Morphs, textures, oh my. Variety needed
daveso
Posts: 7,796
There are constant characters coming out, and I love a whole lot of them, but way back in time there was mainly a core character and then morph packs where you could create pretty much any character you could ever want. What are the best morph packs right now for Gen9?
Also, and ,maybe more importantly,skin texture creation. I have kin Builder 8 for Gen 8,Skin Builder 8 for Genesis 8 Female(s) | Daz 3D and I have converted to 9, but I dont even remebr what I did .... anyway, I have found SB8 to be somewhat limited, maybe its me. Anyway, it would be cool to see a SB9 for sure, but what other textrues have you tried, what other texture creation mechanisms. I know there were a couple sites where you could buy skins and set them up....
I guess my overall thinking is to achieve more variety in the characters, the skin, and the shaping. Its cool to buy off the shelf, but certain looks are just not that wanted, imo. Not everyone on the street is a fashion model, but the vast majority of characters sold here are. Even older women have a pretty nice figure. I need some arthritic joints, fingers, crappy posture, not perfect breasts, or faces.
What do we have that can achieve regular, hard-working people that have spent way too much time in the pub, or find themselves in hard times, hard life.
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I agree. The other day another hand pose set came out and I looked at the perfect fingers, then looked at my hands. A little finger bent, twisted by lifting a ceramic mug with my right hand for at least 60 years. Add knuckles swollen with arthritis and one possibly broken at some point from a fall, finger nails growing back splintered (cold dry air and other damage). Heck, when I got my new ID card, they could only capture 17% of my index finger's print. Scars left from dog bites, swollen veins, dry papery skin over all of it. Hand lotion is never enough to help. Growing old sucks big time, but what it does to our bodies in little ways shows. The models here in 3D should at least reflect that if they are supposed to be at least 60 or older. And if they have lived a hard life (smoking, drinking, drugs...) it may be sooner in the 40s or 50s. I am not counting rich women and men who can afford plastic surgeons or fancy products to maintain themselves from the time they entered puberty in this. Just your normal person on the street.
Morph packs seemed to dry up when PA's started using Zbrush to morph entire characters in one go, with maybe just the head and the body as separate dials.
We definitely need more variety and realism with the morphs and textures. With G9 I can only count two core releases who are older (Minerva and Walter), and they're quite old by now (pun intended). We need updated, realistic and more versatile skins. I like the closeups on the skin and the realism, but it usually looks so...perfect. I agree, the imperfections are what display our humanity and what we've been through.
exactly. Not sure many humans are "perfect" A lot of DAZ characters are though. Definelty need some gnarly, kind of broken down characters. Skin textures to match. And a whole lot of variety to them. Just a quick stock image I found ... they are all a lot different.
You'd think with G9 putting emphasis on imperfections like asymmetry and not-supermodel body proportions we'd see more grounded characters but that's not the case at all. My guess is either
1. it's simply easier to make a attractive looking female character #20, or
2. those realistic, imperfect characters just don't sell as well as pretty ladies.
Or most likely, a mix of 1 and 2.
Maybe they don't see the link between lack of originality and falling sales, like some tired old film studio that keeps on making sequels.
I think we have a few more older and old men for Genesis 9. Nikolai 9 HD for example, Julius 9 HD, Genghis Khan 9 HD, Mercilus 9 HD, Thimor 9 HD, and Neanderthal 9. Donnie and Joey 9 are not youngsters either. What's missing are older women. Yes, and people who you can really tell haven't lazed around in luxury for decades.
They can certainly see relative sales performance, and there are non-young and distinctive charcaters to give an indication of what sells better. We need to be aware of the diffrence between what we want in particular and what the broader market may want on average.
My perception as a customer is that there's a healthy count of character PA's who are appear to be dialing it in. That leaves me wondering whether the customer market has a high turnover, making it more important to have a new release out in every cycle than to target what could be a very small, committed core customer base. There are many characters that I won't buy because I bought essentially the same character 2 or 3 years ago. A new user landing on the store doesn't have that perception. If there is a high customer turnover, a savvy PA should do best by ensuring they have products that are prominent and promoted during the time that a new user arrives. I think that could favour quicker character turnover over more intricate, distinctive work.
Saying that, I do buy almost every DO character, but it would be wrong to assume that's because I want the character. Instead, it's because the textures tend to be among the highest quality, and textures are one of the most important ingredients in making distinct characters.
When it comes to purchases for meshes/morphs that are useful for making distinct characters, I'm increasingly buying from other stores (and spending more, I should add).
