Timbales said:

I skimmed through when I saw it was a new Victoria. Was there anything revealed about the next version of Daz Studio?

See the log file - 4.20.1.x will eventually be 4.21.x.x

Does the Victoria 9 HD Bundle come with Anatomical Elements?
If so will it have improvements over that of Victoria 8 Pro Bundle, such as deeper Anatomical Elements inside?

There will be third party geografts made for Genesis 9, but they like to use geoshells for materials which become problematic for export to UE5, and rendering in UE5 would be the better option for Genesis 9 with low end RTX 3000 series, considering the higher poly count and larger textures, otherwise purchasing RTX 4000 series may be required for rendering multiple Genesis 9 figures with Iray.
It's preferable to use material slots and UVs for the geografts, as used by Victoria 8 Pro which is also supported by custom genital maps from other vendors.

I know this because I have a copy of Victoria 9 :) I'm sure it will be added to the copy in time.

Mada said:

rcourtri_789f4b1c6b said:

3.  Include 4K materials as an option.  For those of us who aren't into the whole microdetail/'pore porn' thing of extreme closeups, 8K will strain our systems and slow things down for no benefit in our finished renders.  Easier if PA's provide the 4K materials than me going through steps to downscale/degrade.

Its not the texture maps that's 8K, its the skin details maps and those don't load by default. The skin detail maps are normal maps that are loaded in the PBR skin shader under the detail section, normal map channel.

If you don't want to load them you don't have to, and if its for a figure in the distance it would be silly to load them - its really for close up details. :)

Where is this stated? Both here https://www.daz3d.com/daz-3d-prerelease and here https://www.daz3d.com/victoria-9-hd-presale it says "8K HD Materials" (this is pretty unambiguous), has this has been further clarified elsewhere?

Not asking because I want 8K Textures, I think it makes about as much sense as an 8K television.

I hope there will be a simple way to migrate the majority of G8 content that I already have to the new unimesh G9 (morphs, clothing, hair, poses and textures)... but have doubts about the textures making an easy transition from G8 to G9, since the new UDIM layouts look VERY different.
Vendors are probably going to have a hard time releasing character products that support G8 / G9 simultaneously in one product.

Maybe we'll see a few Published Artists release G9 character products with both a male and female version of the same character in one product. It would be super cool to see that... like siblings, and everything in between... dial up more female or male, and then mod the texture to either gender expression as required by the character narrative.
The new mesh appears to have a ton of texturing and rigging improvements in the face for close-up renders, and the separation of mouth bag and eyes is going to make the workflow of morphing in external programs much better.
All the improvements that the new model brings to facial expressions, eyes, eyelashes and eyebrows are super welcome, and are big enough improvements for me to *really* want to put in the time to port my customized / stylized characters for G8 to G9.
It will take a while for vendors to release all the G9 products that I'm going to need to stylize G9 far enough from the "default look" of Victoria... need elements from Kanade, Sakura, Aiko and The Girl.
I'm also very curious about how the workflow is going to be with getting male characters on the same basemesh without interference of female surface anatomy..

Catherine3678ab said:

outrider42 said:

The unified sex is actually pretty simple if you look at what they did. The base Genesis 9 is neither male or female. It is halfway between. So the shift to full female or full male is not as jarring as it was from the original Genesis 1 shape, since either way the PA goes for clothing they are halfway there!

Kind of brilliant to be honest.

See, I am not always a negative Nancy! I call it how I see it.

As for textures guys, Scene Optimizer has been around since 2017. 

https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer

It can automate the whole thing for you. Aside from that, I used to the Power Toys add on for Windows that can resize textures wholesale in a flash. You can save them as new files or overwrite the originals. Just overwrite the originals and boom, it is done. The tool was so fast that I could do entire folders with dozens of textures in seconds. And this was when I had a 4690k, not anything special. How easy is it to use? How does right clicking sound? The Power Toy menu is added to your right click. That's it. You can highlight a few textures or highlight them all, and right click. Select the size and quality. It really is a fun tool! It has other fun tools as well, which you can pick to use or not, like "Always on Top" and "Text Extractor".

