I did look at it when it originally came out, but as much as I do want to support such products, it's not really close enough for what I needed. Nyx already has an established look, and one of the limitations of the Black Widow model is that because the front legs are an HD morph of G8F's legs, you have to dial in the entire morph, even if you don't want the morphed torso and arms. (Although the head does at least seem to be a separate morph).

In any case, this did give me the opportunity to learn how to set up a (relatively simple) rigged geograft.

While I apprechiate artist creating male content, I am quite often disappointed by the content we get. Why is it always pretty white ladies, the asian one who got released a couple of days ago, she is so pretty. I haven't bought her yet, I'm waiting for a sale because this March Madness has drained my wallet quite badly. But everytime we get a new male character, it's old, uninteresting. At least to me. There is 1 item from the bundle I actually wanna get, but that's it. Create a high quality male teen character, just like teen Josie or any others, that way people will buy them in pairs. Just my 2 cents

I'm sorry, but which store are you looking at? Because I must respectfully disagree. :P

A lot of the characters are matching pairs. Leroy and Nida, Jonathan and Josephene, Kanade and Yuzuru, Deigo and Gabriela, Elios and Ellithia, Sanjay and Kala, Mr Woo and Mrs Chow, Ollie and Edie, Floyd and Mabel, Monique and Darius, Victoria and Michael, etc...it's not like they're only making young girls and old men.

Also, you've got characters like Deigo, Silas, Yuzuru, Sanjay, Nix, Lee, The Brute, Landon, a pretty diverse cast of male characters who aren't old.

If you don't mind me asking, what exactly would you consider an "interesting" male character?

Apparently there is a lack of Teen males. I saw more than one person complain about this.

In my mind there's nothing special about a teen and there are already a few teen males that are great, without the need for a DO character for it, but that is just my preference. I have 0 interest in a teen male.

 

Well, I can agree with that. Just look at the new releases. 2 MORE Teens for G8F. 0 for Males overall. I don't know why that is, but apparently they don't sell. The only reason why I'd wanna buy a teen male is for the skin texture, and morph it further. I just don't think it's fair to have that more females... But on the other side, I understand PAs, why would they spend their time creating something and risk not selling enough.

If there was a very interesting teen male maybe I could be interested in him but the previous generation teens were so generic and bland that I would not be.

I think there are so many other interesting types of characters we don't have yet that caucasian teen male is not one I would be interested in. For example Dasan 8 is very interesting, he looks like he has a back story to him. 

Of course this is only my opinion. If there are enough people interested in a teen male, why not have a pro bundle for that.

Another thing I would want to mention though is that lately I see a pattern for pairs of characters being released: CJ and Dain, Leroy and Nida, Jonathan and Josephine. Because of that I would expect a pair to Dasan to be released before anything else.

Maybe the chance for the teen male was missed after Raven of Josie. 

Male-M3dia made some G8 male teens that are perfectly good and I think better than something Daz would have come out with to be honest. The downside is that they are only shapes with no textures.

Laurie

After seeing your response, Laurie, I decided to go ahead and post what I was not going to post:

According to Daz representatives from the past, young males sell poorly, even to the point that Tween Ryan 7 was virtually given away for free as a new release. (Perhaps marketing figured, "We're gonna lose money anyway; so, let's buy some customer goodwill instead").

Also, Lucas 8 is late teen to early twenties, and he is probably one of the least popular G8 Core figures, which solidified Daz's original contention (although his orange, waxy, featureless skin and lack of morph personality may be more of a factor in low sales than his age and gender). BTW, Altern8 fixes Lucas 8's skin very nicely.

Although young male is the character category that is least interesting to me, I still need them for scene fillers. This past weekend I was finally able to pick up some wishlisted young males at a price befitting their value to me---though not their high quality: Justin, Josh, Jeremy, & Nick. Them, along with Male-M3dia's unparalleled male teen morph packs (these morphs easily rival Core figure quality in detail and distinctiveness) and skins like Nix 8 and Gage (as well as Genesis 8 UV Swap to use female skins) make it possible to field an entire teen male sports team as well as their opponents with no repetition.

