Sorry for the cross post - I did not find the technical help forum at first.

Hi!

I had to change my email adress and after doing that I wanted to start the install manager. That programm asked for my password again (it was automatically inserted in the field before) but I forgot the password because I never entered it again. So I changed the password - and now it seems to be unable to find my database - I suddenly had no assets installed! Panicking I changed the standard install directory to my current DAZ-asset directory but nothing changed. I tried DAZ central with the same result. Also in DAZ my SMART CONTENT tab is empty!

What can I do now?

Utz

Quote

....back for a bit. RRL been keeping me way too busy and exhausted (and I'm retired).

...well I'm sceptical abut the forthcoming forecast for later this week given the recent disappointments we've had. however they "say" its supposed to turn quite "summery" for the next several days  though  the weekend starting Thursday (almost 90° F on Friday and 70s the following week). 

Meanwhile it's been pretty scary in the central part of the country with heavy rain, hail, strong winds, and large outbreaks of tornadoes. People back there please take care and heed the warnings..

...The Lordy I need A Break From Real Life Complaint Thread.
...The Now Where Did I Pack Away All My Hawi'ian Shirts Complaint Thread

I've installed the [motion Live] plugin through Daz manager, but i couldnt find the plugin listed in "About plugins" section. I couldn't find it anywhere else either! Even tried to reinstall it through Daz central. the problem remains. 
i cant find it anywhere in Daz. Looking forward to any guidance regarding this.

memcneil70 said:

lou_harper said:

PerttiA said:

richardandtracy said:

Right, having got the knitting thing out of my system. I really like 'Mexico City' . No, I don't like the city never having been there, but the model is amazing. It looks dirty, grimy, scuffed & used. Perfect. That's so hard to find. In some ways it still looks a bit too clean & new despite the rubbish in the promos, but it's believable, and that's as much as you can ask for. Like it.

Same. I was drooling over it yesterday, but didn't want to make a bigger purchase at the time.
Today it may land in my product library though. 

I bought it, but of course I'm planning to turn it into a US small town. The top floor of the corner building would work fine, I just have to remove signage, and replace the bottom floor with shopfronts.

Actually, the streets could work just as they are in heavily Hispanic areas of major cities without too much adjustments. I don't speak/read Spanish, so I can't tell if there are unique references to specific Mexico City locales, but having lived around the Western U.S., there are many areas that have unique ethnic neighborhoods or strip malls, where clusters of new residents have moved in over the past sixty or so years. I am sure the MidWest/East Coast has the same where European and Asian enclaves settled during the late 1800s and the signage reflects that.

Minnesota girl here. I don't spend a lot of time in the Twin Cities, but I have been through parts of the city and surrounding suburbs with signage I couldn't read  or that was in dual languages. There's a lot of diversity, with a lot of folk from  Africa and Mexico/Central/South America as well as the European/Asian (especially Hmong - St. Paul has the largest population of that group of any city in the US) you mentioned. A lot of work to be had for translators around here.

Ah, if you are stil using Daz Central then that does give fewer options (and doesn't keep the packages for reinstallation).

Daz Central asked me if I wanted to install it.

I did not uninstall but did install it from DC.

It is now seems to be running properly.

Will it be ok if I did it this way?

Cheerio

lululee

OK, here is the better ramp; I removed the central planter, put the ramp in the middle and added two smaller planters for decoration.  I have now done this to all three customised versions of The Streets of Utopia and it does look much better.

Next additon to the set was doors; only one of the buildings in the central area had any doors!  This is a nuisance as depicting people actually using the place inevitably involves entering and leaving buildings, and even if it doesn't open a proper entrance makes such images much more convincing.  This image depicts the most difficult of the entrances to build; the geometry of the building made it tricky to work out how to go about it, though once it was worked out it wasn't hard to actually model it.  The door opens inwards and outwards and has Blender contraints added to prevent it swinging too far, like all the doors I added.  I may add logos or a clock in the circle above the door.

Since I last checked in, I have finished and handed over my side gig work for the 2024 season, so now I have a few months to play. 

As I had documented the latest steps of my creation process, I figured it might be time to tackle that challenging and controversial topic - G8 or G9?

