see new characters on a daily basis, and they seem to be doing well. I think we may eventually reach a saturation point, but it hasn't happened yet. Though if Genesis 4 isn't dramatically better than G3, I think that might be the time starts happening...that's just my opinion.

Four minutes! I'm sooo jealous! I am clueless when it comes to Windows PCs. How much would a set up like you have cost? The time I'm wasting waiting for renders may be worth the expense of a new or used PC...

Well a setup like his would likely cost you more than a newer desktp setup but with only 1 nVidia 1070 instead of two nVidia cards. Look on Amazon for the "Top Seller" or is it "Best Seller" Acer PC that has the intel 7th Gen CPU and a free slot for a video card. You would need to buy the 1070 video card ($375) and either 16GBm one stick 16GB, ($110) or 32GB, two sticks 16GB each, RAM ($200) to upgrade the 8GB RAM that ships with the PC. The PC costs $449 with free shipping and is easily the best value available today in a Desktop PC.

Thanks, I guess I can't really get anything under $1,000 then... Looks like I'm going to have to take the slow road for quite a while. I should just skip March Madness entirely and save up. I already have so many products I can't even use with either my Mac or Windows Laptop without taking over 32 hours to render...

It depends on if you are willing to learn Unity and DAZ well enough after Unity finishes adding the Octane renderer to do your renders regarding waiting for the new AMD video cards. If you are sticking to DAZ Studio period then nVidia is your only choice however it might be worth investigating how much your CPU renders would speed up using 8 cores of AMDs Ryzen vs 4 core of Intel Gen 7 CPUs. You'd guess, offhand, it's be twice as fast and with DAZ's / iRay's recent rendering speed-ups and Windows 10 then you are talking CPU render speed ups that might make the buying of a Ryzen PC the most sensible thing to do. Nothing compared to using a new nVidia card to render in DAZ Studio but certainly much faster than my 6 year old 2 core Intel CPU renders.

By the time I can afford anything in $1000 and up range, I'm sure even more new cards will be available... I was hoping my two year-old Windows laptop could take an NVIDIA card, but apparently not. Somebody directed me to a site where there is a way to add an external NVIDIA card to a Mac, but that was around $900 too. Everything is way out of my price range right now.

Basically to avoid paying out $1000 every 2 years you have to buy a desktop. I have a 6 year old laptop I paid $125 and upgraded the RAM to 16GB but it was just a stopgap solution. I will this summer pay the $449 for the Acer PC or if it's competitively priced with the Acer, the AMD Ryzen powered PC, that alone will increase my CPU render speeds from 2 times to 4 times faster. I will upgrade the RAM to 32GB too, like you however, I am very hestitant to fork out another $375 - $600 for a video card, be it nVidia or AMD, so I'll have to wait and see.

I just Googled local PC repair places to see if they could McGiver a way to get an NVIDIA card in my laptop. I called a guy who works from home and got excellent reviews and it ends up he's a studio animator (I live in Hollywood.) He said that was impossible and made the same suggestion about getting a new cheap PC but said I did not need the highest end card unless I was planning to render for 4K screens and said I could find a decent one for about $200. He knew about Daz and IRay and seemed to think the higher end cards were overkill for it...

grinch2901 · February 2017

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

I just Googled local PC repair places to see if they could McGiver a way to get an NVIDIA card in my laptop. I called a guy who works from home and got excellent reviews and it ends up he's a studio animator (I live in Hollywood.) He said that was impossible and made the same suggestion about getting a new cheap PC but said I did not need the highest end card unless I was planning to render for 4K screens and said I could find a decent one for about $200. He knew about Daz and IRay and seemed to think the higher end cards were overkill for it...

What does he mean by "higher end", Quatro cards? TitanX?

The 1000 series ( 1060, 1070, 1080) are cheap compared to prior generations and low power consumption, and really good performance. In my mind they are absolutely worth it. GTX 1060 is $259 on sale at Amazon right now so maybe he doesnt consider that a "high end" card (since it's pretty close to his $200 value price point) but it's pretty darned good.