Thanks Elli. That´s really works. Also I find the way of Install manager also works (reading the docs) . Now I can play around whit the products of Michael 4

Hello!
Michael 4 installs to a Poser directory format so you will need to go into your Content Library Pane and right click on "Poser Formats" on the left side and select "Add a Runtime Directory" then point it to your install location that DIM is using. Once you have selected the directory and linked it into the Content Library Pane he will be located in "Figures/DAZ People", his material and morph options are in "Pose/DAZ's Michael 4". He does come with default sample resolution materials for Daz Studio they are found “People/Michael 4/Materials/M4 Sample-Res”.
Elli

In my cart, but I do have to point out tht the bottles look to be the modern form rather than the taller version we used to have (unless there's a morph I missed).

Oh, now that is a good question, I remember the older design... just - I can't remember when it was phased out though.  It was long before milk rounds became a thing of the past.  But I don't know if the milk floats spent more of their time delievering the old bottles or the newer ones?  You've got me wondering now!

Michael 4 and Victoria 4 can't be installed via Connect (install tab in DS) due to the system they use for morphs. That's true for the base figures and their morph packs, but clothes, hair, accessories and most characters can be installed with Connect.

This took me way too long to figure out when I first started using DS. 

Michael 4 and Victoria 4 can't be installed via Connect (install tab in DS) due to the system they use for morphs. That's true for the base figures and their morph packs, but clothes, hair, accessories and most characters can be installed with Connect.

With apologies to any arachnophobes in the audience...

Early testing of a geograft I'll be using to bring an arachne character of mine to life in DS.

It still needs some more work done, and then I've got to transfer the character themselves (this character is just a stand-in), but I'm reasonably happy so far, given this is my first attempt at a rigged geograft.

Hello!
Michael 4 installs to a Poser directory format so you will need to go into your Content Library Pane and right click on "Poser Formats" on the left side and select "Add a Runtime Directory" then point it to your install location that DIM is using. Once you have selected the directory and linked it into the Content Library Pane he will be located in "Figures/DAZ People", his material and morph options are in "Pose/DAZ's Michael 4". He does come with default sample resolution materials for Daz Studio they are found “People/Michael 4/Materials/M4 Sample-Res”.
Elli

I wanna install the newest Daz....I been using old 3.1 thus far......IS there a way to transfer all the stuff I got in 3.1 over to the newest one without having to reinstall everything? o.o

Thanks.

I've got to admit that I've been struggling to get my creative juices flowing. I guess it's all the stress, but now that I'm not commuting back and forth to work every day and I have a lot more time, I just haven't had the gumption to sit down and use the time for anything creative. I'm trying to bust through that wall tonight by just sitting down and making myself work on a quickie character design for my upcoming sci-fi comic project. This is an alien character from the comic. His real name is unpronounceable by humans, so it is greatly shortened to just "Chitz."

The figure is actually Michael 4 with a cool, full-body morph applied. The character is Insectoid by Grotto, available at R'osity. The great thing about this being an M4 morph is that I can still access all the great action poses in my library. Yeah, the extreme body shape means some of them need morphing, but having the base poses as a starting point will save me a lot of time when it actually comes to making the comic itself.

I know this is pretty simple, but I only spent about an hour and a half on this (not counting a few false starts with the lighting), but at least I got something done. And, hopefully, that's a start.

My usual workflow applies: Poser Pro 11 renders using the Comic Book Preview. Clean up is in Clip Studio Paint.

 

Cool image . I wonder about M4 morphs . For Toon character which mandatory morph I should have ?

Good question. Off the top of my head, though, for females I would say "The Girl 4" is very useful. Beyond that, though, I really don't have an answer for you, but "ll take a look through my various content libraries and let you know what I find.

In my cart, but I do have to point out tht the bottles look to be the modern form rather than the taller version we used to have (unless there's a morph I missed).

