she looks good yeah I was looking at v2 and 3 too, v2 has some nice poses with the figure but no expressions and you can't open the mouth unless there was a morph you hadto buy youget three versions well 2 really as one with skin is standard and  light edition the other is the silver no skin which is taller for some reason.oh no clothing. V3 at least has expressions and sort of clothing. Trying to think how could use her maybe as a synth droid, humanoid but not too real looking or a Auton

...as mentioned in several replies here, initially it was the cost of entry and rather intuitive setup.  I also wasn't sure at the outset if I'd like this (particularly coming from a traditional art background), so plunking down 250$ (the price for Poser) or multiple hundreds/thousands for one of the pro grade programmes up front on a very limited income didn't seem like a sound idea (kind of like all those expensive exercise machines advertised on television that wind up in the attic or garage to become dust collectors after a few uses).

Daz on the other hand was free, and was the full base programme, not a hamstrung demo that lasted only a limited time and/or you couldn't save what you did in it.  It came with a bundle of free content (the old 3D Bridge Pack which had the LE versions of Aiko 3 and a few animals as well as some props) and there were more freebies available not just on teh site here, but on others like Rendo, Content Paradise, and ShareCG.  This was enough to get a good feel for the software before actually putting down the zlotys for content in the store. Yeah there was also Blender (2.4) but at the time I found the UI was rather cumbersome (keyboard driven and coming from a lifetime of working with traditional art media it seemed rather counter intuitive).  To create a scene in Blender one also had to pretty much create everything in it from scratch, a fairly daunting process (I actually dabbled  a bit with CG in the 80s back when everything needed to be coded, debugged, and compiled).   

I also worked with the other programmes Daz offered (Bryce Carrara and Hexagon, the latter which was rather unstable at the time) as well as looked into Vue, Sketchup, Wings3D, and eventually bought Poser 6 (at a discount when 7 was in the wings) for its materials and cloth room. However Daz became my primary software, particularly as it began to grow. Yeah it isn't designed for creating large environments like Bryce and Carrara, but I learned to "fake it" back in the days before HDRs.  Granted it is very limited in modelling potential having only primitives, grouping and basic surfacing to work with, however the Polygon Editor makes kitbashing much easier.  With the Genesis concept and Iray, it evolved into something more powerful.  I could now design my own custom characters by mixing different figure morphs and shapes which was not possible beforehand.  As I find it to now be superb for character design, much of my content purchasing has gravitated towards merchant, morph, and shader resources along with plugins like GenX2 Skin Builder, LAMH, Garibaldi Express (now the built in Strand Hair Creator), and Ultimate Pose Master. 

In short, I have seen this quirky little programme I installed thirteen years ago has grown immensely. over the  years I've bene working with it (I still have the installer for ver. 1.8 as well as those for all subsequent updates).

Since Blender reworked it's UI and set-up, I have finally adopted it primarily for modelling purposes as it is not only more powerful but very stable.  However,with the new Daz bridge, I am curious about exploring it for rendering as well since Cycles also has an out of core process like Octane (albeit being a path tracing rather than of PBR engine).

So, I guess to address the original question, I've used Daz for along time, know my way around it pretty well, understand it's potentials and limitations (along with ways to get around the latter), have a hefty investment in it built over the years, it is not subscription based software (yet), and it basically does what I need for my illustration work.   As long as it doesn't change the minimum OS requirement to W10 I'm good (and even then I'll just stay with the whatever last version supports W7).  A Linux version would be nice but I also understand the can of worms that would open up (even some of the big software developers don't support it).

Years ago, I never cared for DAZ Studio, I was a die hard Poser user with way over $3000 worth of stuff I bought from CP/Rendo/RDNA/DAZ. When Genesis came out and it didn't do much for me, it was only when G3 and 8 became popular they really made me look at Poser figures and I realized that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the Poser figures to look as good or come close to realistic like the G3/G8 line seemed to be. Last year I literally booted up DAZ Studio for the second time, rendered the default G8 female and thought "wow her face looks like a real humans!" then it really hit me that Poser wasn't going to give me what I wanted in my renders. With LaFemme being the flagship Poser figure along with LaHomme, PE having almost no support at all from the community and (at that point) Poser 12 being a pipe dream, I left everything behind and dove into Studio.

There's so many things about Studio that I love, being able to simply dial in or out character morphs without having to apply the entire thing to G8 is probably the best thing for me. The ability to mix and match anything I want has allowed me to create unique and interesting features that would be impossible to do in Poser. I also prefer the way a lot of things are organized vs how they are in Poser, it took a while to figure out where certain catagories and menu items were but now that I've become a lot more familiar with Studio it just makes a lot more sense to me.