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/image-resizer

Just look at how easy and fast this is.

Okay, so how does one download this resizer? I tried the + link, that wanted me to sign in first, so okay, I signed in. That wasn't good enough, next it wanted to play some kind of cat and mouse game to find out if I'd ever had another account there. AND that they would be tracking everything about how their utility there was going to be used. For a powertoy, toy, this is ridiculous. They also wanted a user name which would be publically visible, to download something? Again, why and not happening. So unless I totally missed some detail, there are no download buttons for these powertoys.

I don't know why you got any of that. I clicked on install, from there I clicked on the one that took me to a Github page. Then clicked on the x64.exe version. It downloaded and that install never asked for anything. The install EULA didn't mention it either.

Here is a link directly to the Github page.

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/releases/tag/v0.62.1

Hopefully that will get you there.

Power Toys is very old. I was using this on XP, and it might even go farther back than that. It has changed over the years. I think there was a time when it was kind of abandoned. But a small group of people picked it up and continued it so that it would keep working on newer Windows. I could be wrong, my memory might be hazy. But the resizer basically works the same way it always has, and is seriously one of the most useful tools I have. Just think about it, you can resize any image without needing to boot up another program. Even using XnView is not as fast, and XNView doesn't do batches like the Power Toy can. And the actual speed that it takes to execute the resizing is just stupidly fast.

On that note, people should be rejoicing that Victoria 9 has 8K textures. If you want quality, well, you have to have quality. There s no substitute. While you can get away with lesser textures they can show up in larger renders. If you render at say 1080p, maybe nobody will notice, but going higher it becomes clearer. 

I can understand wanting to downsize textures for memory. I have been there. I had a 670, and I was stoked to double my VRAM to a 970 4GB, LOL. That was when I got a lot of use out the Power Toy Resizer. That little tool was a major part of my Daz experience. I'd buy something and the first thing I would do is resize those textures. That resizer made quick work of the task, too. But at the same time, I still appreciated having access to larger textures, because I hoped one day to get past that.

So I don't understand the pushback against 8K textures. We should be celebrate that. If your system can't handle them, the tools are out there so you can. Scene Optimzer has been mentioned multiple times now, including by me. You have options, and having options is important to me. If the textures are small to begin with, it is MUCH harder to get that detail. Trust me. If any of the people complaining about 8K textures ever do pick up something like a 3090, they will be preaching a different tune when they see the compression in their larger renders.

3D art is not easy. Daz Studio makes it easier than probably anything else, but it still requires some tweaking from time to time. There is no "make art button". Well, unless you count the new AI picture generators where you can literally type something and click a button to make those words into art. But in this world, you have to accept that technology is constantly changing. 10 years in technology is a super long time, as any PC built in 2012 is now pretty weak for Daz Studio. No GPU built in 2012 can even run Iray now! The 600 series was released in 2012 and now it has been dropped from Iray support. The 900 series (Maxwell) is on the chopping block. That is just how the tech world moves. And Daz-Tafi has to do that as well. Daz cannot remain in the past forever, they have to move forward or somebody will happily take their place. Daz must compete with the likes of Epic's Metahuman, which might seem small now, but Daz is the underdog in that fight, not Epic. Epic is worth billions. So Daz must make sure their models are compatible with software that others use, because those companies set the standards. And Daz models have to bring quality, they have to be better than everybody else. That is why I can be antogonistic towards them at times, because sometimes I don't believe they are putting their best out there.

In my mind, there's two questions here.

First, do I want to (at some point) get the Genesis 9/Victoria 9 characters? Sure, the images in the presentation yesterday were impressive. 

The second question is do I need to upgrade my library to Genesis 9 characters, different clothing, different hair, etc?  That answer is no, I have plenty of G8 and G3 resources that I can use.

From what I see now, there the added detail in closeups are not enough of a benefit to justify spending buckets of money on new characters, clothes and other add ons.  If I see down the road that there are converters and capabilities that make it possible to move my existing resources over to Genesis 9 then I'll reconsider.  