I don't know what Daz's reasoning was with the decision to go about things this way,  but I do know that converting long hair is fairly complex.  Hairs can go everywhere, simulations can become a giagantic knot, vertices shoot off into outer space for almost no reason.  The software can crash a lot, it can lose objects etc.  Dforce cloth is no where near as complex imo.  I would imagine that some reasoning behind it was to simplify end user experience.  You can make the hair with the SBH editor, save it, and with a few tweaks of a comb you can fake a simulation.  I'm honestly surprised I haven't seen a lot more people utilizing it.  I've made a few longer hairs in it myself. 

The software is full of things that can break other things easily (save functions/morph loader/transfer utility/etc/etc/etc), but none of those are removed or locked. It would be simple to have the dforce hair settings with "expert users only" and a "this will destroy the earth if you enable it, do you agree to accept full liability yes/no" if that was the only reason.

I know you can fake simulation that way, but it basically negates the entire point of it being Dforce to start with, which is fast, almost effortless simulations. Having to tweak a hair over and over is time consuming, and would be a massive undertaking for animations.

As to why few people use it, you have to weigh it against other options for user hair creation. Transmapped hair often looks better and works with dforce. There are several external strand hair options too. Balanced against the competition, a cut down version without the main selling point is basically just another product that does the same as others (with more/less features). It's only really the cut features that make it any more appealing.

Here's a free morph pack for G8 to get you started. It offfers quite a few possibilities already:
https://sharecg.com/v/91888/view/21/DAZ-Studio/SY-200-Morphs-for-Genesis-8-Head-and-Body

But eventually you won't get around spending some money.
The G8M Head and Body morphs mentioned above are essential, as are 200 Plus in my opinion.

If you want to achieve the shapes depicted in the promotional images, then yes, you would need to have ALL of the base characters listed in the "Required Products" field. The main reason you need to own all of the listed base characters is because the various shapes in the morph pack uses both the PA's custom shaping & a dialed percentage of the morphs from some or all of those base characters. Don't quote me on this, but I think the morph pack would still work, but it definitely will not look the same and probably not as good due to the fact that you would be missing some or all of the base characters. If you don't have all of the required products, then I do not recommend buying it. These are stylized shapes and not something you could use to focus on specific areas compared to something like https://www.daz3d.com/ej-face-morphs-and-details-for-genesis-8-females , which I do own and use.

I don't believe the product is intended to make you go out and buy all of those base characters. Its intended more for those who already own them and are looking for something different in regards to figure shaping & mixing morphs. If you're just starting out, I think it would be silly to buy all of that stuff just for those morphs. I already own 4 out of 5 of the required products(still missing Monique 8), and I have no current plans to buy this particular morph pack. You can achieve something very similar using a collection of other G8F morph packs with greater versatility, particularly ones for the head, body, breasts, glutes, and legs. You would probably spend a lot less and get more of your money's worth buying a half dozen G8F morph packs compared to buying this product and buying all of those base characters.

While I apprechiate artist creating male content, I am quite often disappointed by the content we get. Why is it always pretty white ladies, the asian one who got released a couple of days ago, she is so pretty. I haven't bought her yet, I'm waiting for a sale because this March Madness has drained my wallet quite badly. But everytime we get a new male character, it's old, uninteresting. At least to me. There is 1 item from the bundle I actually wanna get, but that's it. Create a high quality male teen character, just like teen Josie or any others, that way people will buy them in pairs. Just my 2 cents

I'm sorry, but which store are you looking at? Because I must respectfully disagree. :P

A lot of the characters are matching pairs. Leroy and Nida, Jonathan and Josephene, Kanade and Yuzuru, Deigo and Gabriela, Elios and Ellithia, Sanjay and Kala, Mr Woo and Mrs Chow, Ollie and Edie, Floyd and Mabel, Monique and Darius, Victoria and Michael, etc...it's not like they're only making young girls and old men.

