Give a Man a Pole..Teach that Man to Fish..Sell that Man... Your "Custom" Fish.
wolf359
Posts: 3,943
Subtitle:
The failed Promise the Genesis Figure Platform.
Remember Anubis?
I remember the heady days of Genesis 1 as I watched enviously from the sidelines.
This was before I migrated from my Old Mac running DS 2.3 to a New PC capable of running the latest Daz studio and genesis.
Once I made the switch from aging Poser figure tech, I fully embraced the Genesis technology as its innovative "One Figure to rule them all" morphing capability liberated me from the limitations of having to always find and then Buy separate figures if I wanted both racial and Demographic and even Species variety for my preferred genre of Sci-Fi storytelling
If I needed the ubiquitous 20 something Northern European Girl/guy ..Sure easy
But if I Needed the middleaged Arab man or woman or Fat frumpy Dorky 21st century westerner or Exotic Alien From the other side of the galaxy,
Then genesis was my solution as wellI am so thankful for Artists Like Dariofish(HFS) for his amazing alien morphs Inspired by the Popular video game
"Mass Effect".
But a disturbing pattern has emerged over the course genesis's evolution to version 3.
More and more we are seeing purpose built "Character Bundles" with clothing that Does NOT morph well outside of those specific Character bundle shapes.
This ,in my personal view, have slowy created the mentality that Genesis is just relatively inert "base figure" with not much utility unless you buy the Amazing bundles. Much like the original Mike & Victoria 1
I understand the marketplace economic utility of getting people to contsantly buy the new bundled "Characters",
This is a business after all.
However it seems we are seeing less & less separate General use Morphs and Skin map products that take true advantage of the Strength and the versatility of the genesis technology.
The technolgy that Liberated us as Artists
It seems ,To me at least we have been slowy coaxed back on to "The plantation" mentality of
"I wish"someone"....not me but "someone" would make a more (Insert character type here) For Gx
I would $$buy$$ that in an instant".
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Comments
I don't know. I feel that that DAZ is doing pretty good. For example whoever made the Polynesian characters was excellant and I recognized facial characteristics in those models as my nephew's phenotype right away.
Now I do agree it is frustrating that there isn't a morph pack to go with the head and morph pack of the Genesis 3 (or Genesis #) that lets one dial in ethnicities but really I think it's a bit of a stretch to expect DAZ to attempt that. Having lived in Europe as an outsider I can tell you indeed there are Irish, Alpine, Italian, Dutch phenotypes (not to 100% of the population) and they are not too much like the Genesis 3 models which seem more Balkan to me. I guess FaceGen is best used for that sort of thing but one needs to have a sense of what all these geographic human phenotypes look like which no one does of course comprehensively.FaceGen by it'self is not enough though. Artistically one has to have the ability to notice the differences in those phenotypes. They aren't glaring. There is to be a few books of collections of portraints of people throughout the world. They were very old and in black & white and very fascinating to look at. I haven't seen one since I was like 12 years old though.
I think the biggest obstacle is clothing. That's why I bought all the 'Cross-Figure' and 'Wear Them All' products. Since you model sy-fy type clothing I don't think it's that big a concern for you though.
I feel DAZ models need a 'morphable' skin texture resource sort of like Skin Builder on high-speed but I doubt we will see such a product, at least for a while. And hair...don't even ask.
Having done at least one extensive publication project for my website using gen4 figures in DS3, entailing umpty-ump middle-school aged characters, and remembering the hoops that I had to jump through to get that acomplished, I will have to say that while things could certainly be better than they are (well, duh, what couldn't?) things have been *vastly* improved since that time.
Mind you, I was quite happy with Genesis 1, and although I've stockpiled a great deal of content against the migration to port my character library to G3 or beyond, I'm still dragging my feet. But just the ability to produce any number of characters of an age under 20 at the spin of a few dials is a ghodsend. And being able to put clothing ont them without tearing my hair out, is even better.
Nowadays the big challenge has been producing some of the grotesques from the Oz books. Their character designs have been public domain for decades, but there arens any models of them. Or not the official versions of them.
While I understand what you're saying, I see repeatedly where people seem to expect DAZ3D or the PAs to create exactly the thing they envisioned for renders they want to do, rather than buy the morph packs and do it themselves. I also see folks totally overlooking stuff like SickleYield's People of Earth or Zev0's various packs to add features that are otherwise lacking in what does get released.
