Is it just me? - G8F Lips
Beanoutback
Posts: 62
Is it just me or do the majority of G8F (and actually some G8M) characters have rather large lips? I find that I almost always use very useful morphs to make them thinner. When I saw VYK Keira for Genesis 8 Female I automatically saw something that I thought was a little more 'realistic' and it turns out to be what I see as 'normal' lips - if there is such a thng. I'm also suprised about how bright a lot of the makeup is in characters - I remember the 80's had some pretty far out getups but is this still happening - other than hollywood? Admittedly I live in outback Australia so 'the model look' - if that is what it is - might not be as obvious here. (Current 47c degree heat melts the skin let alone makeup). In other parts of the world I wonder if lips are really this big? Maybe I need to travel more?! Botox? Surgery? Or just models with big lips?
Anyhoo - just thought I'd thow it out there.
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Comments
What do people even mean as "model look" though?
Nowodays "models" don't even mean what "models" meant in 1970s 1980s, i guess? while most in DAZ/Poser community have "old school" idea of how model looks, not current.
Current models look like this (first pic is austrialian model, btw)
I don’t think the men have big lips, but I do think michael 8 has lips set low to his face which look really off to me, I tend to have to raise them higher because he has a really big gap between his nose and lip.
the second issue I see is the expressions move the mouth in a weird way that doesn’t look like it fits the face. Giving a joker aspect, of a really big overly malleable mouth...when an expression is applied to m8 especially a smile it can look really off to me. For some reason the face musculature doesn’t match the smile and the mouth gets larger or smaller based on the expression.
In general I like bigger lips on men than I see so I make them bigger.
as far as females go, duck lips and larger plumper lips popular so we see a lot . Some of the Daz original characters do have smaller lips, but yes female characters tend to have full lips. That’s what the market goes for.
Tradional drawing guidance for faces say that the mouth line should be:
"The mouth line is found approximately one-third of the way down in between the nose line and the bottom of the chin. A line is loosely drawn for its location"
For those interested, the article I pulled this from is at https://thevirtualinstructor.com/facialproportions.html .
Everyone has their own personal tastes on what they like or find attractive, including the PAs. Luckily there are morphs so a user can change almost whatever they want, so I really don't see the issue.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That said, one thing that I have really wished for would be a smile morph that stretches the upper lip thinner. Right now if a character has those bee-stung lips, when she smiles they remain thick and full. In real people they strectch out and look thinner, especially the upper one. I don't have pics handy but google, for example, Jessica Alba to see a particularly dramatic example. She looks like she has a different mouth when she smiles but the standard smile morphs don't do that to DAZ characters. To me, that looks unnatural and it really looks most noticable when it's a character with large lips. I guess not just smiles, it's any extreme expression ought to effect that I suppose.
I usually change almost everything on a face, including where the eyes and mouth are on the face, so I'm not a good one to ask, but I do tend to lower the width of the mouth a tiny bit. Not too much, but a little :). I don't like thick lips either, because they don't look natural to me. Most faces I look at have much thinner lips (and males usually the thinnest lips of all).
Laurie
Same with me. I always have to morph the lips to a thinner look. Most all the time. The thicker lips do not look natural to me either.
When I do expressions I change the facial morphs as well in order to make them more accurate. Then I save the morphs that I changed with the same name as the expressions. One morph I still need is an HD pin cushion chin, which would really help.
I've seen some faces on Pinterest that convinced me that it's difficult to go too big to be natural with the lips. What they call "soup coolers." I grew up seeing faces with mid to big lips, and that's probably why I like them. Plus, the first time I kissed someone with thin lips I found it to be a strange sensation, and that's another reason. It may have been Jagger that made it popular for men to have larger lips.