Also, you've got characters like Deigo, Silas, Yuzuru, Sanjay, Nix, Lee, The Brute, Landon, a pretty diverse cast of male characters who aren't old.

If you don't mind me asking, what exactly would you consider an "interesting" male character?

Apparently there is a lack of Teen males. I saw more than one person complain about this.

In my mind there's nothing special about a teen and there are already a few teen males that are great, without the need for a DO character for it, but that is just my preference. I have 0 interest in a teen male.

 

Well, I can agree with that. Just look at the new releases. 2 MORE Teens for G8F. 0 for Males overall. I don't know why that is, but apparently they don't sell. The only reason why I'd wanna buy a teen male is for the skin texture, and morph it further. I just don't think it's fair to have that more females... But on the other side, I understand PAs, why would they spend their time creating something and risk not selling enough.

If there was a very interesting teen male maybe I could be interested in him but the previous generation teens were so generic and bland that I would not be.

I think there are so many other interesting types of characters we don't have yet that caucasian teen male is not one I would be interested in. For example Dasan 8 is very interesting, he looks like he has a back story to him. 

Of course this is only my opinion. If there are enough people interested in a teen male, why not have a pro bundle for that.

Another thing I would want to mention though is that lately I see a pattern for pairs of characters being released: CJ and Dain, Leroy and Nida, Jonathan and Josephine. Because of that I would expect a pair to Dasan to be released before anything else.

Maybe the chance for the teen male was missed after Raven of Josie. 

Male-M3dia made some G8 male teens that are perfectly good and I think better than something Daz would have come out with to be honest. The downside is that they are only shapes with no textures.

Laurie

After seeing your response, Laurie, I decided to go ahead and post what I was not going to post:

According to Daz representatives from the past, young males sell poorly, even to the point that Tween Ryan 7 was virtually given away for free as a new release. (Perhaps marketing figured, "We're gonna lose money anyway; so, let's buy some customer goodwill instead").

Also, Lucas 8 is late teen to early twenties, and he is probably one of the least popular G8 Core figures, which solidified Daz's original contention (although his orange, waxy, featureless skin and lack of morph personality may be more of a factor in low sales than his age and gender). BTW, Altern8 fixes Lucas 8's skin very nicely.

Although young male is the character category that is least interesting to me, I still need them for scene fillers. This past weekend I was finally able to pick up some wishlisted young males at a price befitting their value to me---though not their high quality: Justin, Josh, Jeremy, & Nick. Them, along with Male-M3dia's unparalleled male teen morph packs (these morphs easily rival Core figure quality in detail and distinctiveness) and skins like Nix 8 and Gage (as well as Genesis 8 UV Swap to use female skins) make it possible to field an entire teen male sports team as well as their opponents with no repetition.

Right, OK. I imagined there would be more scope to morph straight away… So just out of interest, how are the morph packs created? in another 3D app and then imported back into Daz?

Yes, imported using the Morph Loader Pro plug-in usually. It is possible to create morphs inside DS, from dForms, but most are made in modelling/sculpting applications.

Very remarkable looking character, I was disappointed when I understood it was a standalone character, I had thought maybe it was a Dragon 3 character, which I have a ton of their addons! Having purchased the first Tyrannosaurus not understanding that all of the addons were for your later generation of the new and improved Tyrannosaurus I felt burned. All I can offer at the moment is a thumbs up and "great job".

 

i rather dislike all the daz dragon models so kind of glad this isnt one of them (and not just because it's a wyvern) as i think making a morph for those existing dragons must be very limiting.

 

Actually, having seen another store's transformation from their top female model into a horse, shows that the limitations for some artists that have a handle on modeling is their imagination. I was shocked to see the transformation work, instead of starting with a completely new obj. Plus here their have been some incredible transformations of Dragon 3 from the typical dragon, to a Godzilla style, to a snake style and then a cartoon style. Quite versatile.