I have a small concern about Gen 9 unimesh. I've seen this before with Gen1. At that time, there was huge amounts of hype about how great a unimesh character was and how this would solve many problems. Then they split the mesh again with even more hype in Gen 2 saying it was better for creating realistic characters. So, I'm hoping Gen 10 doesn't split the meshes again after loading the boat with content for Gen 9. Other than that, this is the VERY FIRST Victoria that I like out of ALL the previous ones. Simply fabulous!

Leana said:

Pendraia said:

I was wondering after reading this how long V4 was the main base? Anyone remember? 

From memory Victoria 4.0 was released late 2006, and Genesis late 2011 or early 2012.

Thanks Leana, so 6 years roughly...and many Poser users used her long after that so she was still having clothing built for a few years after that.

Pendraia said:

I was wondering after reading this how long V4 was the main base? Anyone remember? 

From memory Victoria 4.0 was released late 2006, and Genesis late 2011 or early 2012.

Flameburst said:

Paintbox said:

Flameburst said:

3DRT said:

Curious to know what everyone thinks of Genesis 9 vs Metahuman in terms of realism. Personally I prefer the skin and hair of Metahuman but the geometry of G9 looks better (at a cursory glance at least). I really hope we get some improvements to the base skin shader in DAZ. 8K textures is nice but all the pores in the world won't fix plastic-looking skin. 

I personally prefer daz in terms of shader work etc. You can't really compare a real time render engine with a off line render engine like Iray. Iray is slower and can calculate better results. The thing with some of daz model is that they try to make the faces too perfect sometimes and steer away from symmetry which causes a drop in believeability and realism but lately their stuff is looking better and better

As someone who has spent a lot of time in the realism thread, Victoria 9 still falls in the either the waxy/plastic look typical of Daz Renders. The SSS is not as advanced as other human solutions out there (check out the realism thread for more references and in-depth talk)

So while the geometry and skin itself is really good what Jay showed, the render still lags behind on the hidden elephant in the room which is uncanny skin rendering where something is "off"

Yes true.

If you zoom into V9's skin in the promo renders, the sss looks off because it looks like the bump maps are too strong  or the SSS is not strong enough. It does look scratchy and plasticy. What I meant was that Iray would be a better render engine than Unreal 5 because it's not realtime. So being an offline render engine it gets better results, anti aliasing and smoothing whereas the SSS does need more work. Be nice to get results closer to Arnold render engine where its uses a "random walk" method to calculate realistic distribiution of light through the skin

Agreed yes I was also disappointed and have been for a while a company whose main sales are humanoid figures I would have thought they would be ahead of the game in trying to get the best in the realms of realism. not everyone wants realism I know. But if you are up there with realistic rendering capabilities then other non-realistic renders would be a doddle to achieve but unfortunately, Daz lag sorely behind other applications. Perhaps Daz 5 if it ever arrives might bring a few more bells and whistles to achieve better realism.

PREORDER. That word always sends off the alarm bells for me. I've been stung so many times by tempting offers only to be disappointed at time of release of software/game/product. Personally it says to me that there's a lack of confidence that on release it will do as well as they hope, hence the tempting offers. Yes I'm a cynical old git and I want Victoria 9 to be good but my immediate feeling is 'wait!'  

Maybe I was also hoping for 'bigger' improvements like soft body physics etc etc. We'll see. 

Novica said:

Well Genesis 9 is the news- so the rest of you will have to showcase her as I'm not diving in to another figure.

We've got a possible hurricane forming in the Caribbean and future models (GFS) shows it will hit us Sept 30th timeframe, maybe Oct 1. Models hopefully will shift, I hope it doesn't hit us, but don't wish it on anyone else. Edit- and now the midnight run has it headed more toward Texas and Louisiana. 