Wonderland · February 2017

grinch2901 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

I just Googled local PC repair places to see if they could McGiver a way to get an NVIDIA card in my laptop. I called a guy who works from home and got excellent reviews and it ends up he's a studio animator (I live in Hollywood.) He said that was impossible and made the same suggestion about getting a new cheap PC but said I did not need the highest end card unless I was planning to render for 4K screens and said I could find a decent one for about $200. He knew about Daz and IRay and seemed to think the higher end cards were overkill for it...

What does he mean by "higher end", Quatro cards? TitanX?

The 1000 series ( 1060, 1070, 1080) are cheap compared to prior generations and low power consumption, and really good performance. In my mind they are absolutely worth it. GTX 1060 is $259 on sale at Amazon right now so maybe he doesnt consider that a "high end" card (since it's pretty close to his $200 value price point) but it's pretty darned good.

He wasn't specific, but nonesuch00 mentioned above cards costing $600, so I'm guessing, especially since the guy is a studio animator that there are really high end cards that cost a lot more than $200... (And by "studio" I mean like Pixar or something, not Daz Studio LOL)

FSMCDesigns · February 2017

Another fun one for me. Riggs from Friday Night Lights.

Jay Jay_1264499 · February 2017

FSMCDesigns said:
Another fun one for me. Riggs from Friday Night Lights.

Awesome likeness! What genesis figure did you put it onto? Did you have to do much altering in daz after? I'm finding this a bit hit and miss bit to be fair I've not spent much time on this since I purchased it sadly Grest result though

Toonces · February 2017

Agreed, looks impressive. However, I'm curious how long it takes to fix the eyes in that example.

Toonces · February 2017

dupe post

FSMCDesigns · February 2017

Thanks Jay, I used G3M as I don't have access to G3M due to using the trial version. I also don't have any G2M morphs since G3M is my goto male figure, so it could have been better with some more detailed morphs and matching bump, normal and spec maps.

That image took about 15 minutes to do. Load the image, select the dots, check the final face, export, apply morph and textures, add the shirt, try and find a hair similar to the original image, pose it similar to the original image and there you go. I find that I get a good morph/texture about one out of three I try

outrider42 · February 2017

Wonderland said:

grinch2901 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

nonesuch00 said:

Wonderland said:

outrider42 said:

I just Googled local PC repair places to see if they could McGiver a way to get an NVIDIA card in my laptop. I called a guy who works from home and got excellent reviews and it ends up he's a studio animator (I live in Hollywood.) He said that was impossible and made the same suggestion about getting a new cheap PC but said I did not need the highest end card unless I was planning to render for 4K screens and said I could find a decent one for about $200. He knew about Daz and IRay and seemed to think the higher end cards were overkill for it...

What does he mean by "higher end", Quatro cards? TitanX?

The 1000 series ( 1060, 1070, 1080) are cheap compared to prior generations and low power consumption, and really good performance. In my mind they are absolutely worth it. GTX 1060 is $259 on sale at Amazon right now so maybe he doesnt consider that a "high end" card (since it's pretty close to his $200 value price point) but it's pretty darned good.

He wasn't specific, but nonesuch00 mentioned above cards costing $600, so I'm guessing, especially since the guy is a studio animator that there are really high end cards that cost a lot more than $200... (And by "studio" I mean like Pixar or something, not Daz Studio LOL)

It really depends on what kind of scenes you make, and want to make. How many characters are in your typical scenes? What about backgrounds? And at what pixel size? When it comes to Iray, there seriously is no such thing as overkill. Even the most beastly gpu's can run out of memory on scenes that are not really that big. There is a reason why big studios use CPU based rendering for movies and things, GPUs just don't cut it for them when they do works that run in the hundreds of GB. I can easily go past my 970's 4gb with just 2 G3 characters in an environment. Maybe 3 if I push it. But, a 970 can be a good deal at $150. If you tend to make simple scenes, then sure, a 970 might be a good card for you.

