I attached a few of the screenshots. I don't have an image hosting account anywhere, sorry for the inconveniece! The GC Morphs don't load where they should and that solves the issue of why they don't show in the search bar. The folder structure matches other morphs but they load outside of the actor, and that is a vendor issue. So, you are golden there. I've included a few screenshots to show that male body morphs load with the female ones, as I meantioned. Not sure if it has something to do with how the morphs are tagged but those were my main two concerns. I willl probably just end up selecting morphs manually rather then letting it decide randomly and this will advert any issues.   

That is very strange....Can you show me the male morph path location on Genesis 8 Female on your hard drive? I want to see why they are populating under Genesis 8 Female. Do you have Dial Control? I only ask because with that you can browse to exact install location of a morph. I wanted to see it's path in data folder.

I made a couple. Both stated with basic G8F. One got some 3DU Toon morph in it, so I went with the toon theme on that one. The expressions were also mixed by Shape Gen.

1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...
2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.
3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...
4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 
5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 
6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

 

6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.
7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 
8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 
Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.
Cheers!

I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? )

Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...

Large breasts occur naturally in women with all sorts of body types. Weight influences breast size, but is far from the sole determining factor.

yeah here a exemple this is a "famous" ex porn japanese now cosplayer Shibuya Kaho

she is natural large breasts and definitly she is not 300+bls, some peoples have that idea which womans must be "small breasts" all over the world which is the "natural" and only if you get fat which they "grow" but it's not really like that, this what make humans a so special race, because different propertions and spects of the body can happen and is really, really hard to 2 peoples looks like "twins" or equals even when we talk about "races, like 2 caucasian or 2 african never gonna look's like the same, aside from the color, in the same way you can have "ugly or no so attractive womans" being born you have really gorgogoes/awesome or "saiko-desu body" and face womans, the same goes for males, what is matter more is the "genetic" as a big factor, good genes gonna create good look peoples even if they are a little fat(not super ungly fat) the same goes for breast sizes if you family genetic is about "large breast womans" then you aways gonna see "large breast womans" on that family and only few rare cases this not gonna happens.

This would also fit into the "photos, that look like renders" thread. Can't find it, though.

Zev0, I will try to get some screen shots up and will play around with it a bit more. And I agree with the above poster about being able to select morphs by vendor or product as I do have a ton of morph sets but only use select ones. Right now, it just seems like I have to search them out of a giant list and  tick the morphs one by one. It would be simply amazing to be able to tick them by package or set. Not a deal breaker but it would definitely be an amazing selling point for the dummies who haven't bought this product yet! Loving it so far, even with the issues I am having. 

"MRL Rigged Curly Ponytail has a wide range of hair options and combines the realism of dforce with the control of rigging to create an ultra realistic and controllable Curly Ponytail that suits a wide variety of different genres."

Phoenix1966, the hair loads right out of the box with dForce modifiers applied to the ponytail, its nodes, the scalp hairs and its nodes but not the scalp itself. Something that shouldn't be the case with non dForce items and I know this because I frequently turn non dForce items into dForce items with a 75% success rate. The item also comes with a simulations settings folder in the product. Explore the product and simulation settings appears below Documents, Hair and Materials tabs. It was clearly intended to be a dForce designed hair but it just doesn't work under an circumstances. It also crashes the simulation for everything else in the scene unless it is hidden prior to simulation. One last thing, the scalp hairs sit quite a ways above the scalp itself, which looks horrible and without dForce being used, there has been no way to fix it from what I can tell as it does not seem to conform or morph with head morphs themselves. So this is all around a huge let down for me as I absolutely love the look and style of this hair. 

Does anyone have any thoughts on the latest draft of my Naomi Scott morph for G8F?  I could really use at least one other pair of eyes on her as I potentially approach a release-ready version.

 

 

You have done well so far. Can I say you are making a common mistake. 

You should never ever base the standard morph on a characters expression. Find a picture source that reflects a neutral stance.