+1 Agree completely
it seems the marketing of purpose built Characaters
has completely undermined the original purposeof the genesis technology that used to inspire artists to make their own variety.
A person recently stated they wanted a less attractive fatter, older male instead of the endless parade of pretty boys.
Someone posted a link to George HD.
The response:(paraphrasing) "I have seen George but I need the PA's to make something in between the default G3 male and George so I dont have to do any fiddling with morph sliders"
????????!!!!!
These topics are difficult because there are legitimate concerns and gaps and then there are people who seem unwilling to do anything more than load a figure and click on an icon.
Which seems... utterly bizarre to me. I mean, I can get not wanting to, say, go into Carrara or Hexagon and make your own custom face or something, but ... dang.
It is Bizzare to watch.
It is like being back in the bad old days of the original Millenium figures
where indeed you had to have the skills go into a modeling app if you wanted to get rid of the ubiquitous Dan Farr face on Mike 1
...or beg those few elite craftsmen in the community to make you an African or Asian etc.
Yep, that was one of the threads I had in mind when I posted.
I'm pretty sure there are already more than enough general use morph packs. There's only so much you can do before you're just creating redundant morphs that everyone already has multiple copies of from the other packs they own. Though I'm still waiting for some good teeth morphs for Genesis 3. EDIT: Nevermind. I just checked the store and some teeth morphs just came out. lool.
Wasn't there a weight slider or something to create something less fat than George but more fat than default? Seems people are just a little too lazy to even look. That said, I can kinda see the need for a skin texture to go along with a fatter character and George's texture is a little too...flabby.
Of course, there are two extremes.
You have the users irate that they can't push two buttons and generate a cityscape with citiZens and thebrender it on their souped up Vic20.
Then you have the users getting frustrated at all the lazy people not writing their own plugins and doing simple things like generating weather with $10k custom apps and a server farm.
its a tough spiral to break out of.
This!!!!!!!!!! I shake my head also at how sooo many want everything plug and play and have no desire whatsoever to be "creative". It's all about saving time, time and time it seems. I understand that most addon characters add something unique to the gene pool that you might not be able to get yourself from the generic morph packs, but try and be unique in the art you are doing. Bascally by using premade characters as is you are just doing new promos for the vendors since they did all the work.
My fav scenario is when a female is released and then comes the chanting for her male counterpart, HUH?! G3M + morphs = male counterpart.
Users mention how unique Dale and George are, yes, both are great, I love them, but I never use them as is, there is always something else added to the gene pool to make them....my creation for my artwork.
I don't own most of the DAZ addon characters since I don't see that much variety that can add to other figures, but I do have a couple and they are never used 100% as is.
I think all this comes down to one thing, we are spoiled, spoiled rotten!!! In the early V4 days, there was no autofit (super conforming in DS which was hit or miss), so if you wanted an outfit to fit a custom character you had to add the morphs to the outfit and save it, either with DS features or crossdresser/morphing clothes. Before genesis and GenX, your choices on morphs was very limted and tied to the figure. Same with textures, although secondary figures such as Stephanie and Aiko worked ok on V4. You actually had to work at getting custom anything for your scenes back then.
These days with a few choice addons and plugins, everything is backward compatible with a click or two and the choices are endless for custom anything, be it figures, sets or environments
While I have no desire to go back to the stone age of 3D, I am always on the lookout for artists that do the work and try to be more unique in their artwork and let them know it is appreciated
I admit I have no modelling skills. I manage a few clothing morphs in Blender using the sculpt tools and I guess that I could do the same for facial features but I tend to rely on the morph packs and Zev0 add-ons to create my characters. I'm pretty sure that I never use out-of-the-box characters which is why I buy so few of them. Normally, the ones I buy are for the skins, not the shapes. I've also complained at the lack of "real people' in the character collections but, again, I would buy them for the skins and, perhaps, the HD details (I still haven't figured how to add such detail by creating Normal maps).
I have modeling skill enough to create my own clothing now
and I did create my G2 male based self clone via a custom face morph in MODO.
I have been at this many years and have experience with pro apps and certainly dont expect the average Daz hobbyist
to do these things.
But it does seem, to me at least, that the level of user skill with the figures native abilities,within Daz studio, has dropped signifigantly or people simply stopped caring since the Days of Genesis 1
It is interesting to see how these flavor of the month "Character" release cycles playout. Rune ,Gia ,Bethany, Lee 7 etc etc,
I cant but wonder how many people get caught up in the Me Too!! frenzy.