Personally, and this is my opinion, I think a 1070 would be a great solution. As stated above, you don't even need a very good PC, just one that can run it. (For that matter, you don't need a good PC for many GPUs, just to be clear here.) With your connections in LA, maybe somebody might even give you their old PC. Surely somebody in LA has some old PC parts that don't have a home. They certainly are not going to sell PCs with parts from 2007, so maybe they'll hook you up and let you take it off their hands for $50. As long as it has PCIe, a decent power supply (500 or so) and enough physical space (these GPUs can be pretty huge, so its a common mistake to not have enough space for one!) then you can roll with that for a while. Then you could pick up a GPU, I keep saying 1070, but hey, maybe a 970 from ebay would be ok. So how much would that be, if you had that hypothetical hook up, it would only be a bit over $200. It certainly would not be a beast system, but it would be able to handle Iray. It could get you by until you figure out what you want to do. The 970 would not be useless, if you do buy a newer system, you could pop it in that. If you bought a newer GPU, you could even run both of them, like I have done. At any rate, it could be one way to jump into the wild and woolly and wonderful world of PC. That's what makes PC great, IMO, it can be absolutely anything you want it to be, and built with countless combinations of parts.

Maybe that dude you talked to could hook you up with something. I'm betting he isn't selling those old parts to anybody, he might be happy to get rid of them and just charge you a fee to snap them together.

You have a ton of options for how to tackle this. You can do whatever works for you. Just don't buy a slimline or micro PC, you need that space for the GPUs!

There is a Micro Center in Orange, about an hour from LA. Micro Center is like the Toys R Us of electronics (it was founded by Radio Shack employees)...at least that's how I feel when I walk into one. Sometimes they have open box deals and refurbs that aren't too bad. They do have good deals on CPUs and especially when bought with a motherboard. They often have CPU-motherboard bundles that are $40 off.That's where I got my CPU and motherboard (just not in California.)

I don't even bother trying to fix the eyes. I just use eyes from another character in my runtime. The only exception was Bowie, for obvious reasons. I used a closeup picture of his eyes to create a new texture for Daz. If the eye texture FG gives me is almost ok, then I might try to work with it in GIMP.

Toonces · February 2017

Micro Center is awesome! I got burned by another retailer recently and switched to using Micro Center for hardware. They're amazing. The Toys R Us of electronics is right. They have everything from 3d printers to PCs of every shape and size. I sound like a walking advertisement for them, lol, but they really impressed me when it came to purchasing computer parts.

outrider42 · February 2017

havsm said:

Micro Center is awesome! I got burned by another retailer recently and switched to using Micro Center for hardware. They're amazing. The Toys R Us of electronics is right. They have everything from 3d printers to PCs of every shape and size. I sound like a walking advertisement for them, lol, but they really impressed me when it came to purchasing computer parts.

They are pretty good. Their video card prices are just ok, but their CPU and motherboard combos are pretty unbeatable. Its also the shear scale of the store that inspired a real wow factor from me. Radio Shack was, well, just a shack. But MC is as big as a Walmart Super Center, and its jam packed wall to wall with electronics and goodies. An entire aisle of RAM! I wish I lived closer than I do.

cdpro_2831bbd990 · February 2017

nicstt said:

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

nicstt said:

The first time I've got something I'm sort of happy with. Still having trouble getting the eyes right, so replaced em.

Looks great...very pretty. Which hair is that? I like the simplicity of it.

An OOT one; I used VWD to drape the hair naturally.

cdpro_2831bbd990 said:

Wonderland said:

But the FG sliders that show up under actor/head must be in a Daz Studio fIie somewhere... I'll do a search now but I'm such a newbie on Windows. Once created, I don't see why I couldn't copy them to the same folder in DS on my Mac...

Oh, yes...I thought you meant the shaping morphs inside of FG. I've never looked to see where the exported morph is located. I just did a search and couldn't find them, yet.

They are under Head; named the same as what you named them when exporting.

LOL...not what I meant. I meant, where the morphs are located in directories in Windows File Exporer, not within Daz.

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