There are certain things I still miss, like the cloth room being more flexible with draping against multiple objects and the morph brush (Mesh grabber is nice but it's not even close to being a replacement for the morph brush). I've been keeping an eye on the P12 forums looking for a reason to upgrade from P11 to P12 but so far I haven't seen a single render that has impressed me or motivated me to consider buying P12. I know it's still in beta but when I can use the default Studio HDRI with almost any recent figure and get (to me) a more impressive image than anything I've seen so far in P12, I have to wonder why I didn't switch earlier.

So - forgot something... what to look for.
When I went to buy a laptop (well, just did), my priority list ran like this, after I set a budget max:

1. A decent GPU - not bleeding-edge (because only suckers buy bleeding edge), and not ancient. Today, this means the RTX 20xx series for iRay and such. They have RTX 30xx, but hoooly crap it costs a mint. Now if you;re on a budget, you can still do just fine with a lower-end GTX 1080 or better.
2. More than one drive. This way I park all my runtimes and content directoris on that fat second drive (a 2TB SDD), that I was able to easily drop into the new laptop; all my files kept their references, and no transfer times.
3. CPU. Yeah, #3. Why? Because an i7 10th-Gen isn't really too awful faster from the i7 8th-Gen I just replaced it with. Now if you exclusively use 3Delight or a CPU0intensive render engine, then okay, go for the gusto and get the latest/greatest CPU, maybe even spring for a mobile Xeon if you have the budget for it (yes, they make those).
4. Look for "Gamer" laptops - you don't pay as much as you do for a "mobile graphics workstation" or similar claptrap. 
5. Manufacturer reputation: MSI is a solid and known quality to me. So is Apple (which has slipped of late... urgh). So is Acer. Believe it or not, I avoid Dell (because their Alienware brand is way overpriced and usually outdated), and I'm okay with HP and their products are generally solid, but they tend to charge a bit more than they should IMHO, so unless there's a great deal on one, I don't bother.
6. Weight. In my case it's a bit low on the list because I'm buying 17" beasts. That said, my new baby is a full half-kilo lighter than the old Aspire 7... which is pretty nice.

My budget max was $2k, and I wound up paying $1200 (after rebates and price-codes. Note that I also paid $200 above that for a two-year SquareTrade warranty (because the missus had to use them once after dropping her laptop, and it was IMHO well worth the $200 for a two-year coverage period. Cheaper than AppleCare too.)

HTH a little.

Content and Speed. As someone who also uses blender, Yes there are quite a few things I can do there that I can't do in  DS, but I don't have an entire content library I can just click and load. The diffeomorphic plugin comes close, but setup is still enough slower that, especially for simpler scenes, it makes sense to stick in DS.

Also there are certain elements that are legitimately great: the recent strand hair tools have some features I legitimately prefer to blender's. being able to automatically adjust the rig to a new morph even extreme ones. autofollowing for morphing + smoothing with collisions is also pretty nifty

I like the current combo I have going. Primary setup in ds, but if at any point I realize I need something in blender I can pop it right over

Honestly, I use it because I use Face Motion for facial mocap for my animation work and I can't get those keys to export to Blender through either the D2B bridge or diffeomorphic so I can continue animating with the rigs in Blender. I'd honestly prefer to use the Blender rig because the feet won't move around all willy nilly, but the face mocap outweighs that right now. I also do love using dForce and will say I get better results with Iray than anything else. So I guess in a perfect world, I could animate in Blender, transfer that through the D2B bridge back into Daz and be able to mocap the face and render in iray as I do love Daz's ease of use. 

maybe it's a morph I need to buy? or iv installed it wrong? 

In the picture, you have "Left Shoulder Bend" selected - Leave it like it is and instead select the base figure "Genesis 8 Male" - which dials have non-zero value in parameters list? (try filtering with "Currently Used")

I use Blender for most, but I can transfer a Studio character to Blender simply enough, which saves me modelling - i can do that; i do, however, hate rigging!

Not sure if I can't resist this sale, at least I'm interested in Oskarsson's hair:

https://www.daz3d.com/artisan-hair-for-genesis-8-females

Anybody bought it already and willing to do a quick render with the flat top morph ? 

I rarely ever buy things when they come out but I did get Gunnar for G8M by DTHUREGRIF. It was mostly an impulse buy, plus he had a sweet introductory discount. I thought I might as well write a review.

I like Gunnar. He's a conventionally attractive young white guy with perhaps a bit of a "country boy" look. He looks a little awkward when you first load him; but once you give him a proper haircut, a bit of a facial expression, and a pose he starts revealing his charms.

Context suggests that the character was inspired by the TV series Vikings – his female counterpart is clearly inspired by Vikings actress Katheryn Winnick – but Gunnar really doesn't look anything like Travis Fimmel, Alexander Ludwig, Clive Standen, or any other actor from that series I can think of. Not a criticism, just an observation.
 