If you hang around the Daz forums, you're surely familiar with the main "Getting on the 9 train, or not" thread over in The Commons, which has been perpetually active since G9 appeared on the scene in the fall of 2022.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/598286/getting-on-the-9-train-or-not/p1

Over the last year and a half plenty of people have made their case for why they are staying with G8/G8.1 (or even earlier) or why they are moving on to G9.

I came to the conclusion that whichever figure works best for a particular user, and his or her art and process, is the right version for that user. 

I don't think there are many people who have invested more time and money in parallel testing of G8/G8.1 and G9 than I have and ultimately - barring catastrophic usability issues in terms of poses or clothing or something else of central importance in using Daz - the most important factor for me was which one made better versions of my characters. It was the same consideration that came into play when I went back and forth between FaceGen and Face Transfer, back to FaceGen (in part), on to new Face Transfer 2; and when I adopted and moved on from various approaches to skin textures. 

So here they are - G8 (the brunette) and G9 (the blonde) from the same source image, using just FT and FT2, respectively, with 75% of the respective "female" fixes for each verson. (G8, being half a foot taller, is also scaled down to be a similar height and I've done routine head propagation tweaking on G8, which comes in after FT with disproportionately tiny heads; somewhere around 4-6% gets a match in dimensions to a stock G8F figure.) Here, I'm actually using the same skin treatment on both - I've applied a commercial G8 skin to both figures and then used textures sourced from FaceGen as the base.

This was the original source image:

I could do better, but the goal here was a quick comparison of Face Transfer/G8 and Face Transfer 2/G9 characters on the most level conditions I could reasonably muster. This particular skin material set, being out-of-the-box G8, is Iray Uber, which I haven't done so much with lately, and I didn't do any cleanup of the "stain" from the source image shadows yet. Putting a G8 skin directly on G9 is accomplished by use of the "Material Suit," which is pretty cool toy if you want to put G8 textures on a G9:

https://www.daz3d.com/rssy-genesis-8-and-81-female-material-suit-for-genesis-9
https://www.daz3d.com/rssy-genesis-8-and-81-male-material-suit-for-genesis-9

So am I planning on doing much application of G8 textures to G9? Not sure, but for a few bucks, I like having the option.

And as for the main question - G8 or G9?

I'm still not sure but have been leaning G9 for a while now. I just do not like the oval android head of G8F in particular; G8F face transfer characters also tend to have disproportionate lower face features, especially a heavy jaw line, and that's harder to morph away than the long head itself.

I have a bunch of asset updates to install, and even though I could download stuff via the Install and Smart Content tabs on Wednesday, today absolutely none of them will download, whether I try to download each asset set individually or if I try to have them all update at once.

I've always had problems with DAZ Central and DAZ Install Manager not putting the files in the right folder, despite setting that folder multiple times. I've only ever had them go to my Content Directories when I install via DAZ Studio itself. So I'd prefer to fix Studio's issue than fight either of the other to ways to install them.

There's no errors. It just sits at 0% and doesn't get anywhere for hours and hours, even in a single, small download. Only DAZ Studio is having issues downloading anything - I can download stuff via my browser just fine.

SilverGirl said:

MimicMolly said:

The touchable products should have better preview thumbnails, at least. The cropped letters make them skippable because I often don't recognize hair by the names, only by the looks.

 Yeah, I was wondering if something messed up on import? Because only seeing part of a title of stylized letters tells me NOTHING (visually) about whether I'm interested or not, and no way am I going to click on all that just to see if I might like it. And it just looks... cheap and ill-coded. 

The thumbnails were most likely automatically created when importing the product by cropping the central part of main promo image in the desired aspect ratio. Which doesn't work at all for a lot of wolfie's products which don't use the usual Daz promo format for the main promo.

About 22 minutes before totality here in north central Arkansas. Sun is 3/4 eclipsed and light is noticeably paler, in an odd way. 

Fun fact - I confirmed during the 2017 partial eclipse - shadows of leaves & things will have a crescent shape, just like the sun! If I get a good picture, I will post it.

B as go to safely watching the eclipse. 

Tried some crowded scenes and started each prompt with "The central park of New York"

I got so tired of looking for stuff I had just bought that now I manually install everything. I still don't use "Smart Content" or DIM or Daz Central for anything. I did that when discovered it wasn't enough to know the name of the item I had bought; I had to know the Product Artist's name of everything I bought because that's how Daz and Poser set up their file structures. (I was looking for my new clothing item under People/Genesis 3 Male/Clothing/Brand-New-Item and it wasn't there because it's under People/Genesis 3 Male/Clothing/Some-Artist-I-Never-Heard-Of/Brand-New-Item instead.) There are whole forum threads about how to do that, but I could talk a little more about it here if anyone's interested in my personal solution. Other solutions may vary. But you know what? I know exactly where to find everything I own. Always. 