Unless one has legitimately attempted to modify geometry into different shapes with reconstructing the geometry, then they don't really understand the limitations of this process and what all it impacts (geometry, rigging, uv maps, textures, etc). The dragon is highly anatomically incorrect, both in sculpting and in rigging (especially in its wings). You can also create almost any shape of these base figures but once the topology becomes very stretched, the UV maps also become strecthed in their projection onto the mesh. In other words, you can lose a LOT of quality and run into many problems. I've been working on this thing since last March (off and on) and a figure like this is already a LOT of work already without those problems. Yes all of things mentioned above are very possible but they will never be even in the same ballpark comparing them to the same thing built from the ground up in terms of quality. My one thing with all my products is quality comes first, always. Then comes optimizing and then versatility.
Any previous pose collection would not work anyways since my creature is anatomically very different. RiverSoftArt created a product so you can use your Dragon 3 poses as a starting point but that still works a lot better than trying to throw those poses on a new rig without an algorithm in place, even if it was a morph.Outside of poses, which RiverSoftArt's product solves, what products were you hoping to use?

 

Actually the Hivewire Horse is a quality product also...this was shaped from their Dawn character. Yes, I am sure that much morphing required an updated texture map layout, I never stated that it was easy or anyone would do it. I am not suggesting that your product would be inherently better it it was a Dragon 3 morph.

But not, I'm pretty sure, rigged from Dawn - the shape is not the major issue here, though topology does matter.

Alright, I found an opportunity to do some Fraps testing of the Viewport. I don't have screenshots on me but I'll try my best to describe the scene. This is on the same Intel Xeon quad and Quadro 2000 card using DAZ Studio v4.6.

Scene:
V4.2 EZ figure (with a morph applied to change the facial features) with shorts, bikini top, and shoes. Long hair included. V4 is seated in a medium poly car (Noble m400 for reference). Everything textured (low-medium sized maps). The animation has V4 in the act of driving (steering, shifting, pedal pumping, body related movement). Most of the animations were done via Puppeteer. 2380 frames total at 30 fps.

- Camera moving about a paused (static) scene. Capped at 60 fps.

- Playing the full scene (regardless of camera position) -
V4 resolution:
Base: 7-8 fps
17k: 8-9 fps
4k-2k: 9-10 fps
1K: 10 fps solid

- Playing another project where the legs and feet are only moving - Base res: 10 fps peaking 11 fpa

Oddly, smooth shaded has no affect on the fps. Changing to Wirebounded box only improved it to 10-11 fps. Very very slight improvement.

- Deleted the car mesh (including interior): 10 fps normally and peaking at 11 fps.
So it looks like removing unneeded static mesh objects does improve it but really not all that much. Imperceptible to human eyes. I should note that the steering wheel and shifter were animated so perhaps that may have had some sway in the bench mark.

- Removed V4 clothing (shorts and top): 15-16 fps - min 14 fps
Dramatic improvement here, even when said items were not visible in the Viewport.

- Removed hair: avg 22 fps peaking 23 fps
Another Dramatic improvement. The hair is also rigged and followed the motions of the head.

- Removed shoes: avg 28 fps peaking 29 fps
I was surprised here. Not sure what poly count those shoes were but they were only high heeled sandals.

- Removed non-visible shoes: avg 30 fps peaking 32 fps
I was testing shoes and I made these invisible. Apparently they were still fit to V4 so I removed them.
Wirebounding mode does not improve here.

- Removed pedals (gas, brake, clutch): Now peaking at 33 fps
This as the last animatable item to be removed.

- Setting V4 back to Base res: 15 fps peaking 16 fps
I've noticed that if V4 has some extra motion (moving many bones), the fps drop is 1fps. Not much but interesting to note.

- V4 at 1K res and having her foot selected using the Universal tool: 16 fps
This is a dramatic drop. Apparently when DAZ has to draw the universal tool (for xyz movement) on her foot, it causes the fps to go down.