Victoria 9 is way too pricey for me, especially when I don't know what will be in the bundle

It looks like it could be at least a catagory 2 or 3 hurricane. I'm not sure where it will go after it gets into the Gulf; but when I run the EMCF model I'm seeing the possibilty of it turnning NE and going across central Florida and then up the East Coast toward me. I hope it doesn't get either one of us.

Comunque, che DAZ faccia uscire di tanto in tanto nuove figure deriva dal fatto che in fondo questi campano vendendo oggetti 3D. Se non ci fosse questa continua evoluzione saremmo ancora a Victoria 3, poi magari si può discutere quanto si vuole se era meglio fare in un modo o nell'altro, ma di fatto questi fanno uscire una nuova figura e la "spingono" a soppiantare quelle precedenti, in modo che la gente compra quello che esce sul mercato. Peraltro mi pare che funzioni benissimo, io avevo non so quanta roba per V4 che ormai non uso proprio più perché è stata sostituita da G8 e quindi ho dovuto ricomprare un sacco di roba. Ora il passaggio a G9 per me non sarà così rapido perché con G8 mi trovo più che bene ma tanto prima o poi comincerò a usarla.

Mattymanx said:

Just to correct a misunderstanding that is going around:

The Genesis 9 texture maps are NOT 8K they are 4K except for the nail maps which are 1K.  The skin DETAIL maps are up to 8K.  Arms, legs, body and head detail maps are each 8K.  The male and female genital maps are 4K and the nail details are only 1K.  The detail maps are optional and do not load by default.

 

 

This is for Genesis 9 base.  I dont know if Victoria 9 will have 8K skin maps or not

Tks, that would mean I could use these for displacement and/or topcoat in 3DL! 

Gator said:

I went ahead and bought the bundle.  I skipped Genesis 8 and 8.1, I have a few characters here and there but don't use them.

I like the fact that they come with HD morphs - it's about time!  Victoria 4 was released 16 years ago with slightly more vertices than Genesis 8 Female!  That was before Nvidia 8 series cards!!!  The difference in compute power from the top of the line 8 series card of 2006 to a basic 3060 is astonishing.  On the cost, I'd argue it (HD) really shouldn't be an upcharge at this point, it should be a given.

You can always turn details off, however you can't add more.

Victoria 4 had about four times as many polygons as Genseis 8's base cage mesh - one level of SubD, the default for the Viewport, brings Genesis 8 up to nearly the same resolution, the default render level mutliplies that by sixteen.

Richard Haseltine said:

Xellosz said:

Will Hexagon be able to handle it???

G8 works in Hexagon, with the double amount of polygon I think G9 might crash it.

I don't know the numbers, but it would still be lighter than Victoria 4/Michael 4.

Thx for the info. We will see it in a month.

The 8GB RAM part mentioned on youtube still makes my hobby 1050Ti twitching for help.

But all things will clear up soon.  

Paintbox said:

As someone who has spent a lot of time in the realism thread, Victoria 9 still falls in the either the waxy/plastic look typical of Daz Renders. The SSS is not as advanced as other human solutions out there

We have been told, that Iray was designed for automotive industry, maybe that's why it's not quite there for human skin. 

Richard Haseltine said:

hansmolleman33 said:

The price tag alone for Victoria 9 makes it a huge pass. Is DAZ serious with their pricings ??

Free is too expensive? Victoria 9 is not the base, Genesis 9 is and that will still be free.

He complained that Victoria 9 is too expensive and not Genesis 9.

And Victoria 9 isn't free, for sure.

But if Victoria 9 is too expensive for the majority will DAZ soon see, once they released her.

I have no special opionon about that.

to repeat myself from this thread - https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7715486/#Comment_7715486

Just to correct a misunderstanding that is going around:

The Genesis 9 texture maps are NOT 8K they are 4K except for the nail maps which are 1K.  The skin DETAIL maps are up to 8K.  Arms, legs, body and head detail maps are each 8K.  The male and female genital maps are 4K and the nail details are only 1K.  The detail maps are optional and do not load by default.

This is for Genesis 9 base.  I dont know if Victoria 9 will have 8K skin maps or not