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Comments
I would like to see more male figures, especially faces. One of the things I've always tried to do is make sure that my characters' faces are distict from each other. I've seen too many comics (my preferred genre) where the artist knows how to do 1 male face and figure, and 1 female; the only real distiction between characters is the clothing. I do get a lot of mileage from various morph packs, but it's nice to have a good variety of faces and bodies to use as bases.
One thing I look for is figures that have more than just one body and face; Mal3M3dia's products are good in this regard. I have noticed that as we've progressed through the generations, the iconic figures have come with less in the way of morphs. Stephanie 4 had 9 variations included, She-Freak 4 had 8 heads and 4 bodies. Michael 5 had 2 additional bodies, Victoria 5 had 1 extra body. Freak 5 had one additional body, but 5 additional heads. He was probably the last one I saw who had that many additional morphs. It just seems to me that I'm getting more for my money when a product comes with a variety of options. It seems to me that the base figures should each come with several faces to cover the 'basic' racial groups, and several skin textures to go along with them. That could really be helpful in the case of Genesis 3, where older skin textures can't be used.
For what it's worth, recent experiments have shown me that actually G3 starts with a lot of opportunities to adjust facial features even before you get to morphs and texture. All those facial bones.
I need to play with G3F more. I haven't really experimented much with her.
The technology looks really cool, but I can't really consider shifting over for at least a year or two and a LOT more content is available (and I have enough money to convert over)
...I most likely will stay with G2 unless Zev0 issues a Growing Up for G3 and both a more lithe petite character (suitable for mid to late teens) is available as well as a set of NPMs are released (would probably need Vicky 7 for those though, wish they'd be released for the base G3F figure instead).
I buy characters for skins and makeup, and perhaps facial features that I can make with morphs. I pick up as many facial morph packages I can find as well. Rarely do I use the eyes that came with the character but pick from a pool. Every character I have created I have personalized in some way.
I too am hesitant to purchase Vickie 7 - I am heavily invested in V5 and V6 with lots of utilities. I can (with patience) interchange the clothes and I have a great collection of hair including V4 hair. The point of this was to build on an existing library of items I can interchange and even upgrade the clothes with new texture packages. Same with the hair. So why throw all that investment out? Doesn't make sense to me. I won't even consider V7 until there is a much larger selection of morphs, clothes, utilities, etc. to go with.
Not too sure about IRAY either. Yes, I am buying a new computer with IRAY capability, but I don't like the idea of re-texturing everything - and what if I happen to like the textures of the clothes?
Brilliant~ =-)
Actually, Beautiful Bends for G2M have been around for quite some time.
http://www.daz3d.com/beautiful-bends-for-genesis-2-male-s
The correctives are made from scratch for each figure. So, no morphs are shared between them. As for the (financial) reward, it's not as big seller as the G2F version, but sales have been quite good. I didn't make him for that though. For me, it's matter of necessity. Couldn't let him have those ugly looking limb bends.
Not particularly fond of needing to "tweak" things.
What exactly do you mean by "tweak?" Are there standard steps you can use for each item, or does it vary with each one?
Well, for example, I find most items work pretty well if you have Glossy Weight .5, Glossy Color white or 192 value gray, and Glossy Roughness .5.
Some shaders convert in that ballpark. Sometimes they have a glossy (specular) map at 1.0 glossy weight, so it works out, sometimes glossy color map, etc.
Buuuut... sometimes shaders end up 1/white/1, so they have amped up brightness. Sometimes they end up with tiny glossy weight (.0 or .000936 or something), glossy color black, and high gloss value, so they either look dingy or weirdly glossy.
Once you know what to look for, though, it takes only a few seconds to fix: select all, 'Iray Base Shader,' change glossy to what I outlined.
If anything is metal, consider just upping Metallicity to 1, (or less if it's dingy), or perhaps ctrl-click one of the Iray metal shaders.
If there's any emission color and you don't want there to be, set it to black.
On the plus side? You can VERY EASILY make glowy and glassy bits. Windows/lenses and similar? Ctrl-apply the glass shader. Glowy bit? Takes a little more work -- set Emission Color to white, then put in the old ambient map (which is often the same as base color map), Temperature to 6500, and then start adding zeroes to the Luminosity until you can see it in NVIDIA preview.
So, for example, it took me maybe a minute to convert a scifi console, and it looks awesome.
Oh, also, check bump channel. Sometimes it gets set to 0, sometimes you want more anyway, so I'd set it to somewhere between 2 and 5. If there's displacement, be sure to switch it on (again, sometimes it goes to 0 for no good reason), and you might want to double-check what the values were pre-conversion (undo/redo can be helpful here), and then set Displacement subd to 3 (any lower and it won't look right. Occasionally you want to set it higher, but try 3)
Yes, it takes a little work, but the results, IMO, are fantastic. And once you understand it, I find it's a lot more straightforward and intuitive than doing stuff in 3Delight. Particularly with lighting -- lighting flows through the scene in a very realistic way.
It should also be noted that often the autoconversion is really darn good. Here's a series of 'I didn't change anything, I converted the shaders, I converted and tweaked the shaders':
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Iray-tests-552459014
As you can see... frankly, even if you do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, most of the time the autoconversion works fine.
Autoconversion mostly works, although I am still not very happy with certain hair models after conversion. Hair that looked good under 3DL can look medicore at best under Iray and this seems to be the case no matter what I do.
But back onto the topic, my goal is to have lots of figures, so it doesn't take much to prompt me to buy one other than a good sale on a decent starter or pro bundle.
My advice with hair:
Most older hair has glossy and light information in the base/diffuse color. If this is the case, after converting, get rid of the map. Also get rid of any glossy maps. If you want more varied color, look for some sort of 'mixed strand' color map, or make it yourself, if you can. Otherwise, just set the base color.
The key is bump and displacement maps along with cutout. Leave those alone, crank up bump to 5 or so; that way the strands will catch the light better. It may also be useful adding a top coat; use glossy color for a tone or lighter version of base color, and then a fresnel top coat to add 'shine' on the hair.