This. For all that some folks like to go on and on about the added facial poseability of the G8 figures over the G3s, I find that the latest gen figures expressions often look more like exagerated caricatures than real faces when that posing is employed. I think DAZ has known this for a while, which is why we got a raft of older-appearing figures out of the gate with the G8s, as well as super-extreme characters like Edna and Ollie. Lee 8, in particular, has a smile that Ijust find creepy.
There's a bit of a misconception regarding facial posability. It's more posable for users because the face has all these bones and so you can theoretically create expressions now when previously you would have had to resort to actual sculpting in ZBrush or whatever. That does not really mean that the expressions necessarily end up better looking on G8 than G3 though. No amount of posing those bones is going to take care of the more subtle things like volume changes (lips getting thinner for example), wrinkles etc. This is still done by the PA's manual sculpting, if we're talking expression products. And that could have been done just as well on G3 if we're honest.
When it comes to realism, there are things that bother me more than the lips of female figure.
But that is a different thread. In general I like fuller lips, and usually dial them bigger. I agree about Lee's wooden smile, and Michael 8's rictus smile. The women seem to fare better with expressions that are happy than the men do.
I try to stay subtle with expressions. I don't think any of them look good at 100% TBH.
Laurie
I have always thought that the base or default settings should be as close to "natural" shape as possible is there is such a thing.
Now that you mention it I notice it too, especially on the base figures like Eva 8, V8 etc.
I don't mind it though.
They are going to need to invent and define muscles & muscle groups that expand and contract to ever get realistic expressions. Rigging bones are never going to manage that.
Personally I believe that there are certain biological rules for facial proportions so that there's always some consistent proportional harmony not matter how the face looks. If you break these rules when using morphs the face will look wrong or unnatural in some way. Sort of a proportional uncanny valley look.
Me too. Many figures and characters also look weird when they smile. I really like the way the old Miki 2 smiles, despite she's 10 years old she still beats most newer characters when it comes to smiling, IMO.
Miki 1 had even better expressions than Miki 2...lol. Such a cutie she was too...if it only wasn't for those horrible, horrible bends. Gah...her limbs bent like a piece of wet macaroni. 1st is Miki 1, second is Miki 2.
Laurie
Yes, the bends are terrible, but it's only a problem if you see them of course.
Maybe DAZ should hire those SM guys to design their figure heads.
All this is why I will buy expression packages but only if they come as pose control dials. I can create such myself from the pose setting but I'm lazy. I typically use a couple of expressions each dialed in at under 50% to give me something unique and not weird looking. For exmaple I might combine a little smile with a worried look (inner brows raised a little) to give a mom watching her kid go off to kindergarten for the first time. That sort of thing. But can't do that if it's just a pose preset. So please sellers, if you make expressions sell them as pose control dials.
Very important!
Ah, the lip debate again...! Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I personally am with Serene Night:
1. Thin lips (in most cases, not all) don't look attractive to me - no matter if female or male. I'd like to have some morphs that make the lips fuller, but don't inflate them like a rubber dinghy. There should be a way to make them flatter at the same time so that they look more natural. And yes: I saw that some of the G8 base females have extremely wide (joker) lips. Strange.
2. Daz should do something about the smiles/expressions in the G3- and G8-Generations. Until Daz offers an improvement, I find xyer's method to adjust the morphs very practical.
This is a interesting discussion.... as one of the relatively few black Daz3d users, I always assumed the lips were way too thin and bony. It is good to see the other perspective.
There are some artists whose character models I never buy, because they all have the same Angelina Jolie lips.
Don't get me wrong, I think Angelina Jolie still is a beautiful woman, but let Angelina Jolie be Angelina Jolie, and don't copy one of her most pronounced features on other faces, because it just doesn't look right. It's the same as the "big-butts" hype currently going on. It looks nice on some women, but it's not a requirement or anything for making a nice body. To me, it's the combination of the whole. Sometimes big lips look better, sometimes narrow lips look better. Sometimes a big butt looks better, other times a narrow butt looks better. I have no preference for any component, and only see it as detrimental when it clashes with the whole.