Gen 9? I don't know
hhglick
Posts: 52
When I saw the new announcement hype, in the back of my mind, I thought it might be Gen 9. But with Gen 8.1 just released, I didn't think they would drop a new model this fast. Apparently, I was wrong. I personally am not impressed by Gen 9 and feel its a money grab, like Gen 8.1. Wasn't the sell for 8.1 that it had more facial options? Now this is more of the same? Even more facial options? and more detailed skins? So I can get a mosquito and render a pic of it biting one of the models? And then there is the genger swaping feature. An extra setting is always nice, but its not a whole model upgrade.
I have certainly got my moneys worth out of the Gen 8 models I purchased, put I expected more from Gen 9. This feels like Gen 8.15. I wish more effort would go into developing new products and items rather than constantly remaking the same tired content. They should take a lesson from Apple, if you own the old version of a model, you can just upgrade to the new version if your have a Daz+ membership. Then they could keep doing these minor tweaks and people like myself wouldnt feel they were being taken advantage of.
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Comments
G8.1 was released in january 2021. That was a year and half ago, so hardly "just released".
When the character is useless without all the clothing, skins, morphs and items released for that specific character alone, then yes- a year and a half ago is 'just released' in my book.
This is so infuriating. I just started getting good at Daz in 2021 and poured all this money into Genesis 8 stuff accross the board with clothing, morphs, animations, etc. I wish they would update G8 with these enhancements or make it so all assets from G8 can work on G9.
It can’t be upgraded without breaking things, especially when it comes to a new rigging, that’s practically a new figure. If it put global updates in G8 it break the compatibility with its own products, which is not useful or logical, it is preferable to build another mesh from scratch.
In addition, DS already has all the tools to make conversions, we just need the PAs to provide us with scripts or plugins that save us the most cumbersome steps.
Genesis 8.1 has never been a real option to me. So I pretty much skipped her. So yay, ready to test G9.
It's not like one day I was going to wake up and go, "well...now that I have all the things I need for G8 I can get working on my novel...oh noe! G9? Everything is gone...useless....I must now rebuy all my content for G9!"
It's like a new version of D&D. Over time people will stop making things for the old version but it'll take a long while but by then the new version will be in a better place with more content. Even then there's nothing that says you can't run an earlier version of a game (or use an earlier version of a model.)
I don't know...it seems like a lot of hand wringing for a non issue. Then again, maybe I'm missing something.
So far, the promo renders don't really look any better than what an experienced user can create with 8.1. I have a feeling we may end up with a Genesis 3 situation here, where it was so much change (rendering the existing library of textures and morphs unusable) for so little added value that there wasn't much incentive to make the migration.
It's an even bigger issue now with the proliferation of HD morphs and MetaMixer, as it seems likely that any custom characters we have made utilizing those tools simply can't be migrated to G9 due to the differing geometry. Since non-PAs have no access to HD morphs, we can't even do it the hard way by projecting them in Zbrush or another modeling program, so once again there's little incentive to migrate to the new base model.
In addition, 8k maps are memory hogs and make very little difference if the model isn't well-lit and in extreme closeup - how many of us are rendering from a camera distance of 2 cm? How many of us are just going to downsample the maps so our computers don't grind to a halt for some 8k nose pores?
I don't begrudge them trying to advance the technology, but they also can't expect a warm welcome from their userbase when we have to start entirely from scratch with each new generation after investing hundreds to thousands of dollars in assets. We'll just have to see how much - if any - work has been put into backward compatibility.
What I need to know - is there a new technology how G9 uses morphs? The former Genesis figures had to load all morphs at once, so loading a figure can took up to 30 minutes when you own hundreds of different characters. I preferred the V4 figure where you had to load the needed morphs manually so much faster loading a figure was possible.
We don't know until G9 Starter essentials is released with DS 4.21
Please see my comment here:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7715486/#Comment_7715486 ;
I'm sorry, but I just can't justify the expense of it. I watched the presentation and I have to say that I was actually expecting them to talk about DAZ Studio 5. They dropped the teaser for it, but then have said absolutely nothing about it since then, other than it's coming. I just can't see the upside to it right now. 8K textures don't mean much to a hobbyist like me. I'm more than capable of getting what I want out of Genesis 8. I would rather they spent their development time putting work into DAZ Studio 5. They would have gotten much farther with the audience if they'd done that. Genesis 9 would basically mean having to upgrade everything --and I mean everything. More hard drive space for larger texture sizes. More RAM, a beefier processor and a 3090 ti at least before I'd even consider working with the figures. But then if you put more than three of them in a scene all that 3090 24GB will be gone before you know it. It's like those people who keep saying they need 120fps in games, even though the human eye can't see that fast so it makes no difference. 8K is only going to be relevant for a professional, and they'd be making their own textures anyway. About the only thing I thought was good was that they gave us a base texture for Asian, Hispanic, and Negro as well as Caucasian. So out of all that talk, I was interested in about 10 minutes worth of it. I think I've finally reached that point where this is just no good for me anymore. I want to animate and it seems we're never going to get the tools that allow us to do that in DAZ with any proficiency. I'm underwhelmed.
Except that G8.1 uses the clothes, skins, morphs and items from G8, so there was already plenty of content for it on release.
You look to have a fair number of pretty valid points. The question I ended up with was the seeming default inclusion of the HD as a slider. I'm wondering how that will interact with non-Daz or third-party or non-PA content creators, whatever you care to call them. Will they still be able to create and sell on the various other platforms as they currently do? Or is it some technical ploy to sort of eliminate the competition?
Considering the large hobbyist user base of Daz the proliferation of alternative platforms and content compatible with Studio is something I consider a net benefit. I certainly hope they don't break it.
I don't see how including HD morph as part of the core figure would prevent creators to make their own morphs, even morphs based on the core character.
HD part of the morph is often a separate slider, and will only kick in if you subdivide the mesh anyway.
As long as you export the figure at base resolution you can use that as a base for morph creation, just like you would do for earlier figures.
Nope, not missing anything. It's happened with every figure release I've seen back to V4 and probably happened with earlier figures.
You're correct things you already have aren't useless they can still be used and converted. I still occasionally use Nursoda's beautiful figures...
It was even worse for figures before V4, as there was no autofit, no morph transfer plugin... Basically no easy way to reuse your older content.
There was morphing clothes but I don't think I ever managed to use it. And texture transformer for uv's...
Is G9 going to support Blender rigging and its shaders like Evee and Cycles. If not why buy? I rarely use Daz Studio to render anymore. All the models I have > have to be reworked for Blender and Lightwave for my uses. Thank you Daz for the bridge otherwise I would stop buying your stuff. If the new stuff is Blender shader and rigging friendly > I see no problem with a new figure. Less work is always nice!
Moved to the Commons as it is not a Daz Studio topic and closed as there are alrady two main threads here on the subject.