You are concentrating on the individual parts of the face. We all do it. What happens is that the features become too strong. I'm not sure how you do it in Daz Studio but dial the morph down to say 50% and start again using that as a base. Don't be afraid to do this - Keep doing this.

Concentrate initially on the overall features. She is a beautiful woman. Very petite. Small face. Highly defined PETITE nose. Large lips. Relatively large eyes.

Sorry if I'm sounding overally negative. You are doing great so far.

From a perspective of someone who has very little time to spend on 3D and (and with use cases that are perhaps very different than what people in this thread are referring to) - I find iray in DAZ Studio one of the easiest render engines around to get acceptable results, and at least for the scenes I do, it mostly is quite fast and responsive compared with other renderers I am using (Modo in the past, now also Blender).

Part of this is of course that I have lots of Daz Studio content that was already prepped by others for iray with extensive materials, but the point is that in the end, the combination of tuned content and iray allows me to get results that I could never get with Blender - I just can't afford the time it takes to get there from a content creation point of view. At least for me, that time factor is a much bigger factor than machine cost issues.

To have at least one positive voice on iray in this thread - I really quite like it in the context of the rich content ecosystem it sits in.

Anyways - I would also very much like to see DAZ figures natively in Blender. In an ideal world, I want all the modeling capabilities in a general purppose 3D app like Blender together with the Daz figure stuff much more than two separate apps. For this i'd love to have the iray engine be available in Blender too so that I don't loose all the content I have - or a material converter that works flawlessly :)

I find the Diffoemorphic plugin excellent at getting characters and products into Blender with very little effort. I always transfer props and general background items seperately from figures as once a prop has been transferred it can be added again just as simply as in Studio.

The image shows the steps I take, with the final one being an option as I like using Rigify. I don't adjust the materials as I like to use my own setup I've created, but at the default they look good. I click those buttons and let them run with default settings, which works fine in my experience.

... The same as Iray, if your lighting sucks, your render will too.

It's good that the process suits you, the one you use now, but I too don't usually have much time, and I found Iray was a hog on resources, which impacted on my time; Blender has allowed me to do more - obviously for you it works fine - but we are all going to find our best way of working, and hopefully if we have an open mind - continually re-evaluate that.

... Will I still exclusively render in Blender when I finally (presuming I do) upgrade my 980ti to a 3000 series? I'll have to wait and see.

I also eagerly await this product! In fact it can't come soon enough for me, since the scifi project I'm currently working on requires me to make opposite gender versions of alien characters which were only released for one gender base. As has been mentioned before, the ability to transfer associated geografts would also be rather critical for me, since the characters I'm hoping to expand into a more-than-one-sex-species all have geografts which are highly distinctive and defining for their appearance. Currently I'm trying to make do by using transgender morphs and/or transfering the texture over and parenting the geografts to the "wrong" base without autofit, to maintain the bones and other needed features in the graft, but this still leaves a lot to be wanting. I'd also use a product like this to transfer morph kits that were only released for one gender to expand my shaping options equally to both genders; usually that'd mean F->M morph transfer, so a script or optional additional morph adjusting for the different nipple placement would be most helpful too. 

1. The physics asset generated from the import of Genesis 8 figures doesn't work out of the box. Trying to simulate ragdoll physics breaks the model completely.

2. Certain Morph targets that change the size of Genesis (like "Height" ) will only rescale the mesh but not the skeleton. This causes animations to break when those morph targets are applied

1) Yea, the autogeneration doesn't work well with the Daz Assets currently.  If you right-click on the Skeletal Mesh and go to Create -> Create Physics Asset you should be able to play withe settings and generate a new one.