Rush to Buy these Characters.
Post one render in the big Mutual validation thread and never even use them again.
My biggest complaint about G3F characters. Why are 90% of them from 5'10" - 5'11" tall? The Daz3D world needs size and shape diversity in it's figures. I pass on most of the female character that come out, because despite having a cool unique face... It's almost always the same story for their body 110-130lbs 5'10" - 5'11". I do not need 10 very similar bodies cluttering up my morph list when most of those shapes can be created using the G3F body morph pack.
Certain characters I agree with for thier height, but others?
Mei Lin 7.... Why is she 5'7"
Kalea 7.... Why is she 5'8"
Both of these characters are way above the average height for their ethnicities. If they weighed in at 4-5 inches shorter they would probably have ended up in my shopping cart.
Bethany 7 is the only G3F character that I've purchased, because she has a very pleasing body shape (only 5'8") and a nice face.
On the second ledge of my soapbox....
We need more than one generic "heavy" morph. People carry their weight differently. This could be solved in several ways. Have completely different morphs for the major body shapes, or have one neutral weight morph and a series of adjusters to realisticly change the shape of various body parts (kind of like how there are individual muscle morphs for most major muscles/groups).
See I really don't understand the height issue, especially when there is a scale slider and a height slider, it just boggles my mind that it is an issue for some. Unless you have more than one figure in the scene, it doesn't seem to matter what their height is. Then again I never use the body morph with any character I purchase as I have spent a fair amount of time sculpting the body shapes (3 of them) that work for me and they are my default shapes to use/start with.
JamesJAB - if you change the scaling to 90% for MeiLin and Kalea, they end up 60.3" and 61.2" tall. Scaling the taller females at 95% will give you heights from 66.5" to 67.5". These should be in the ballpark for average heights.
Personally, I like having a variety of characters. Sometimes I use them as is with no fiddling and other times I will start mixing morphs and textures from different products, it just depends on what I want to accomplish at the time. With clothes, I prefer items that work by default with my figures, so that I don't have to spend extra time adapting them to the figures I use. On the other hand, if I really like a product, I will do whatever is needed to get it to work. I don't believe there is a right or wrong way to use the characters and morphs, although if someone is unwilling to spin the dials for a character, they are putting unnecessary limits on what they can accomplish. I suspect that newer users of DAZ Studio and Poser are more likely to just think of the figures as monolithic products to be used as is and as they gain experience a lot of them will expand how they work with the resources they have available. Some of us may never get to the point of wanting to sculpt new characters in a modelling program, but that is fine. So long as the way someone makes their art makes them happy, that is the most important thing.
Edit: I saw the post you are refering to. I have to admit that when someone knows how to do something that simple, but can't be bothered and then whines about it, I tend to lose sympathy for them.
Aside from FSMC's points above.
Kalea is presented as a Polynesian character, Polynesian woman average around 5'6" (about the same as white American woman). 5'8" doesn't strike me as wildly excessive?
Or maybe it's just me, my youngest is a 6' Polyeurasian 19 year old and she is not exceptional in her crowd (height wise, obviously exceptional in many other ways
)
The issue at hand is not the ability to scale a character manualy. The issue that arises there is that it's a uniform scaling across the entire figure. The listed measurements on the character pages would be more at home on someone who is shorter. Kalea 7 for example, 36-26-39 would look alot more at home on a pacific islander who is 5'4" or 5'5". And Mei Lin 7's proportions look freakishly skinny at 5'7".
But that's just my opinion.
Well, don't discount that many customers, especialy new ones, and some old ones too since iRay is relatively new, are purposely not using their creativity because their 1st goal in learning DAZ is to create a photorealistic render. They want to see if they can match those Victoria 7 and Michael renders. That is there goal. Well, at least as photorealistic as some of the examples they have seen.
And that is not an easy task really. I've tried a few times but honestly I haven't gotten close. I'm running a render now that isn't close for my latest try. I mean it looks good and it clearly isn't a toon or caricature but photorealistic? No.
That said, I like the look that is created but I don't know what to 'classify' a render style as when I do a clear render of characters in a very nice architectural model set like the Hapsburg model I am using now from HowieFarks with no postprocessing. It's obvious that all the talent in my renders done like that lie with the model artists and the DAZ Studio and various other programmers at other businesses but I still do them because I like the look.