- V4 at 1k res and waist selected (locked from moving): 30 fps avg
As long as the tool does not need to be redrawn on the screen, it does not impact the overall fps much. However, it still drops it some.

Conclusions and additional observations:
It seems most of the impact is due to the IK calculations that DAZ must perform to move the respective meshes (v4, clothes, shoes, hair, etc...) during an animation. If bounding boxes are affected, then it may just be the IK calculations. Fewer the moving parts, better the overall fps. Looking at the CPU, it never peaks above 12% utilization (only using a single thread when Multithreading is On) and the GPU core load is averaging 8%. I can't see where the bottleneck is happening. I've already upgraded my memory to 18 Gig so that should be plenty.

Perhaps the animation code (as well as posing) is not optimized for multithreaded operation. The more meshes that must move/morph during posing/animation, the slower the fps. Can anyone from DAZ or knowledgeable mods also contribute to this discussion? Is there room for improvement here in the future? Is there anything in addition to my findings that can further increase the animation playback frame rate?

Thanks!

Actually this is a very interesting discussion for animators and it seems in 2020 much didn't happen in this regard. I am experiencing the same issues as you. When I remove g8 clothing the animation gets much smoother (even when it was hidden before). My CPU also has almost no load, but the viewport is only giving about 8 FPS. Not smooth at all. 

Only solution is remove the clothing, but how should I animate without the clothing. In many scenes the clothing is important to see for collission for example. 

Did anybody already post a feature request in this regard? 

While I apprechiate artist creating male content, I am quite often disappointed by the content we get. Why is it always pretty white ladies, the asian one who got released a couple of days ago, she is so pretty. I haven't bought her yet, I'm waiting for a sale because this March Madness has drained my wallet quite badly. But everytime we get a new male character, it's old, uninteresting. At least to me. There is 1 item from the bundle I actually wanna get, but that's it. Create a high quality male teen character, just like teen Josie or any others, that way people will buy them in pairs. Just my 2 cents

I'm sorry, but which store are you looking at? Because I must respectfully disagree. :P

A lot of the characters are matching pairs. Leroy and Nida, Jonathan and Josephene, Kanade and Yuzuru, Deigo and Gabriela, Elios and Ellithia, Sanjay and Kala, Mr Woo and Mrs Chow, Ollie and Edie, Floyd and Mabel, Monique and Darius, Victoria and Michael, etc...it's not like they're only making young girls and old men.

Also, you've got characters like Deigo, Silas, Yuzuru, Sanjay, Nix, Lee, The Brute, Landon, a pretty diverse cast of male characters who aren't old.

If you don't mind me asking, what exactly would you consider an "interesting" male character?

Apparently there is a lack of Teen males. I saw more than one person complain about this.

In my mind there's nothing special about a teen and there are already a few teen males that are great, without the need for a DO character for it, but that is just my preference. I have 0 interest in a teen male.

 

Well, I can agree with that. Just look at the new releases. 2 MORE Teens for G8F. 0 for Males overall. I don't know why that is, but apparently they don't sell. The only reason why I'd wanna buy a teen male is for the skin texture, and morph it further. I just don't think it's fair to have that more females... But on the other side, I understand PAs, why would they spend their time creating something and risk not selling enough.

If there was a very interesting teen male maybe I could be interested in him but the previous generation teens were so generic and bland that I would not be.

I think there are so many other interesting types of characters we don't have yet that caucasian teen male is not one I would be interested in. For example Dasan 8 is very interesting, he looks like he has a back story to him. 

Of course this is only my opinion. If there are enough people interested in a teen male, why not have a pro bundle for that.

Another thing I would want to mention though is that lately I see a pattern for pairs of characters being released: CJ and Dain, Leroy and Nida, Jonathan and Josephine. Because of that I would expect a pair to Dasan to be released before anything else.

Maybe the chance for the teen male was missed after Raven of Josie. 

Male-M3dia made some G8 male teens that are perfectly good and I think better than something Daz would have come out with to be honest. The downside is that they are only shapes with no textures.

Laurie