2) I haven't figured out a good fix for this.  If you don't export these morphs specifically, they'll be baked into the character and that works correctly.  To modify the size of the character in Unreal I scale the skeletal mesh and this seems to work.  It's not a perfect answer though.

hey david since you are here, i would love if you could take a look at this issue wit the geografty stuffs, while my tests showed which this is not a "unreal or even bridge" issue and more like a "daz" issue, would be good if by any means you could find a way to "fix" it on the bridge, currently when exporting a geografity stuff it have a huge change to "duplicate it" generating a second mesh:

i've explained the issue here:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5983977/#Comment_5983977

also here have more info:

https://i.imgur.com/CbKgMZT.jpg

i know which the pluging have nothing to do with it but would be good if you could find a way to fix this issue, it's make work with geografity elements a little troublesome and while i opened a ticket to daz support about it i don't know if they can or want or gonna fix it.

1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...
2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.
3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...
4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 
5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 
6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

 

6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.
7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 
8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 
Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.
Cheers!

I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? )

Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...

Large breasts occur naturally in women with all sorts of body types. Weight influences breast size, but is far from the sole determining factor.

As a woman with 100% natural G-cup breasts and who doesn't weight even half those 300 lbs, I can guarantee you we exist. Granted, mine are still far from the watermelons some DS users give their female figures...

The point in this context was, you can easily make mountains out of molehills in DS, but doing the opposite can sometimes be impossible, and having those mountains on a figure sets a tone that you are not looking for or even wanting.

The fact that there are females with larger than life appendages, doesn't mean that they all do.

That may have been the point you intended. It's not the point you made. You said that there was no credibility for a "spinster" having large breasts, and you made the further point that she must be 300 pounds if she did. Leana is telling you that no, she need not be 300 pounds. FWIW, I've had two kids, and I'm an I cup at any weight. *shrug*

1. The physics asset generated from the import of Genesis 8 figures doesn't work out of the box. Trying to simulate ragdoll physics breaks the model completely.

2. Certain Morph targets that change the size of Genesis (like "Height" ) will only rescale the mesh but not the skeleton. This causes animations to break when those morph targets are applied

1) Yea, the autogeneration doesn't work well with the Daz Assets currently.  If you right-click on the Skeletal Mesh and go to Create -> Create Physics Asset you should be able to play withe settings and generate a new one.

2) I haven't figured out a good fix for this.  If you don't export these morphs specifically, they'll be baked into the character and that works correctly.  To modify the size of the character in Unreal I scale the skeletal mesh and this seems to work.  It's not a perfect answer though.

A couple things I noticed while using this plugin:

1. The physics asset generated from the import of Genesis 8 figures doesn't work out of the box. Trying to simulate ragdoll physics breaks the model completely.

2. Certain Morph targets that change the size of Genesis (like "Height" ) will only rescale the mesh but not the skeleton. This causes animations to break when those morph targets are applied

in the case if "height morphs i would recomend you to export the character "with the morph already applied it's because how the morph was made, the better way to "rescale a character size in unreal is you direct "re-scale his size by using the tool of scale in unreal unless the size is something with come with a shape like a morph to make a dwarf, would be more right to "use the morph and make the dwarf in daz them export the "dwarf" to unreal than use the morph to turn the character in a dwarf, it's more like a daz issue than unreal, or how the morph is applied in the mesh.

the physics i've already talked with the creator and he told which is on his "to do list, then until a proper fix come you can use those videos as base since daz characters have a "skeleton which near the same as daz skeleton:

those videos can help you to setup a proper ragdoll physics, use then as base since character creator and daz are not exactly perfect the same stuffs, then you need to do some extra adjusts in the numbers until you feel happy, but overal they help you to know how to setup all the ragdoll capsules and constrains inside unreal.

Also, I'm guessing I have a LOT more morphs and expressions than you, and chose to keep more of them, because my file went down from 8.5GB to 149MB.

Its just the face morph... ? I cant find the body morphs...

A couple things I noticed while using this plugin:

1. The physics asset generated from the import of Genesis 8 figures doesn't work out of the box. Trying to simulate ragdoll physics breaks the model completely.

2. Certain Morph targets that change the size of Genesis (like "Height" ) will only rescale the mesh but not the skeleton. This causes animations to break when those morph targets are applied

Kid 4 might install, but it won't run the script to create the ExP files. Not sure if they would stick around if you ran it manually, Connect likes to stay in control, from what I hear. You could probably load K4, but no morphs would work.

