Does hair do the most to make Genesis 8 characters unique? Clothing? Morphs?
Selek
Posts: 70
I'm pretty new to Daz, and I'm wondering where to invest my resources to make my Genesis 8 characters as diverse as possible. Of course all facets of a character contribute to their unique look: body shape, skin tone, facial structure, hair style and color, personality, etc. But so far hair seems to be my "bottleneck," if you will. With only a few bits of hair in my arsenal, my characters often look familiar to me, heh. Whereas a relatively few morphs get me a wide diversity of body and face types.
Is this your experience? How do you advise a newb to spend money to "diversify" their Genesis 8 portfolio? I'm doing this mostly for fun, so I'm not planning to spend boatloads, but I would like to be able to make an array of interesting characters. Thanks!
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Firstly, don't throw lots of money at the problem - that is something that is way too easy to do here at Daz. From your post, it sounds as though you are planning to be selective in what you buy, so that is a good and cautious approach to take.
If I was starting out, I would invest in a figure (possibly one of the "Pro" bundles if it was on sale. Before deciding which figure to buy, I would take a look at these products:
https://www.daz3d.com/aliveshecried#
These are fairly recent and I think that they give a lot of value from a figure, with very little effort from the user. So for the price of a figure and one of the "Alt" add-ons, you now have over a dozen different looks.
The Genesis 8 body and head morphs (Male and female) are a good investment as they do help you to diversify your characters a lot. E.g.:
https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-8-male-body-morphs
In terms of hair, the Platinum Club items have fairly regular hair products (of course you need to be a PC member first but there are fairly regular sales on memberships so either wait for one of those, or just take out a month's membership and then cancel so it doesn't auto-renew, then get a longer membershiponce they are on sale). You can pick up a hair and a colour set for around 5 to 8 dollars.
https://www.daz3d.com/platinum-club-items
A lot of hair products contain style morphs and style presets, but these tend to be more expensive. Although everyone has their own favourites, I really like Out of Touch's products for their quality and versatility:
https://www.daz3d.com/outoftouch
I'd recommend building things up slowly until you find what styles or genres of work you prefer, and remember - there are ALWAYS sales at Daz, so if an item is full price, put it in your wishlist and wait for a sale - I just wish that I could always follow my own advice on that!
I list them in this order for making a character unique "enough":
1) Skin Texture set used
2) Hair used
3) Clothing used
4) Actual geometry of the face used
5) Actual geometry of the body used
6) Environment placed in
The actual facial expression and angle the camera is at actually makes a really big difference too but I'm not sure were to rank that - maybe even rank it at number one. It's that old saying "Out of Sight, Out of Mind"
I do some commission images for people in my roleplaying community. If I were to use their focus on what makes the biggest difference in getting their character right, it would be in order of the following:
When I'm working with someone to create their character, that is the order they tend to focus on the details of the character. Although I admit I start with focusing soley on the head so that probably has a factor in why the body shape is lower in priority.
I also highly agree with @nonesuch00 that the pose and camera angle can make more of a difference than you might think. I can't tell you how often I've worked with someone to get their character looking right in the base pose from a specific camera POV, then went to do the final image and had to readjust because cheekbones or jawline looked weird when looking from a different angle.
Thank you for those very helpful replies! DimReaper, you're right, I'm trying to be cautious about buying too much at once. I really like the Out of Touch stuff you linked to -- not just the hair, but also the clothes. Tempting. Does the Platinum membership include discounts on that vendor's items?
Nonesuch and JonnyRay, thanks for your comments. You both put hair pretty high in the "makes unique" ranking, confirming my early experience. But I hadn't thought about skin texture. I need to learn more to avoid the plastic-mannequin look. Anyway, it does seem hair is a top priority.
I actually have some facility with ZBrush, but I've never tried making Fibermesh hair with it. I'm tempted to give it a go.
Anyway, thanks again!
Hair for earlier generations can be less expensive* & is very easy to make work with a later generation (G8 in this case). DON'T autofit it! Just position and scale it, then parent in place. For Iray renders, I get good (enough for me, anyway) results just applying the Iray base shader if it's G2 or earlier, but you can buy Iray hair shaders, Sloshwerks', for example.
*Especially with one of the many sales/coupons/biweekly freebies including V4, M4, Genesis, G2; or if it's PC+ & you're a member
Yes, I would generally agree that hair is one of the biggest things.
I morphed up a model for a character I play in a tabletop roleplaying game. She's supposed to be (the space equivalent of) mixed-race West African/East Asian, and depending on whether I gave her straight black hair or curly black hair while trying to pick a style, she frequently ended up looking completely unrelated to herself. (Eventually I opted to dial the actual morph to be more Asian and go with the African hair to try to hit a compromise where she did look reasonably mixed-race).
Skin and face morphs, imo
I think facial structure and skin texture are the most important. But if you have a scene with several characters you absolutely need to give each one their own hair model. It will immediately look weird otherwise.
If you have a limited supply of character hair due to budget concerns and/or being new to the hobby, changing up hair colors and morphing the shape and length using the hair's dials as best you can is something that can help with situations where you are forced to use the same hairstyle for different characters in the same scene.
The PC membership gives you 30% off Daz original items - i.e. those directly owned by Daz3d. No extra discount for items from other vendors (PA's), but you do get two $6 vouchers each month - one for Daz originals and one for PA items.
For me, the It's usually a combination of things that make a character stand out. Outfit, hair, face, and even the facial expression can all work together to grab my attention.