Gunnar's head morph – which extensively uses G8M Head Morphs – is attractive (to me) but not very detailed. You can see this in his promos, he's not a particularly photorealistic character. This does not bother me; I like working with non-photorealistic characters, I find that they are less prone to tumbling down the uncanny valley. But I can imagine that Gunnar's somewhat simplistic sculpt might not be to everybody's taste.

One aspect I don't like about his head morph is that it gives him imperfect teeth. It's still just about acceptable (to me), but only just. Artists can certainly give their character wonky/realistic teeth but I really think they should come as a separate dial.

Another aspect that could have been done better: Gunnar's head morph dial is located in Parameters but not in Shapes, which is irritating; and it's not linked to the G8M Head Morph dials the character uses. Which means Gunnar can't be dialled in partially, you have to apply him fully by using the one-click option.

His body morph is entirely made from G8M Body Morphs. It's... fine. It serves well enough but it's nothing special. I'll probably always refine it with some other body morphs.

His skin is fair but not overly pale, with a slightly "rough" quality to it. It's appropriate for a Viking warrior but I can also imagine it on a boy-next-door/surfer/jock type. I'd say the quality of his skin is good-not-great. It's not the kind of skin the bards will praise in songs for centuries (Hey there, Alistair! What's good, Tyrone!), but I do like it and will use it.

He has a baked-in five-o-clock shadow and baked-in hair on his legs, forearms, and armpits. I like it, although I can imagine it might bother some.

His face doesn't have a no-brow option, which is a little more annoying to me. His painted-on brows are quite prominent and very yellow, which is limiting. I wish I didn't have to deploy Photoshop or Brow Remover to make him anything other than wheat blond. A no-brow option would have been much appreciated.

Gunnar's skin loads in his matte preset, there's also a glossy option. To be honest I'm not entirely convinced by either preset but I found it very easy to slightly tweak the skin and make it look more to my personal liking (I mostly increased gloss and translucency.)

He comes with a number of material options such as muddy, covered in blood, drenched in sweat, stronger five-o-clock shadow, pubic hair, face tattoo, black eye, and others. All these option use LIE (with the exception of the sweat option which uses Top Coat.) This means they can be applied to other G8M and G3M characters, which is very cool.

The facial tattoos look cool but unfotunately, if you take a look at the maps you'll find that they are pixellated and not as high quality as they should be. Usable, but not great. Other maps don't seem to have this problem, only the two tattoo overlays.

All overlay maps are saved as PNGs with transparent backgrounds, yet dropping them into Diffuse Overlay doesn't work, for reasons that I haven't figured out.
 

One aspect of his skin that I absolutely have to call out: Gunnar comes with a set of Diffuse maps and a set of SSS maps... but if you compare the two you'll find that both sets are 100% identical.

I don't mind if artists use the same map in Diffuse and Translucency. In fact I prefer it because fewer maps make for smaller files and faster renders. But to save the exact same set of maps under two different names... it's stupid, it's nonsensical, it's a waste of space and resources, and it seems scammy. And none of it was necessary. Just use the same set of maps twice, many reputable artists do!

Even though this is easy to correct manually it's still my least favourite aspect of this character, just because it's so dumb and unnecessary.

Some more random skin facts: Gunnar comes with anatomical maps; aside from diffuse/SSS maps he also has normal, specular, and bump maps; all maps are JPGs except for the various overlay maps, which are PNGs as mentioned earlier; the artist included the option to turn on displacement but it's just the bump maps again and I wonder if that even makes sense for a non-photorealistic character.

So... there are definitely some minor (and arguably a few major) points that can be improved. But at the end of the day... I like Gunnar! He's cute, and I'm basic like that! I think his promos are a good representation of the character, what you see is what you get. So ultimately, take a look and judge for yourself. I hope my ramblings were useful to some!

Lastly, I'm attaching my first render with Gunnar. I tweaked his skin settings and body sculpt – there is some SWOLE in there – and made his face and head a bit wider. Also attaching a screenshot of his not-great teeth, with Mouth Realism HD at 0%.

maybe it's a morph I need to buy? or iv installed it wrong? 

I'm not sure if anyone has tried using AME on Leyna, so I gave it a go.  AME Body set to 50%, AME Flex Size 50%, AME Muscle Definition 100%, and AME Veins 50%.  Snuck in my starter morph parameters, but dialed out Cartoonized.  Her outfit is one for G8F and autofitted.

Render straight out of DAZ Studio with none of my usual contrast/tone enhancements.