When I really want to put the time into a character myself, I find face transfer gives me the best starting base. I often blend several face transfer generations together, and do some odd stuff like deliberately doing face transfers on bad reference photos to give me something 'off' to blend in too. Once I've a base and need to add details, I've rarely found myself wanting for any other morphs than those in the Daz Store (I have most of them). I could always do with more noses, though - less for the isolated look of a character, and more for how they look next to other characters. Noses come in many shapes - which we have an okay number of in the store - but every shape also comes in many, many variations - which I do not see much of. If I want a Roman nose, for example, I have 2 or 3 to choose from. Not great when you're rendering Rome! I also find noses the worst performing part of the face mesh when it comes to customising using smaller, targeted morphs (wings, bridges etc.). The results are often monstrous, whereas in reality while many people think their own nose is monstrous while they're actually quite beautiful or, at worst, fitting.
Yeah for sure on the sales. That's why I mentioned texture creation and morph products that can crewate mid to elder character with realistic fingers, toes, sagging areas, and all that. Skin textures of older folk are not even close to what most skin textures are here. Same goes for the younger set --- under 16 or so.
@daveso I have done a lot of morphing with G8, and it is my opinion, one can not have too many morphing products. Same goes for skin making assets. As wonderful as all those products are, I started feeling more and more like I was in a box. I could create a character close to what I wanted but it was never quite right, always a compromise. Compromise makes me very unhappy when it comes to my art. I started modifying/creating skin textures in GIMP, and doing seams work in Blender.
With the release of G9 I started sculpting in Blender, and it is wonderful. I am still in a box, (moving mesh has consequences) but it is a much bigger box, far less limiting.
If you go with morphing assets I suggest you just dive in. There is a learning curve but it is not too hard. You can see the results of your work almost in real time.
The Blender route is much more difficult. A near vertical learning curve, but is the more rewarding path IMHO.
Modifying existing texture assets (for personal use) is not difficult, but you will need to become very familiar with the UVs. Creating displacement and normal maps is more difficult but very achievable in a program such as GIMP.
Learn those skills and the sky is the limit.
well, there are some interesting morphs in store today
for the anatomical elements
yeah, those secret bits have been getting a whole lot of attention lately. It's like the entrie DAZ philosophy has changed, except the forums. Maybe they've realized an untapped market. In my case, the more they go that route, the less I'm interested in. My work rarely involves people with no clothes on. I'm not into most of the skimpy stuff. I do buy some clothes on the erotic side, in my opnion erotic, and I do erotic images. Overall though I'm more of an utrascenery kind of guy :) Hug a tree. Kiss a rock.
it's something I have never loaded even though I bought it for all the eyebrows when on sale
Well I've thought the last bunch of characters, from DAZ 3D at least, have been very average in body type, meaning they look skinny, but not muscular, to modern day averages in the USA at least, and average looks, which actually means they are attractive.
Male-M3dia | Daz 3D though has done several sets of sculpted morph characters and they are quite good too. They are more of the sculpted, physical types though, like if you were casting the sport stars of your college or high school play, well except the sets he did of kids and teens, who just look slightly chubby and average, on average. You will have to mix and match texture sets, or use Colm Jackson's Skin Detailer For Genesis 9 Merchant Resource | Daz 3D, or make of your own of shaders adjustments, or a mix of all three to make textures for his morphs though.
...I live by morph and skin resource sets. As I've mentioned before I have an extensive library of them going back to G2. Two of the assets I use are Generation X2 and Zev0s XTransfer. Using both in sequence I can actually transfer G2 morphs and morph resources to G8. which further expands the resources I have available.
The same goes for hair as I have all of Slosh's UHT kits as well as a couple others which saves me a bundle on separate hair colour/texture add on content.
I also use Zev0's Skin Builder8 along with the Ultimate Iray Skin Manger by V3Digitimes to develop more variation in skin appearance (for example, someone who is very fair skinned with freckles or a realistic albino skin).
This is partially why I have not fully adopted G9 (save for unique characters by artists like RawArt that are pre-sculpted).as there are no conversion resources like this (likely due to the androgynous figure base) only ones for the existing base characters.
I've fallen into quite a few G9 characters now, lots of them go for a decent price, low. Overall I even preferred V4 more than 9...probably more for its uniqeness at the time, but I had way more fun then. G8 I actually like a lot more than 9. G8.1 just threw another block into the overall flow, at least for me. So yeah, G8 , and I have a lot more resources for that generation for sure.
There are plenty of conversion options for G9. I even use X2 in my workflow to transfer ancient characters and morphs to G9. Plus - spoiler alert - most of the convertor products are nothing more than macros on things you can already do in studio.
Today's sales email title made me chuckle and reminded me of this thread.
thing is, there really isn't edgy about it. The character by Matari3D is pretty cool though. Not your everyday beautiful male. yeah, some real character to him.
OK, speaking of morphs, and of M3D’s latest character … are there any morph packages for either G9 or G8M that can “straighten out” a pinched (side to side) nose like M3D Frank’s? I’ve had no success with this. Obviously I can just use a different character, or apply a skin to a different underlying shape, and all that. This is more of a “theoretical” question — I’d like to better understand how to get the results I envision, rather than just spinning dials until it looks “right.”