I guess you could call that style 'modern realistic 3D game style' since it won't be too long before game hardware can handle that and some games are already close (somewhat simplified but most eyes won't catch the simplifications, least of all mine).
If you have the G3F morphs, there is a Height slider in the Shaping tab which only changes height. You can also dial in some weight(body size, heavy, pear shape, voluptuous, or weight).
I have a Measurement Metrics (or is it called Figure Metrics?) product I bought from the DAZ Store that really should be improved and integrated free directly into DAZ Studio. It's quite a basic requirement of creating scenes in 3D.
Measure Metrics. I have it too and agree that it's way too basic and expensive, and should be included free.
What frustrates me is when you find something that *ought* to solve your problem, abd then it turns out that it can't be used for what you need it to do.
Example. Admittedly one a bit out of the ordinary. I had a project of an apocryphal Oz book. Those need illustrations. Lots of them. One of the continuing major characters in the story is Professor Woggle-Bug.
He wears clothing. Insects have six limbs.
Now, I did a version of this project in DS3 back in 2011 using gen4-era characters. It was kind of a nightmare. The Woggle-bug was basically a kitbash of Noggin's Insect-I-Vore Roach with the Wasp head, and the Roach antenae. Getting clothing onto it was mainly a matter of applying shaders to the exoskeleton and adding boots, and gloves for the hands.
Well, a year and a half ago I redid about 2/3 of the illustrations using Genesis-era figures.
Well you would think, or I certainly thought, that the Four-Arm geograft on Genesis ought to be able to solve a lot of the problems.
Well, no. It doesn't appear to be possible to put any sort of clothing onto the Four-Arm geograft. Or I certainly never found a satisfactory way of doing it. I ended up with a kitbash of two invisible Genesis figures parented onto a squashed sphere, with sleeves from SickleMar's Tuxedo and the jacket itself bullied into fitting the sphere as well as possible -- along with the Roach and the Wasp. And shaders. It was not what I could call a satisfactory solution, but it about worked if I was careful about the camera angles.
But I still resent the fact that I could not fit clothing to the Four-Arm geograft by any apparent means inside Studio.
It is called Measure Metrics and looks quite useful, but at $50 normal price it is a little expensive for me. I also found this http://www.sharecg.com/v/71852/browse/21/DAZ-Studio/MWall-Prop which should do most of what I want.
When changing the height of a figure you should use the height dial, not scaling, for the reasons you stated. Most of the difference in height between adults is due to leg length, where as head size and torso lengths differ by a smaller margin. This is considered using the height dial, so will create more realistic shorter figures.
In that situation I would probably have tried dynamics, duplicates of the same clothing item (perhaps the morning coat freebie) one set to collide with the geografts and all surfaces hidden but the sleeves, and one set to collide with the main figure and NOT the geografts. Of course, with my limited skills and the crapshoot factor of working with dynamics in DS, it might not have worked any better than your solution....
well you can always use the geometry editor to create a set of sleeves only you fit to the second pair of arms with the transfer utility
Copied and pasted from the "Amber"thread:
". I noticed that Amber loads in shorter than Rayn or Skyler, perhaps she's a younger sister?......
What I would really like to see is a boy who is around the same age and style as Rayn."
Again Completely ignoring the youth morph options for the G2/G3 males and calling for a separate purpose built "Boy" Character to be built and sold.
The idea of my images looking like everyone else's makes me feel really uncomfortable, especially since the intent is to make money from most of them. Apart from utilities that will help me get more out of my machine in a shorter space of time, my favourite purchases are products which will help to make resurfacing and re-shaping content easier. This is why I like to see material zones highlighted in promos and environments shown to their full extent. It's always interesting to see what the PA (or whoever has been hired to do the promos) can do with their product, but I want to see what I can do with it if I buy. Another thing I really hate is finding out after the event that a product is based on something or someone from a popular game, film or TV show, since I seldom watch TV or films and am not a gamer either, so am usually the last to know. I've yet to be burned by buying one of these products (and it would be returned pronto if I found out within thirty days of purchase), but I've thrown a few things out of my wishlist because of it.
I don't think those of us who try to be more original have got it that bad to be honest - there's certainly more out there that's easily adaptable than there was when I started all this just a few years ago. It's just that it's not always showcased as such, and the unoriginal/popular clones aren't always shown for what they are either.
and GenX
for prepubescent characters that works well with a 50/50 mix
its actually the young skins without grown male body and facial hair thats the thing in short supply.