Leyna for Genesiis 8 Male might be of use for those wanting a quick way to get AME abilities on a female character without a lot of effort. :)

Here's the store link for Leyna:

https://www.daz3d.com/leyna-for-genesis-8-male

Lee

 

That's actually a great idea. However, is there a product that allows the use of female genitalia on a G8M-based character for situations such as studio nudes? If so, your idea would have even more merit. Thanks for this suggestion!

Thank you, RenderPretender.  I would suspect that there are such products on more mature themed 3D websites.  Let us know if you find something that works!

Lee

Not sure if I can't resist this sale, at least I'm interested in Oskarsson's hair:

https://www.daz3d.com/artisan-hair-for-genesis-8-females

Anybody bought it already and willing to do a quick render with the flat top morph ? 

hello, i have not managed yet to change the SY morph/s. they are way too many and there is no update. I downloaded her files from share cg in april this year.

as for the missing g8f morphs, i checked them out and i have all of them installed. the same with v8 and topsy. they are all installed in data directory morphs location (attached screen shot).

i'll hve to open a support ticket, since i cannot tell why the issue related to g8f morphs is occuring.

2020-11-24 14:45:15.823 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(6843): Could not find target property for formula: 
Genesis8Female:/data/DAZ%203D/Genesis%208/Female/Morphs/DAZ%203D/Head/PHMEarlobesAttached.dsf#PHMEarlobesAttached?value in file : 
/data/DAZ%203D/Genesis%208/Female/Morphs/DAZ%203D/Victoria%208/eJCMVictoria8EarlobesAttached.dsf

PHMEarlobesAttached.dsf comes with the product "Genesis 8 Female Head Morphs", do you have it?

2020-11-24 14:45:16.024 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(6843): Could not find target property for formula: 
Genesis8Female:/data/DAZ%203D/Genesis%208/Female/Morphs/DAZ%203D/Expressions/eCTRLExcitement_HD.dsf#eCTRLExcitement?value in file : 
/data/DAZ%203D/Genesis%208/Female/Morphs/DAZ%203D/Topsy%208/eJCM_Topsy8_ExcitementHD_div2.dsf

"eCTRLExcitement_HD.dsf" comes with the product "Genesis 8 Female Expressions", do you have it?

hello, i have not managed yet to change the SY morph/s. they are way too many and there is no update. I downloaded her files from share cg in april this year.

as for the missing g8f morphs, i checked them out and i have all of them installed. the same with v8 and topsy. they are all installed in data directory morphs location (attached screen shot).

i'll hve to open a support ticket, since i cannot tell why the issue related to g8f morphs is occuring.

I just did one using the Hexagon Bridge following this procedure. 

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/394251/face-transfer-how-to-save-as-an-adjustable-head-shape

Did you do something special with the 2nd picture re pose and morph? Whenever I do a pose like that - really anything with lifted arms - I get wonky biceps and triceps, sometimes wonky traps and lats.

(Why do those subtle scars on his torso make me feel... excited?)

The pose is from Composed Poses for Genesis 8 Males ('Pose 01M', descriptively), but I rearranged the right arm a lot and the left a bit because they were not having a nice time with the hood at all.  Also, I have both Ultimate Natural Bend Morphs on (I totally forgot that was its name until I had to make an educated guess at what the U of UNBM meant...), which does a lot of heavy lifting with some poses.  And in part I think it's because a lot of his right arm got obscured by the hood anyway.     I usually avoid poses like this like the plague (same problem, I spent longer sorting out Alex's arm in one picture than I did setting up the rest of the scene and it still looked iffy) but this one worked out surprisingly well.

I'll admit to getting a bit... uh... distracted by his stomach as well...

I'm not sure if anyone has tried using AME on Leyna, so I gave it a go.  AME Body set to 50%, AME Flex Size 50%, AME Muscle Definition 100%, and AME Veins 50%.  Snuck in my starter morph parameters, but dialed out Cartoonized.  Her outfit is one for G8F and autofitted.

Render straight out of DAZ Studio with none of my usual contrast/tone enhancements.

Leyna for Genesiis 8 Male might be of use for those wanting a quick way to get AME abilities on a female character without a lot of effort. :)

Here's the store link for Leyna:

https://www.daz3d.com/leyna-for-genesis-8-male

Lee

 

That's actually a great idea. However, is there a product that allows the use of female genitalia on a G8M-based character for situations such as studio nudes? If so, your idea would have even more merit. Thanks for this suggestion!

Did you do something special with the 2nd picture re pose and morph? Whenever I do a pose like that - really anything with lifted arms - I get wonky biceps and triceps, sometimes wonky traps and lats.

(Why do those subtle scars on his torso make me feel... excited?)

Ì have a figure posed and exported to blender.

Made adjustments in blender and imported the result back to DAZ via morph loader pro.

Technically it worked but the new morph "explodes" the mesh.

Question:

Do moprhs only work if they where made with a figure that was exported in base / zero pose?