Very nice. That's a good example of why some DAZ artists may like this idea; you just don't see pure 3D hair and clothing like that outside of Zbrush Central or from a pro at Artstation.

AgitatedRiot said:

TJohn said:

What the... Is everyone asleep?

Finally, with the help of a CPAP 

I'm on a Bipap now that monitors my breathing and will breathe for me for as long as I'm not breathing which is usually about 8-10 sec. I have complex sleep apnea which is obstructive and central. Central is where the brain doesn't tell the body to breathe, and when you hear of deaths due to sleep apnea it's usually because of central. I stop breathing 128 times an hour and more than half is central. I'm in bad shape if I fall asleep for even a half hour. I end up lethargic, delirious, can't speak, mumble, and can't walk, I at times will see things or talk to invisible people, it is messed up. We had to install security cameras in all the rooms in our house to be able to watch me 24 / 7. I've passed out several times because my oxygen levels dropped so low. All of this was the result of pain meds for 2 decades. I also now have short-term memory loss due to the oxygen levels dropping all the time and I forget most things within 14-16 hours. It is pretty much suffering from the effects of hypoxia and there isn't anything they can do about it. All of this is why I was MIA for almost 2 yrs several yrs back. Been dealing with this for 5 yrs now. I've had sleep apnea for over a decade now but most of this has been in the last 5 yrs

If it is this https://www.daz3d.com/minnie-bow-hair you will find it under poser content.

In DIM it can show which files are installed and where - I don't know if Daz Central can the same.

greywolf said:

Richard Haseltine said:

lemonabittera said:

Genesis 8 female character doesn't work with OOT hair. I need to set a Transmitted color of the hair to none and that needs to be done after all other assets are loaded to character so I can render.

That is a content bug, compounded by installation order if using DIM/Daz Central/manual (it's a shared file that has the issue, so if a fixed version is installed last the issue will be fixed for all hairs like this) or exactly which product is read if using Connect (each product has its own folder, but I think DS grabs the first copy of the shared file it finds).

Not to be contrary, but if the software changes and the asset does not, it does not seem reasonable to say it's because of the asset.

It's Iray being less forgiving, but nevertheless the thing of which it is being less forgiving is a content error.

Richard Haseltine said:

lemonabittera said:

Genesis 8 female character doesn't work with OOT hair. I need to set a Transmitted color of the hair to none and that needs to be done after all other assets are loaded to character so I can render.

That is a content bug, compounded by installation order if using DIM/Daz Central/manual (it's a shared file that has the issue, so if a fixed version is installed last the issue will be fixed for all hairs like this) or exactly which product is read if using Connect (each product has its own folder, but I think DS grabs the first copy of the shared file it finds).

Not to be contrary, but if the software changes and the asset does not, it does not seem reasonable to say it's because of the asset.

Gordig said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

well I myself am quite happy for my cisgender boys to wear makeup and dresses like they did right up to and during the Renaissance and Baroque periods before the Victorian age made every one boring AF

it's not even a gender or sexual orientation issue, it's people being able to express themselves without being confined to imposed cultural norms

It IS a gender issue, though, in the sense that makeup and dresses are outside of contemporary gender norms for men even though neither is intrinsically "feminine". That's the inherent problem with the construction of gender.

I want to say that I appreciate that both you, Gordig and WendyLuvsCatz, are using the terms, "sex" and "gender", correctly.  When i took my oral exam in grad school, my advisor's advisor was on my commitee; he brought along heis wife who was a noted sex researcher who studied an Central American population that had a late maturing testosterone receptor so that all children in the region were born "girls" and then differentiated into "boys" and "girls" at puberty.  Each child was given a feminine name at birth and renamed at puberty.  She then regailed us with a discussion about how the sex determination tests at the Olympics were doomed to failure (they have quietly given up the ghost and now use a hazy hormone standards system with its own problems of unscientific methodology). Everyone then launched into their favorite orals questions; my advisor always asks the candidate to name five women who had won Nobel prizes in the sciences