The problem is not the script, it's that Connect installs each product in its own content structure, while Exp morph system used by generation 4 figures needs all the morphs data files to be in the same Runtime to work.

Ah, okay. I should stay away from any discussions that involve Connect, anyway...

Kid 4 might install, but it won't run the script to create the ExP files. Not sure if they would stick around if you ran it manually, Connect likes to stay in control, from what I hear. You could probably load K4, but no morphs would work.

The problem is not the script, it's that Connect installs each product in its own content structure, while Exp morph system used by generation 4 figures needs all the morphs data files to be in the same Runtime to work.

Working on learning zBrush again,  thinking about picking up Blender in the (far) future to serve as a suppliment and/or replacement for Cinema4D (Since I never did upgrade from R13 Visualize before they went Subscription-only...)
If I get Poser,  can you use that to make content that can be shared around?  It was always a mystery to me how people make those Morph Packs, or even the creatures themselves.  All very far-future thinking right now though~

This is Enayola by Deva3d, she comes with the red fantasy skin and the pointy ears morph. :) 

From a customer prospective

I'm probably in the minority from what I've read in the forums.  But here's how I create my non-photo real comic book characters.

1.  I render in 3Delight. (my average scenes with 5-10 characters render in under 10 minutes.).  I used only V4/Genesis until about 4 years ago then moved to G3 (still in process for a lot of assets).  I won't be moving beyond G3 I imagine.  It was too much work getting to this point.  Other than some SASE characters that maybe I'll get and convert to G3 someday, there's really nothing in G8 that looks worth the effort.

2.  I get rid of all maps other than diffuse and specular.  Specular maps are generic for all my characters that share the same UV set.  All shaders are either Daz Defaults or Ubersurface.

3.  Resize all maps to be 1024x1024 at the max.  Backgrounds might be bigger, but no character/prop/environment maps are.  I see people debating 4k and larger here; for me, 4k maps just mean 16x more memory eaten up that won't be reflected in my final panels.  Plus most of my map library is quite ancient, from back in the days when 256 and 512 were the norm so 1024 was kind of edgy.

4.  Dial in some basic morphs that get me kinda close to what I'm looking for.  I'm one that resizes my 'citizen' females down to be somewhere in the 61-69 inch height, guys range from 65-72 inces.  My heros/heroines are in the 69-81 inch range.

5.  Export to a modeling program for all the detail work.  Personally I love symmetry, it's aesthetically pleasing.  I even want my villains to look good.  Not sure how making something less attractive makes it better, but whatever.

6.  Use a graphics program to tweak the diffuse of the skin to make it 'unique' somehow.

7.  Re-import as morph for G3, erc freeze, save as morph, apply textures and save as character.

I've made around 200 characters this way.  Someday I may get the nerve to actually post one of my comics somewhere :/  For now their adventures live on my hard drives alone.  I've been a 3d hobbiest for about 30 years and Daz for about 10.  I'm no Sickleyield, but I know enough to make what I like.  If you are just starting out making things, there is a learning curve.  Be ready for it and don't let it frustrate you.

Disclaimer and mini-rant: I'm not a PA and I only purchase a couple of things out of the store because what I'm looking for I haven't seen for the most part, and it's getting worse by the week.  Like dforce, which seems to have given license for the creation of poor quality assets that don't fit properly or look good, with the expectation that the customers will be fine waiting around for a simluation to run to fix it, every time the character is moved.  Where as I can just use an older non-dforce asset that fits properly in the new stuff's place, modify a couple of material maps to make it look different and render immediately after each pose.

Unfortunately, it's not there. 

You don't have the base Kids4 body part selected in the Scene pane.

Or in the one that says "morphs" when the base is selected. 

You don't have the "morphs" section selected in the Parameters pane.

Unfortunately, installed Generation 4 morph sets (which includes Kids4) don't work with Connect. Use any of the other installation methods. This is probably why you're having this problem.